Mod/Script Support for wayfarer undermined - the next stupid decision of Nia ....
Raachermannl-ING
Posts: 1,070 ✭✭✭✭✭
With the latest update of their wayfarer-website Niantic made it very hard to create plugins and JS-scripts to improve the reviewing expierience.
Technical Problems in short
The words of the creator of Wayfarer+ concerning this topic:
I'm afraid I couldn't find a clever way to **** into WF's internals to be able to reuse most of the functionality done so far. Hooking into this new DOM and Angular seems very hard and requires constant rewrites on every update.
Not seeing a way forward without a complete rearchitecture and (at least in my view) it'll take long person months until we reach full feature parity with what we had. [...]
Background is, that the wayfarer website had a html-framework with only a bit Angular2+ parts. Now evrything is done on Angular2+, and this makes it harder to hook the data from the website.
(please don't ask me anything about the details here. I'm able to code in C(++), python and a bit java, but my expierience with web based stuff is very low. I modded a few of the wayfarer JS-mods a bit, but that's it.)
I'm fully aware, that Niantic doesn't like lots of the features of these mods. Examples:
- showing the s2 cells within the maps in the reviewing interface (Nia doesn't like this, since they are never talking about their secret Krabby patty recipe, although evryone knows it)
- reviewing presets (Niantic works against this with their temporary bans)
- reviewing timer (as a reaction because Niantic uses temporary bans for those who review to fast)
- marking the actual position of a portal in the interface for location edits
- ...
All these things are features, that are sometimes nice, but by far not necessary. For all of these points above I could understand to not implement them into wayfarer without any comment, because the reasoning might be obvious.
But there are lots of aspects, where small and simple improvements could simplify the reviewing process for their users. So here the two most important examples of very helpful mod aspects imho:
The one-click-translation-button
Wayfarer plus had a button, that automatically opened a new tab with google translate, with all three texts (title, description, supporting statement) put in.
Here an example:
I'm German and live close to Czech Republic, and even a bit of Poland is in my reviewing range. Both languages are slavic, so totally different than German and I don't understand nothing. Nethertheless evry 3rd or 4th candidate is from Czech Republic or poland. Without additional tools I learned only a very basic wayfarer related vocabulary:
kostel (church), kryz (cross), pomnik/pamatnik (memorial), info tabule (infoboard), detske hriste (playground), kasna (well/fountain), ....
This is enough to deal with very simple candidates, but there arelots of difficult ones like this one:
On first glance I see a historical house, in a small towns historical centre. Maybe it fulfills the criteria, maybe not. Maybe it should be considered to be PRP, maybe not ..... so I need to understand the texts here.
What did I have to do with WF+? Click on one button and I see all 3 texts translated to English. So this takes me 5sec more time during my review, and evrything is fine.
What do I have to do now without WF+? Open a new tab with a translator myself, multiple times CTRL+C and CTRL+V, etc.pp. ..... it's already annoying at the computer. At the phone I would skip this instantly, because copy-pasting is torturing. And then the skips are used very fast .... and then I have to end my reveiwing session because of the language barrier.
Nomination maps
There are different mods for different maps, that put your nominations into a map. Some people like the WF+ map, that puts all wayspots from the own nominations list into a google map, and the marker colors show the states (in queue, in voting, accepted, rejected).
For my personal expierience there is(/was?) a better one: The tampermonkey scripts wayfarer exporter and wayfarer planner were simply great to have an overview about the own candidate queue, and not even the own queues.
Wayfarer exporter puts the nomination data (title, location, and state) into a google spreadsheet. Wayfarer planner puts all these points as exclamation marks to the intel map.
Since the same google spreadsheet can be used by different persons, this allows to coordinate the nominations of a whole towns community, so that evry single candidate is only once nominated at a time, and nearly no duplicates are flying around.
Example from the intel map (with OSM background and ING-game-stuff turned off):
So you have then these orange markers for candidates in queue or in voting, red markers for rejected ones, and grey ones can be placed on the intel map as personal to-do-list.
