What determines whether people get the warning email?
HaramDingo-ING
Posts: 1,725 ✭✭✭✭✭
Referring to the 'Strange Email Problems' posted on August 30, there have been more reports coming in of wayfinders receiving either of the emails below (where the left are the Ingress-oriented emails and the right are the Pokemon Go-oriented emails).
Based on recent observations, the reasons why people might receive this email:
- A couple of cases have noted that these emails come briefly or right after the fantastic "." (dot) rejection. These are randomly handpicked by Niantic and often lead to weird rejections like gazebos, trail markers and even park signs.
- But often people are confused as to why they've gotten this. There might not have been a clear rejection in the past but it almost always seems to mystify people.
So how exactly do "candidates/nominations that do not meet our criteria" elicit this email get sent out to people? I have seen tons of cases (not just the Sydney CBD abuse) where people in the suburbs are submitting home candidates, random fire hydrants, sluice valves and all the such but nothing happens. Because there are numerous others around the area that also go into voting once the first couple are rejected and it's likely to be the same person submitting (and spamming) ineligible nominations over several months.
Some that come to mind also include a random bird cage in front of a pet shop, the fake endless attempts at Prestons, the very bad Mollymook attempts of some lizard graffiti, someone submitting a footpath in Blacktown several times behind their house over two years, someone in Ashfield submitting a mural numerous x of times with the text "upgrade poke gym" and the million Telstra communications panels near homes.
Is this the result of the commonly used "taken action on # wayfinders..."? A first strike warning only? Has anyone ever gotten a permanent suspension of their Wayfarer and associated gaming account? Well, this is not possible to post here if anyone was suspended. But there are Wayfinders that spam things for months with no let up whatsoever.
Is it because Niantic is manually reviewing nominations and have the direct capability of sending out this email and issuing a penalty to this account? Is it due to things being marked as abuse? Are people reporting things in some sort of Google form? How? Some people deserve to get suspended.
Comments
At the very least there should be some indication of which nomination(s) this refers to.
Our pals at Noantics seem to believe in the concept of security via obscurity. They do not have any feedback loops, educational messages, or correlation between patterns of behavior and severity or degree of response.
Noantics used to refer to a three-strike policy, but Wayfarers have reported here when they received a temporary ban over a class of activity that they believed had happened only one or zero times, one or more years ago.
The corporate philosophy seems to be: No statute of limitations, no recitation of malfeasance, no presentation of evidence.
On the other hand, Noantics does seem to protect the privacy of the accused, such that we are told only that action has been taken against X wayfarers for Y Wayspots.
We seldom if ever know if the Big Hammer (permanent ban from any/all games or wayfarer activities) has been deployed, but this threat is dangling near the end of most warning emails.
Niantic could at least give a list of things that can cause this email. Repeatedly nominating on PRP, abusively moving locations, falsifying wayspots...