Niantic's lack of any statement in regards to today's Wayfarer issues is unacceptable.
About 9 hours ago, Wayfarer had one of the largest, if not the single largest technical mishap in it's entire history, and as of writing this, that mishap is still ongoing. For the uninformed, at least two critical bugs appeared within Wayfarer at the same time:
- Supporting info text disappeared for all nominations, including in your nominations tab and while others were reviewing your nominations.
- A large number of wayspots and edits which had previously been resolved reentered the voting phase, flooding the voting queue with duplicates.
As of writing this, it appears that Issue 1 (the supporting info text) was resolved after about 6 hours, but Issue 2 (the flood of resolved nominations) is still unresolved.
These issues created an entire host of problems within Wayfarer and leave us with many questions, all of which deserve to be addressed:
- For about 6 hours, people were able to vote on nominations without being able to read supporting info text. This will surely effect the outcome of many nominations and contribute to many incorrect rejections, as for many nominations the supporting info is integral to providing proof of the Wayspot's eligibility.
- Along with the incorrect rejections this will cause, many people likely voted differently than they should have and will miss agreements as a result of not having access to supporting info text. This wastes reviewers time and could potentially impact people's Wayfarer ratings.
- The 6 hour period of time was enough to completely doom any upgrades currently in voting that relied on supporting text. Personally I had an upgrade enter voting right around the time these issues began, and it was rejected before the supporting text issue was resolved. I effectively lost an upgrade and a nomination as a result.
- The wave of resolved nominations that is flooding the voting queue with duplicates is slowing down the process of voting on new legitimate nominations that should actually be being voted on.
- We have no idea if users will earn agreements on the nominations which have reentered voting as a result of this. Realistically, these nominations will likely be pulled from the queue when this is fixed. Niantic has previously said that users don't earn agreements on nominations that Niantic removes from voting, meaning that no agreements will likely be earned. This is a massive waste of reviewers time.
The problem is, these issues have yet to be addressed by Niantic at all. Not here on the forum. Not on any of their support outlets such as Twitter or Facebook. Not a notice on the reviewing website. Despite numerous bug reports being posted to this forum and the general discussion board being flooded with questions about these issues, Niantic have said nothing anywhere. They didn't even bother to update the status of the bug report threads to "investigating", despite keen-eyed users noticing that Niantic was still active here on the forum approving filtered posts and comments, and even combining a few threads together.
This is the type of major issue that requires acknowledgement. It doesn't have to be an insanely long, or technical post about the issue, but at least give people a "Hey, we are aware of this issue and working on a fix" until a larger update can be provided. The reality is that the people who are managing this forum, or the general support staff on outlets like Twitter aren't the same people who are doing the nitty-gritty coding and bug-squashing, so there shouldn't have been anything from stopping a Niantic representative from providing an update. There is no excuse for why this still hasn't been acknowledged or addressed. This is especially problematic given the statements recently made by @NianticCasey-ING about the increased dedication and support staff that has supposedly been given to this very forum. Today feels like the exact opposite of what we should be seeing. It feels like this is being swept under the rug.
The reality is that reviewing should have been temporarily shut off when these issues surfaced. As outlined above, there are great consequences to the bugs that occurred today. Many knowledgeable reviewers quickly realized this, stopped reviewing, and spread the word about this as best as we could. The impacts of these bugs could have been completely avoided if Niantic had just restricted access when this occurred. The bigger issue though, is the number of users who didn't notice a problem at all, and even tried to argue that there wasn't a problem. Many reviewers didn't notice that the supporting information was gone from every nomination they looked at, or didn't stop to think, "Hey, I just saw three exact duplicates in a row, thats weird". A user on Facebook even went as far as to remark that they didn't notice the supporting text was gone because it is useless and they usually don't even read it. These people kept on reviewing, and likely contributed to many of the problems outlined above. Even if Niantic didn't think shutting down the system was the right thing to do here, the impact of this might have at least been lessened if Niantic had done anything to acknowledge the bugs and alert reviewers to the ongoing issues. This should be a standard practice.