This is map has my ING-Acc, my PGO-Acc (both have different wayfarer accs) and someone else's PGO-Acc synced into the map. So without the red exclamation marks wouldnt have any overview, since my submitting area has grown during the last year. And since my phone is filled with hundreds of pictures for ING-remote-submissions this allows me to have an overview also there.
Evrything is now undermined by Niantic ....
So my hopes for Niantics Actions now
There was only one situation, where Niantic reacted to implement a feature of a mod because of community pressure: the dark mode.
Since Niantic now prevented lots of mods, they should deliver the necessary ones on their own. The translation problem was very often pointed out in this forum and @NianticCasey-ING never took any actions. I hope @NianticTintino (since he mentioned to be fluent in Spanish for example) might be more aware, that this language problem should be solved.
In Europe the local language swithces evry few hundred km's.
It's totally okay to review the stuff from neighbour countries. But the wayfarer infrastructure should be prepared for this. So the 1-click-translate-evrything-button solves a lot of problems. If wayfarer detects, that the nomination isnt in your mothertongue, then maybe allow a few more review-skips for these cases, and this problem is solved fully, imho.
The second one with the nominations maps. I don't know how accessible the nominations list data is now ..... but please make it happen, that these plugins may work again or deliver a similar feature.
In general this technical change now snubs lots of reviewers. From our social media chats the majority of reviewers uses WF+ (or other plugins/mods/scripts) for different QoL upgrades, that all are prevented now. So the crowd will be pissed, if they realize what the problem causes ....
And finally ..... @NianticPooja @NianticTintino how about hiring the mod programmers? My gut feeling say, that they are better skilled then your programmer staff :P
Comments
Reviewing with keyboard is my number one thing and would be so simple to add.
History of reviews with map is very nice as is the map of nominations.
So many great features other than the ones you mention that Niantic might not be fond of that wouldn't be all that much work to implement. Certainly easier than it was to add them via external plugin.
There are a lot of issues with the redesign and its implications that are an issue, there are also many good things that Wayfarer+ enabled that you didnt talk about, but I want to focus in on one key thing about the lack of the translation feature:
Its impact on Wayfarer challenges.
Many people who participated in the Russia, India, and Poland wayfarer challenges did so with the help of Wayfarer+. The extremely easy translation button made it feasible to actually participate in these challenges and make worthwhile contributions to adding Wayspots in these countries. The loss of this feature will reduce the number of people who are able pr willing to participate in these challenges, and will also likely contribute to nomination text not being judged properly amongst those who are too lazy to take the extra steps to translate it without the help of Wayfarer+.
Can't speak to or advocate for any of the other features, but the translation issue is a super easy fix.
Crazily easy, in fact (even though I had to Google part of the solution for myself, haha).
For mobile reviewers, if you use the Chrome browser, the upper right browser icon (scroll up slightly to see it, if it vanishes) displays a number of options, one of which is Translate. Choose the language you want to translate to. Recently, it seems your selection will stay active through subsequent reviews, so you only need to activate it once unless you navigate away.
For computer reviewers, similar concept. Chrome browser, but this time you right click on the page and locate the option to translate, because the automatic translate function doesn't seem to readily recognize the page as needing translation. It will then translate everything in the page. If it doesn't show up in your menu, try clicking in a different area.
I'm an English speaker currently reviewing a lot of German areas and I use this all the time. Sometimes the translation is a bit spotty, but it's definitely good enough, and it doesn't slow me down at all. Sounds as 1-click easy as these plugins. Of course, I also don't worry about grammar or spelling because I have no way of knowing if mistakes are translator issues or not.
If you're using a different browser, just switch. Or, I'm sure there's a simple translation plug-in that will tap into Google translate.
The S2 cells should have never been a concern for reviewers, you're supposed to review if the proposed location is correct, not where does it fit better in your point of view. You don't even know what are the plans of the person that sent the nomination and maybe by moving it your breaking their plans for more wayspots because you only thought about Pokemon.
In the same way, a location edit ask you to select which is the better location for that PoI, and Niantic wants you to do that judgment without prejudices about where's currently located.
