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Ban because of bad word filter
Xmacke7x-ING
Posts: 215 ✭✭✭✭
A lot of German speaking wayfarers got a 30 day ban because of incorrectly reviewing incorrect or inappropriate titles/descriptions, existing Wayspots.
Under those Wayfarers accepted by the ban are some very experienced wayfarers with more than 10000 reviews with good ratings. The circumstances of these bans seem to indicate that there is some kind of bug or an oversensitive filter which causes those bans and not any wrong doing by the affected wayfarers. All reports of those bans are by Wayfarers who are from Germany or German speaking countries or Wayfarers who live near Germany and get German nominations regulary. This is the reason why I think this could be a language/translation problem.
I would appreciate if someone of Niantic`s Staff could look into those bans and share reason for those bans. Maybe it is a problem which only a German speaking person can rcognize. Because something gets lost in translation.
Comments
Hi there,
Thanks for surfacing. We recently took action against a group of users who were working together to submit and approve abusive edits to manipulate Wayspot titles. Although I can't confirm without any specific usernames to review, it's likely that this is what these users are experiencing.
How do we know what we did wrong if we do not get the examples of the wrong doing. I never did approve abuse edits on purpose. I did over 20000 reviews and have a 70% agreement rate. If you do that many reviews, you will do mistakes. I bet I have accepted fakes in the past because i did not notice the fake. And I might have voted for an abusive edit of a wayspot title withut noticing the abuse.
But I think it is my right to know what I did wrong. If Niantic won't show me the reviews where I approved those edits, I can not learn what to change in the future. My solution would be to stop reviewing because I will not risk losing my Pokemon go account.
If this was the reason then you clearly hit a couple dozen innocent people here which may have been reviewing at the same times. Banning the reviewing people is the completely wrong way anyway. Just the person requesting these abusive edits should get the ban/warning.
You can not expect the reviewer to know if an edit may be an abusive one. We are not under any obligation to do deep research on something we review. And as people mentioned, they often got a great rating, so it's self explaining that they know how to review.
And many of these people that got hit are part of a certain group and this group knows how to keep the quality high.
And yeah, we demand proof from your site what was the alleged abusive edit review. And if we have to mention via the rules of GDPR.
If you should go through with that, you will soon no longer have any evaluators and you can do everything yourself.
If you threaten to lose accounts, you will soon run out of people to play your games. Then the communities slowly die out or move on to other mobile phone games.
Then your income will also drop sharply. That is my opinion too.
You should first issue warnings but never threaten to lose your account directly. Better then let people know what is wrong. Reach out to them and help you understand and implement it better.
Unfortunately, that also makes me sad to read.
If this is the case, please show us what the abuse was. You don't have to reveal any usernames, but we all need to know what was wrong so we don't get hit with a similar ban unknowingly. Getting to a high level enough to do Wayfayer (and OPR before that) can take years, and if there is any risk of our accounts being banned from the games because of unknown mistakes done in Wayfarer, the only logical thing to do for many reviewers is quitting Wayfarer altogether.
If Niantic really is focussing to eliminate abusers I am totally on their side. However it seems that they have a clue in which location some of these abusers are and to elimante them, they bombed whole parts of more regions and are eliminating users who reviewed at the wrong time on the wrong nomination. You can call it a virtual collateral damage if you want so. It's like we have a spider in the house.... and we burn down the whole house to get the spider out of it. 🙃 (no matter if other people are in the house)
But the ironic aspect of this is, that the guys who want to elimante the spider (= abusers, fakers... whatever) too, are now also facing the suspension. We are speaking of wayfarers with way more than 10.000 reviews and the perfect rating. Of course you might oversee a bad nomination in over than 10.000 reviews. If that's even the case... 3 days are gone and we still don't know.
To be honest I don't think that Niantic is able to show us the abuse of titles/description. Or do they speak German? Or Czech? Or whatever language the abusive description was. Maybe it was an edit from an known abuser(s).... but the edit itself was not abusive at all. And now the "bot" is eliminating everybody who voted on this review.... because it was an edit from an (or more) abusive user.
@NianticCasey-ING you have written ".... were working together to submit and approve abusive edits to manipulate Wayspot titles. Although I can't confirm without any specific usernames to review, it's likely that this is what these users are experiencing."
There are lot more people affected than here on the forum. I think everyone from here is fine, that you share the submissions of the suspended wayfarers. And so you (and all other) will probably see, that there is not a single abusive text or title-submission. (of course I can't speak for everybody). And than you can share the abusive "reviews" (or just a single one) from us which you might find sooooo bad, that you really think a 30-day suspension and possible permanent suspensions is really necessary.
We need trustpersons in the community that communicate with niantic on such matters.
It is clear that Niantic isnt able to communicate this whole kerfuffle direct with its wayfarers.
The whole situation is rather bizarre, and i completely understand that my fellow wayfarers will lay down their work here, too.
Thanks for your patience while we looked into these reports. We can confirm that the banned reviewers submitted or voted on obviously bad title/descriptions with the goal to report the Wayspot as invalid once the title/description was approved. This is not a translation issue or a case where they could have accidentally chosen the wrong title/description.They were trying to bypass the existing process for reporting invalid Wayspots.
As a reminder, if your invalid Wayspot report is rejected due to insufficient evidence, please submit an appeal in the forum with additional details instead of misusing the edits process.
Note that for cases where we find intentional abuse, we will take strict action even if the account has no prior violations. Since these reviewers had multiple cases where they voted on bad titles/descriptions, our team has given them a 30 day timeout. If you are part of this group, you are welcome to continue to review once your account is reinstated.
My first intention was the big "Jegum" abuse. But that's only a guess.
Hmm. That sounds like people tried to get pois removed, most likely anchor points for fields in Ingress. I've heard about such things before. But innocent people might have been caught in the crossfire. :/
But ok, I'll resume reviewing.