This isn't even the only recent major bug we have seen. While the implications weren't as severe as today, about 3 weeks ago there was a major issue where items in the duplicate check were not appearing in their usual order of distance from closest to furthest. Niantic at least responded in that thread, acknowledged the issue, and said they would update with further details, however an update never came. While it appears the issue was eventually resolved, the thread is still marked as "investigating", and seems to have been forgotten about. Of course, this is just one of many threads that have been forgotten about, with another example being an update to the upcoming revamped appeal and abuse reporting system which we were supposed to get an update on about 2 weeks ago. I can't help but feel a little disheartened about the commitment that was made to addressing incorrect rejections, given the events that happened today and the consequences of that.
It feels very bad to know that many of us users are more passionate about Wayfarer than the employees who oversee the Wayfarer program, and today that feeling really hits home. There is absolutely no excuse for today's lack of communication or action. It is both unacceptable and deplorable. The community deserves better, and something needs to be done about our wasted time and nominations. Considering how the rewards for the India Wayfarer Challenge were botched and then the make-up rewards were botched as well (which is another thing still unaddressed), I can't really say I have the confidence that anything will be done. Worst of all, we could be seeing the consequences of this for months as nominations continue to roll through the system. Do better Niantic. We don't deserve this.
Comments
I missed another issue that is still unacknowledged and unresolved, apparently when the supporting info issue was "resolved" (I guess it wasn't fully resolved after all), some people had their nominations reverted to placeholder text, including nominations that are in voting and are now unable to be edited again. A bug report on that can be found here:
https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/17607/supporting-text-incorrectly-restored-in-voting
Amen!!! Day 2.0
Yeah, this level of **** up without any communication at all is just unforgivable. Nothing on the forum, from twitter, on the website itself. People had to figure it out and propigate this info through social media.
I'm pretty upset about this, thanks for bringing it up in here. I doubt anything will be done, and I want to reiterate a point you brought up:
Along with the incorrect rejections this will cause, many people likely voted differently than they should have and will miss agreements as a result of not having access to supporting info text. This wastes reviewers time and could potentially impact people's Wayfarer ratings.
In no way can I claim it was a "5 star, meets all criteria" nomination, but it is a nomination I felt strongly for. I was proud enough to share the information with a few friends. I expected a mixed vote. It's an indoors nomination without good photospheres. My supporting photo looks weird unless you read what I added to my text: "photo shows the recognizable doorway as well as outside building facade and sidewalk that is easily recognizable on Satellite view." I feel bad for reviewers who may have already approved it and now new reviewers will simply see the word "photos."
I like making nominations while traveling. I don't care that I'll probably never interact with this Wayspot, but I was proud of the find and took a lot of pleasure in nominating it.
I keep typing up wordy responses, but they all boil down to a simple "I agree". I'm frustrated by the lost time submitting, the doubly lost time reviewing, the length of time my submissions stay in voting, the harsh punishments for my fellow reviewers whose cries for more guidance and education have gone unanswered, the potential reviewers lost to the two-failures exclusion - but what's most frustrating is the lack of response or interaction with the people here who are so very invested in crafting a great product. Discontent has been brewing for weeks, and a tiny bit of communication would have accomplished a lot. The only reason some of us knew that the current issue was even being looked at was because a Facebook user posted that they contacted a friend on the inside and were told the issue was being investigated. I work in IT, and if we handled outages in this manner we'd be out of a job.
Yeah, the system needs to be turned off immediately.
I understand your sentiment folks. I have flagged all these issues to our dedicated team immediately and we'll ensure to have them resolved ASAP.
Ohhhh that explains a lot, my friend was like he swears he put in description for things but it was disappearing. Also for one of his submissions, in the nominations list preview, the photo was coming up as the stock picture of Niantic balloon + mountain, and when clicking on the sub, there's no main photo. He was thinking whether to withdraw it or not, luckily after a couple of hours, the nomination now appears to be normal.