As you state, without an option to easily translate foreign nominations using Wayfarer in Europe is a huge pain, and the Wayfarer events would have been a flop. But Niantic is not aware of the huge extent of the problem, they live in USA and everything that they see is in English, and their metrics tells them that people review no matter what, so by using Wayfarer+ everyone has prevented an earlier solution to the problem. Whenever someone posted "I can't understand foreign nominations", there was always a helpful: Use wayfarer+, avoiding that way the pressure on Niantic.
That being said, I think that updated or new mods will show up soon, after all it's still HTML and Javascript so it's possible to keep tinkering with it. Keep this in mind whenever anyone request a "Wayfarer app", that would prevent any kind of modification and even using things like the built-in browser translation won't work.
I can only speak for myself, but without WF+, the fun of the reviewing experience is very much lessened, and I'm not very motivated to do any more, after more than 13K reviews.
Of course it shouldn't, but in some cases it may help to understand why some edits are done .... and of course that's not objective, so it shouldnt be delivered by Nia.
I had it turned off in WF+ in any way, since I saw that the S2 cells there are inaccurate - at least 1m wrong.
So in the end the set of unnecessary features shouldnt be a point of the discussion here. Let's collect the necessary features for surviving as Nia's slaves.... like the translation button issue ....
Niantic does not support unofficial plugins.
Also, translation issues are problems that you can solve yourself.
Agreed, I don't think Niantic should be held responsible for the functionality of a third-party plugin - that's the downside of becoming dependent on these crutches. Still, although translation issues can be resolved by manual copy/paste, it does slow down reviewing and involvement in foreign Wayfarer Events that may require heavy reliance on translation tools. Easy translation of all fields by single click is something Niantic should be building into the revamped site. It's clearly a desired feature by many dedicated reviewers.
Translation functions exist already with a single click, without copy-paste. Not that it shouldn't be part of the interface, but it does already exist outside of a plug-in.
I dont think the point here is plug in or not, but all the features and functions that are missing in the ordinary Wayfarer.
If they implemented these features there wouldnt be the need for extra plugins.
So totally get the point, Niantic should look i to how to implement translation buttin, keyboard shortcuts.. And now just a better visual experince. Totally broken at the moment.
I do agree that some of the functionality from WF+ could have been cherry-picked to integrate in the base application.
While I understand some of the functionality is undesirable / unwanted for Niantic, it has/had stuff where you think 'why isn't this available by default?'.
I'm having trouble liking the new Wayfarer and certainly the "one click translation" Wayfarer+ provides is rather useful. Especially if I want to help out with the Wayfarer Challenges. Why would anyone bother to review given how little they are appreciated by Niantic?
For those wondering "how exactly do I determine where I put the pin for the Wayspot?" All one needs to do is right click to inspect the page HTML and find the Google Maps link. From the Google Maps URL, the coordinates will be given and then one can input those into their chosen Wayspot mapper to determine whether or not it would appear.
That's why the
"While the look and feel will be the same, the update brings long-term reliability and stability to your existing Wayfarer experience"
makes no sence at all, it's more of
"While the look and feel will not be the same and less conveiniant, the update brings long-term reliability and stability against modicifations and external add-ons who provided you an improved Wayfarer experience"
:-D
Being forced to use a special browser is no solution for evryone
It's not a special browser. It's one of the most common browsers there is. No different from using a special wayfarer+ app and saying that's the solution for everyone, except this solution isn't actually against any rules or beyond what Niantic should care about.
Besides, there are probably Google translation plugins for your browser of choice, anyway. It's as much a solution for everyone as wayfarer+ ever was, with regards to translation support.
I point it out to be helpful. People are acting like suddenly they can no longer easily review foreign submissions, and it's bizarre. It simply isn't true, not by a long shot. The workaround is cake. I'm not sure what more you could ask for, if the translation issue is your biggest hold up to smooth reviewing.
It might be a solution for those, who are actually using chrome. So it's fully worth to be mentioned here.
But chrome as the browser of data kraken google is by far not a browser, that should be seen as a solution for evryone.
Way around a big company like Nia should not limit themselves to a level, that the fix of their softwares problems is using specific software to use their own software, unimportant if wittingly or unwittingly. That would be the level of a garage company. So this thread is here, that this might not be unwittingly, so that Nia recognizes this issue, and solves it on their own.
