@Niantic, please stop performing "in house" reviews until Lightship-Ingress sync is fixed
Gendgi-PGO
Posts: 3,277 Ambassador
Is the team even reviewing to criteria? Currently, there is overwhelming negative community feedback on wrongfully rejected "." Niantic or their contracted reviewers that seemingly meet criteria or candidates that should have been rejected being approved (https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/22616/proof-that-life-isn-t-fair, https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/18767/rejection-mails-are-not-containing-any-rejection-reasons, https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/18790/too-many-rejections-on-good-candidates-recently) But this thread isn't about that.
"Internal" approvals by Niantic or its contracted reviewers do not show up in Ingress. While impossible to say with 100% certainty, nearly all of the nominations I've seen in my communities that follow the trend of vanishing from Wayfarer for Nia review end up not syncing into Ingress on approval. Where no evidence of disappearing exists and there is no Portal, it can be noted that review time does not typically match normal local turnaround time. This gives credibility to a growing suspicion that candidates reviewed by the Niantic/third party team go directly into Lightship and the sync does not take place for Ingress, even when typical proximity rules are not a factor.
Why is this a problem? Well, I assume it isn't "working as intended" for Wayspots that meet acceptance in review and proximity to not be allowed into Ingress. But also this effectively blocks accepted candidates. Since they are in the system, they should not be re-nominated. While usually approved faster than normal, they cannot be Upgraded. The break in sync "steals" our Portals from ever being created.
There is a workaround. A workaround was discovered and has been reported in depth in this Wayforum, Reddit, Facebook, and other communities. This isn't always an option in communities with less PoGO players and cannot be done by Agents who also play PoGO with trainer levels below 38.
With such an impact, can the Niantic team please crease reviewing until the Lightship sync can be fixed?
Comments
Wanted to voice my support.
While it is nice to see decisions on more nominations, and to see Niantic taking an active role, it is somewhat disheartening when the Approved POI does not appear in Ingress (my primary game). And all three of my noms that are affected meet the criteria to appear in Ingress.
This is also a problem as the current method to see what to nominate is to use Ingress Intel, as it is the only available game map.
If the Intel map is not accurate, that will make it more difficult for active nominators to nominate quality POI.
Is there still a sync issue? I haven't had a problem in the last few weeks. Had about 50 recently get approved without issue. And all but one of the 6 that was missing have now come online in ingress with the 1being about 50 miles away and I haven't had the time to go take care of it.
Endorse the above as we now beyond 2 months.
The problem just gets worse and we have no control if our nomination will be quasi- randomly (whatever that means ) selected for this special treatment.
Thank you @Gendgi-PGO posting this and bringing more attention to this issue. Even as someone who is both a Pokemon GO and Ingress player its causing other issues as well. So getting this fixed should be a top priority.
Nia are legally obligated to from the lawsuit several years ago.
Yes, there is a still a sync issue, in that a Wayspot that was approved near my house a couple of days ago is in PoGo, but not in Ingress.
Regarding the workaround, it also is not possible if the new Wayspot shares its L17 cell with an existing Pokestop or gym, since by rule it will never appear in PoGo, and therefore there is no picture to thumb. I have two approvals like this. Despite the guidance to not resubmit these, I did it anyway, because *someone* is bound to, and maybe being rejected as a duplicate will force a sync, similar to the current PoGo workaround.
Yes they are, but that doesn’t mean they have to continue to do it at a time it’s not working. It should act to focus minds on a quick resolution
Niantic will manually review a statistically significant percentage of new POI submissions via a Niantic employee or contractor for the principal purpose of trying to avoidPOIs that are more likely to lead to issues with nuisance or trespass.
https://www.scribd.com/document/399724786/Pokemon-Go-nuisance-settlement
They are not required to review to accept candidates, they should simply return them to the nominator's queue after determining they are not on private residential property.
Precisely this.
On PRP? Reject, send warning to submitter. Not on PRP? Return to community review.
Unless there is another reason for the reviews, but presumably that can be put on hold.
Argh.
Niantic has today apparently pulled in THREE of my nominations. Of those, two of them share a cell with another existing portal, so I won't be able to use any thumbs-up hijinx to force a sync. (Does that mean I should now be rooting for a "Silly Niantic rejected my nominations despite meeting all criteria" result? Gah!)
Truly sorry for your loss.
I've wondered if making a duplicate to add a photo would force the sync, but you/we shouldn't have to do that, and it may be unrealistic depending on local turnaround time.
I'd already corrected the speeling error on ONE of the existing portals some time ago, but there's not much else I can do remotely regardless. I'm not likely to be in that area again for an unknown number of weeks, and even then that'll only be (at best) while doing a driveby on a bus.
Which, as an unrelated aside, is also the only way I'm ever going to get that "required" gps-tagged photo that Niantic seems to require, for that other wayspot I'd created back in OPR days, of a bit of artwork that disappeared when some kind of siding was put up on the building over top of it.