I was getting tons of location edits today and I was shocked. Now I know why am I getting them.
No no no
I'm quite concerned about old location edits re-entering the voting system. Didn't rules on location edits change, so that cell rules now apply for Pokemon GO pokestop/gym moves? This could result in them disappearing now if they get accepted again, when they didn't previously disappear.
But no matter what, you'll keep on nominating and reviewing. So why should Niantic change its attitude?
"We deserve better", then you should act according to how the other party behaves.
While you're at it, add the 4 days "cooldown" to the list of unanswered problems by Niantic
Was looking at my stats and noticed that my rejections had gone up by one over night. I was concerned as I didn't remember seeing a rejection email. Did i miss something? So I dove into all my nominations. It appears that one of my older submission that was originally marked as duplicate (it wasn't but that was how the community voted months back) is now marked as a regular rejection.
Looks like one of the "fixes" is to rollback all the duplicates to a rejection. Odd they couldn't keep it contained to things that had happened in the last 24 hours.
Your stats show the status of the nominations that you've reviewed, not the nominations that you proposed.
They're probably referring to Wayfarer+ stats which does show a summary of nominations you've proposed.
Not my profile stats.... my nomination stats. I track those separately. I went from 19 rejections to 20 rejections overnight with none of my current pending nominations having been completed. A submission from March that had been marked as duplicate after I upgraded it, is now marked as just straight rejected, which was the reason for the change.
Thank you for being the one to get on this. It was driving me nuts.
@Oakes1923-PGO Thank you for mentioning this. Sure enough, both of my nominations that were judged as “duplicates” a few months ago are now erroneously marked as “rejections.”
Really, ****?
Yesterday’s system meltdown requires action and remedy, not avoidance and ignoring the problems. Not doing anything is irresponsible management of the program and processes.
Yup, can confirm that all 4 of my nominations that were previously marked as duplicates are all now showing as just "not accepted".
Still having issues with duplicates and resurrected voting. Add to that we are now seeing edits for locations moving their locations halfway across the globe????
Same thing on my end with the duplicates. Very odd.
But - as to not to take the thread too off topic - to echo Shilfiell's sentiments, I just agree with everything. This isn't a new issue - Niantic's communication with the community has continuously been utterly terrible, and this incident with the bugs is really just the cherry on top.
The damage that this is causing over time to the Wayfarer community, Wayfarer as a product, and all of Niantic's game maps - is immeasurable, IMO.
I don't know which Niantic higher-up is responsible for all of this but you seriously need to do better. If this incident didn't serve as a wake up call then I honestly don't know what will.
If this incident didn't serve as a wake up call then I honestly don't know what will.
I don't know what will, either.
There will be no change. sadly it is always that companies only wake up when they get alot of negative PR because something ugly happened.
A while back I've reached the conclusion - after my prolonged personal experience with the topic - that abuse isn't really an urgent issue for the Wayfarer team. My opinion on this matter won't change until I see a significant shift in the way serious abuse cases are being handled, and in the tools and assistance given to reporters.
I thought that perhaps something more technical, such as system-breaking bugs, would be handled differently. But perhaps not.
It's true, and I absolutely hate it.
Ok, sorry.
As you know, many people confuse both sets of data and I didn't expect that people tracked their nominations that way
Was coming here to report the duplicates issue and this edit which i have reviewed a couple of times now.
I just reviewed 3 nom's in a row that were exact duplicates. Same coords, picture, and title.
Same thing with my noms that were previously marked as duplicate.
I have one accepted nom that went back into voting and thanks to the missing Supporting Info my recent upgrade got the season display rejection, which w/o that info I understand. Maybe they could roll back the rejections in the 24 hours since that bug. Though part of me wonders if the other re-entries was a bug of that fix.
The lack of communication is killing me though. Legit just letting us know they know about the bug and are working on it would have soothed so much of the irritation.