WF+ was a good intermediate solution, so that I was pleased enough to not write walls of text about this issue. But your workaround is a no-go for me, although it may be a valid workaround for others.
So don't be aggriefed for no reason. Your comment reads like that you are defending Nia only because of that.
Where can I find this feature? I would have reviewed more during the Russian event if I didn’t have to copy/paste translate the description and supporting text.
It requires using the Google browser, if you are not morally opposed. 😂 I described it a little earlier on in this same thread. It's just a tool to me, and it works great, for mobile and computer. Been using it for German submissions for weeks now.
I guess what I find funny and a little hypocritical is the the idea of being opposed to a corporation's tool (Google browser) just to remain in the service of another corporation (Niantic), because third-party software that Niantic specifically stated it never supported is no longer supported.
If the issue is a moral one because you oppose Google, but you're still helping out another corporation, I'm not sure I see where you're winning. But that's a personal choice, so you do you. It's a common, everyday tool on a common, everyday browser. As such, it's a perfectly available and valid workaround. You can even choose to use the browser only for Wayfarer and nothing else. That's actually what I personally do on my phone, because I prefer an ad-blocking browser for everything else and it doesn't have the built in translation function.
Regardless, I go back to the plugin comment. I would be surprised if one doesn't exist for your browser of choice. If Google is a no-go for you, maybe look for one?
I'm not defending Niantic. Both Wayfarer and Google are simply tools to me, nothing more nefarious.
Niantic has another example of something like this-- the Ingress intel map. Niantic built a tool that had basic functionality for exploring the portal map. Outside developers came along and wrote extensions for it that extended the functionality in many useful ways. You could bookmark specific portals. You could draw on the map, which is incredibly useful for planning field and other operations. You could change the base map to satellite view, you could show/hide portals based on their level or who owned them, and a variety of other things. IITC took the basic functionality and extended it in ways that made it massively more useful. It's hard for me to imagine that large fielding ops would have ever happened without IITC, or that any team could have ever run an anomaly without it. In many ways IITC has been integral to the success of Ingress.
If I'd been Niantic I probably would have reached out to the developers to partner with them, or maybe offered to buy the code and hire some of the devs. Maybe instead of that I would have looked at what they'd done and used it as inspiration too make the intel map even better than what they'd done. Niantic didn't do either of those things, though years later they did release some limited functionality that lets people draw on the map and do a couple of other things. Stock intel is still an inferior product.
In all fairness, there are also some IITC extensions that have not been good for the game although as a whole IITC is a massive net win.
Wayfarer+ is yet another case where third-party developers stepped in to fill in some obvious gaps in Niantic's implementation, mostly in ways that were a massive net win. Auto-translate is one of several ways in which Wayfarer+ made Wayfarer easier to use and more effective at its purpose. And yes, like IITC there were a few features that probably shouldn't have been added. Niantic could have used Wayfarer+ as an inspiration for improving their own offering, or they could have partnered with the developers and ensured that it continued to work while having the "bad" features removed.
@NianticTintino I bring this to your attention as something you might want to consider educating your employer about. When enthusiastic players invest their time and energy to make your products even more awesome that is a giant gift to the company. The devs have done market research to understand what features players want, design work to identify a solution, and implementation/testing to make it happen. Niantic should find a way to partner with people who want to extend their products and accept the generous gift they have been offered.
I found my own workaround-tool for reviewing at PC, but it's nethertheless worse than the expierience with WF+.
Unimportant which tool you use, that isn't tailored for wayfarer: Either you have to mark all wanted texts for the plugin, or the tool translates evrything on the website. The 1st thing is exactly the annoying part, especially for phone reviewers, and the second thing is also not wanted and can cause trouble in wayfarer. For me as a German reviewer, that has settings in english, and tries to review and Polish stuff, there might be complications. For example that can distort Niantics own texts, that are already awful in other languages, like German: location sensitive and inappropriate location have the same phrase. One is only a predicative clause version of the other one, and both are totally misleading worded.