Personally, I think Niantic should be reviewing things at the same weight like regular Wayfinders. Not being the all-encompassing answer and completely overwriting others' reviews. I've seen people report nominations that were In Voting, and where people have seen it within Wayfarer, only for it to get rejected for a dot because it got quasi-randomly snatched by Niantic and ignoring all previous reviews. Plus the fact that they're happy to take nominations just hours or even days after being submitted to reject them for a dot in a place where the queues are about a fortnight and not focusing on many other places that would take beyond a year.
(Not all) Niantic staff is NOT on top of the criteria, a SINGULAR person should not have an authoritative decision, and is most likely NOT sensitive to or understanding the real-world culture or value of wayspots across the world. The person on Niantic's side is not accountable. That's what it boils down to. Instead of a crowdsourced decision, nominations now have a slight chance of being snatched and is relegated to a room of portal monkeyes in training and we are back to the pre-OPR days of the infinite monkeye theorem. Is that what we want?
And yet, they accepted this painted hydrant.
Since this was approved by the Niantic team (it doesn't show in Ingress & was approved in a matter of days) we finally have our official answer about whether or not the grass between the sidewalk & street is eligible.
Confirmed.
First of the three has been accepted, and despite being in a location that would otherwise allow it to appear in Ingress, my new shiny portal does not exist. And since that S2 cell is already occupied by another portal, I can't use the forums' workaround of using a "thumbs up" vote on a picture to force a sync into Ingress from Lightship.
Of the other two nominations that I'm still waiting on, one is what should be basically a shoe-in (a small mural artwork), but it is somewhat luckily in its own cell. But the other, while it's definitely valid, it's "only" an unsigned parkette -- a small seating/rest area with a lovely little garden. (I've definitely had some success with similar spots, but they do tend to require more work and resubmissions to pass through wayfarer.)
@NianticTintino @NianticDanbocat The amount of noise in the forums (both here in General, and over there in Bug Reporting) shows that this is happening to a LOT of nominations, ever since the Ingress' switchover to the LightShip platform -- accepted wayspots that follow ALL the requirements (20m+ from any other existing portal) not appearing. Something needs to be done, and this "something" should not require players to open tickets and bug reports. We've put in a lot of effort and energy showcasing and selling our nominations, only to have our work stymied by what amounts to a programming error.
A review needs must be made of the Niantic-approved wayspots, and make sure that the allowable ones ARE imported into Ingress.
How about this new POI?
It's a place to hang out, totally elegible.
May anyone explain me about Lightship?
Submitting again didn’t work for me. Another trainer nominated the approved wayspot I had that never appeared anywhere. It was marked as a duplicate and didn’t trigger the original approved nomination to appear anywhere.
Hello and welcome.
Lightship is the name for the database that holds all approved waypoints.
The various Niantic games draw on that database to create, portals, pokestops, castles etc.
After seeing some of the accepted candidates reviewed by the internal team....yeah, I'm good. I'll just swing back to upvote in Pokemon Go if I want to see it in Ingress, and it will be a blessing to not have Intel cluttered by such extreme garbage.
I've a nomination that was accepted. It's in the shadow of a wayspot in another cell. I've heard that this is no longer an issue with Pokemon Go. It has been a week and I'm not seeing it in game though it does show on the list when I review other local nominations.
Will it eventually make it into Pokemon Go?
I've forced a few local ones that actually should have been accepted.
Even though PoGO is my primary game, I still dislike not having Portals go through that I spent the time and effort on. The stats are important to me in Ingress.
So my footbridge was accepted 15 hours after I nominated it. Obviously it isn't in Ingress, despite me nominating it in Ingress and it being in an area without other POI.
I won't be back to the area for months. Since Niantic clearly isn't prioritizing this, looks like I won't have my Portal by then.
I agree, we deserve our credit for creating these waypoints. I'm just in a state of despair over the whole thing right now since the Internal Reviews are (thus far) SO bad that getting a valid POI accepted by that method is just the first of many hurdles towards final inclusion in all eligible-by-proximity games. Since @NianticDanbocat and @NianticTintino have remained silent on this, all I can do is keep doing my thing and hope it's not further impaired by Niantic doing theirs.
Is this a good place to leave this comment? I correctly rejected a seasonal berry picking farm months ago only to get a gift from the pokestop a couple of days ago. Sure enough, it isn't showing in Ingress - a tell-tale sign that Niantic approved it. Can we get a list of the criteria y'all are using? I will enjoy the pokestop until they chain off access for the winter season.
Oh, and I thumbs-upped the photo to get it to show up in Ingress on sync.
As an active Wayfinder with thousands of points mapped and much more reviewed, this is something that stresses me out profoundly. To dedicate my time to carefully plan and nominate candidates just to have them:
I've open a bug report in the appropriate section.
https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/24130/disappearing-nominations/p1?new=1