Niantic's lack of any statement in regards to today's Wayfarer issues is unacceptable.

AisforAndis-INGAisforAndis-ING Posts: 1,072 Ambassador

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:

  1. Supporting info text disappeared for all nominations, including in your nominations tab and while others were reviewing your nominations.
  2. 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.

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