So I've chosen a tool, that translates marked text. Instead of one click of WF+ this means one has to do twice: click and mark, key combo.
I can live with that for now, but on long term Niantic should really care about which obstacles they put in their volunteer workers way, unwittingly or wittingly.
I want to add one aspect to @Hosette-ING 's comparison to the IITC:
Neither did Nia take actions against the mods nor did they support modding somehow. But few years ago they used IITC pictures in tweets...... ironic.
What I was told that was funny was, originally niatic didn't want people using iutc and threatened to ban people, then it turned out that noantic staff that played ingress used iitc 🤣🤣
If anyone wants Niantic to care about these features, they should focus on the those that aren't risky and that Niantic can't deny that are useful.
Imagine if someone posts: "Hey my auto-voter bot has stopped working" (as suggested by https://www.reddit.com/r/NianticWayfarer/comments/p6mcho/psa_regarding_submitting_waystops_multiaccounters/h9dwbx6 and surely those 3rd party scripts are already back at full speed), that won't get the response that they might expect. So if you ask Niantic about a tool with some features that can lead to a wrong usage of their site, the request might fail because the first thing they see are those features that they don't like.
Probably Niantic has no idea about how to improve the UI of wayfarer because it's clear that they don't use it (otherwise they wouldn't have released this version), and people don't provide feedback here because they use scripts to modify that UI and add all kind of additional features. If Wayfarer+ didn't include any kind of features that Niantic couldn't argue against, it should be easy to create a list of features that can be added to the main site if they prove that they are useful after being battle tested in a third party add-on.
It's already easy to create such a list and several comments around these forums have.
Not only that, but some of the most useful features existed prior to Wayfarer itself in the OPR tools plugin.
This is not a new problem, and blaming those turning to 3rd party tools to get basic quality of life features is not a good take.
It seems that I still haven't managed to express my message correctly.
You state that "several comments around the forums" have the list of features that should be added to Wayfarer, or that the OPR tools plugin did already include them.
But: Is/was Niantic aware of such requests? Or maybe they didn't notice the lack of those features because people didn't request them previously as they used a script?
I'm not blaming at all anyone for using such tools, use whatever you want, but I think that it would be better if this was presented in a way that the message was the missing features in Wayfarer that should be present and also, that people would have kept on requesting them directly from Niantic until they are aware of the issue.
I guess you're probably right that such requests aren't distilled enough, so I guess the question is how much does Niantic actually read these forums? I will write up a list and make a new post for it then just to be sure.
You've seen numerous Bug Reports of people complaining about the translation issue. The first post is always "use W+" and then the OP comes back with "great, problem resolved."
There are easily features (keyboard reviewing) that is easy to assume Niantic was unaware of, but translation tools is not one they should have been ignoring this long.
I say this as a US reviewer who sees Spanish or French speaking nominations maybe once or twice a month. It's not my problem, per se, but I have no problem advocating for it.
H*ck, there's been a few Niantic employees caught using IITC themselves in the pat at Ingress events. It's just that gosh darn useful.
Review history/map built in would be really nice. I like checking back on some items I've reviewed I was unsure about to see if they got approved or not.
One of the things not mentioned in this thread is that Wayfarer+ is NOT the only add-on plugin that reviewers can use. And others have what amounts to abusive/nefarious use. ie. being able to collectively vote the same on specific nominations
Perhaps some of Niantic's backend changes had more to do with the eternal cat-and-mouse game of disabling the latter, and the former was merely a casualty.
Similarly, IITC has primarily good plugins, but some are bad. "Creepily **** all of a given player's actions and store that information on a central database" bad. "Overload the servers with an order of magnitude extra requests" bad.
But "stock" IITC doesn't do that, it "just" makes the map prettier while simultaneously using far fewer resources in your own web browser. Nonetheless, Niantic has yet to ever explicitly declare that "IITC is ok with us", and for many intellectual property reasons is never likely to.
The good news is, that wayfarer exporter works again <3
Comparing to the map of the initial post you can see, that there are changes in the south of that line, that divides the northern dead cell from the speedy southern cell. Orange exclamation marks dissapeared (because accepted) and others turned red xD
So its alive again. Thank goodness...