October News: Rejection Reasons to be MIA for rest of year
@NianticTinTino This is horrific news! Niantic is taking rejection reasons off emails… but won’t be adding the rejection reasons to nomination pages in the near future due to reduced engineering staff. Furthermore, the trainers submitting wayspots may not partake in the wayfarer experience, and never see the reasons even when they are posted on Wayfarer. This is going to block the learning curve for new wayfarers.
Currently, about a fifth of the nominations I review are blatantly ineligible. Getting the rejection reasons helps the newer wayfarers hone their skills. Without this in game training, they will not develop their skills and the % of blatantly ineligible nominations will rise. On the plus side, agreements will be quicker to accumulate for such lovelies as “Middle School Gazebo”.
please reconsider
Comments
Put it this way: Why would they care? It's the community doing the reviews, so it doesnt matter if it's 1 trash sub/month or 1k/month, their effort is 0 and with more submissions, even if most are trash, some will be valid.
Do understand that while some Niantic lower-level staff might actually care about this, the higher ups couldn't give a rat's behind.
Where is this news located?
I respectfully disagree. I think rejection reasons cause a lot of confusion and really only provide a little bit of help and I am happy to see them disappear. If Niantic can make them more signal and less noise then that would be a good time to return them.
Think about how many fewer complaints we're going to see about something being rejected because it was a live animal, had a visible license plate, or wasn't culturally/historically significant.
Those complaints will just turn into "Why was my X rejected??" along with a host of other complaints along similar lines from people who now have no feedback.
Though honestly not much more than what we already have now. At least, we won't have "my nomination was rejected for the 'wrong' reasons."
But I do think that this should be used as an opportunity to overhaul the reviewing process and basing the rejection reasons on how reviewers rate the nomination in each of the three criteria sections.
There have been a number of rejections I've received that don't have any justification for them, or even make sense.
I've had two rejections give a reason as "."
That's it. The reason was a dot.
Unless I'm not aware of something, I don't think that's an actual reason.
It's picking between the lesser of two evils, perhaps?
At least for me, maybe not giving any reasons for rejection would cause me less of a headache over seeing rejections with mind-numbingly dumb reasons. Some of them are legitimate, though, I have messed up a couple of times. But the majority just make me aggravated.
As much as I don't like being kept in the dark, maybe the dark is less stressful than seeing idiotic reasons for rejections.
@Xaerfaal-PGO the “.” rejection reason is an internal Niantic review. Also, internal Niantic reviewers are really horrible at their job. There’s lots of support for both these points in this forum.
The rejection reasons are sometimes a source of confusion, but a little refinement would go a long way, with no coding. Things such as replacing the term “location inappropriate” with “explicit activity,” for example, or writing a *less* specific description for a category such as “low quality photo” (where nominators are told their photo is dark or taken from a car, when really it just doesn’t show the subject very well… or at all). That doesn’t take an engineer to do, that just takes a technical writer (which costs way, way less than an engineer, especially if you’re just contracting one off the internet for a single project).
Personally, I have been able to learn from my rejection reasons, such as when my soccer field nomination was rejected for the photo (that’s when I learned to take pictures straight on and level whenever possible), or the solar light statue rejected as a duplicate (that was me learning the hard way that not every portal was in Pokémon Go). I would not have understood these rejections at all if not accompanied by some reason, and it would have just discouraged me from learning how Wayfarer works.
Yes, I only just learned about the "." thing an hour or so ago from reading another thread (d'oh).
I can certainly agree with your point(s); and maybe from a different angle.
That is, not so much a hands-on learning in practice the acceptance and rejection criteria, but how reviewers themselves operate; which is not according to any official criteria. In a perfect world, reviewers would have no ulterior motives in reviewing nominations. But we're very much far away from that theoretical possibility.
That kind of learning, I do not object to.
I don't see how Niantic could even begin to enforce reviewers to strictly stick to judging nominations solely by the criteria they have put out.
As a reviewer I am concerned that there will be no reasons given to the submitter.
I do want the overhaul of the system to be in place and the focus in future into being on education in order to improve.
However having no reason given at all is not helpful.
Surely the text of the email could have been tweaked to say something along the lines of
The following rejection reasons have been selected by wayfinders …….. please note that it is not always clear which rejection reason applies and if there is a range given this is likely to be due to a range of categories that apply. Please reflect on this feedback and address some of the issues raised before considering resubmission.
This would allow the current system to remain in place until a new one was ready.
Although we all see examples with spurious reasons there must be plenty of instances where the current system works well eg it’s a school. I fear without any reasons or explanation why then there will just be repeat submissions without any adjustment.
So, the rejection reasons sometimes are wrong and cause confusion, so let's just remove them altogether and leave everybody in the dark regarding the reason their nominations were rejected? Really?
The reasons are often correct, spot on, and tell the submitter exactly what they needed to know. We are talking about exceptions here. We need to fix these exceptions, not remove it altogether. If we are removing them, change the review page to a simple Yes/No question and save reviewers time as well.
We will start seeing people complaining about how the school they nominated was rejected and they don't know why. Or even better, they will just try again. Exactly what we need.
We used to get super generic rejections on emails before Wayfarer. See an old Ingress rejection;
We've reviewed your Portal submission and given the information you've provided in your submission, we have decided not to accept this candidate.
At this time, we’re not able to provide specific rejection reasons for each submission we review; however, the following are common reasons for rejection:
So if there is a gap between rejection reasons being removed, and then being put on to Wayfarer, I guess we will get something similar
As a note, the “PLEASE DON’T SUBMIT LIST & ACCEPTANCE CRITERIA” did have links in the original email, I just removed them as they’re no longer valid.
The appeals section on Google+ was the worst. Almost everyone asked why their church or playground didn't meet any ACCEPTANCE CRITERIA or wondered why the candidate was marked in an incorrect location when the pin was exactly on the candidate in question.
At least this means that the people are who submitting actually have to log into Wayfarer to check out the rejection reasons (eventually), but really, what is the proportion of people who have submitted trash and have never even logged into Wayfarer, or even know what it does in the first place?
The majority of such nominations are just random submissions because that button to potentially create a pokestop just exists there.
@aleprj-PGO I think that in many ways we're both right. Rejection reasons can be signal, and they can be noise. It's probably also true that the noise is overrepresented in forum discussions because people are confused, annoyed, or outraged by "WRONG REJECTION REASONS!!!!1!!!!". That has certainly been a recurring theme on Wayfarer discussion forums-- I remember looking at this one a couple of months ago and fully 20% of the discussions on the first page were different people complaining about bad rejection reasons.
Are they currently more noise than signal? I don't know. I don't think that we as users have an objective way to know. Niantic may not even have a way to know although maybe they could use their internal data to make a pretty good guess. Certainly omitting rejection reasons from email will make some things better and some things worse.
Perhaps we can all agree that Niantic needs to do a better job of providing signal in rejection reasons and reduce the noise?
I dk about you, but i dedicate countless hours helping people improve their nominations to have a better chance of success and almost always rejection reasons server as a guide at valid concerns that need to be addressed in the nomination.
Does this mean that we don't have to choose anymore a reason when rejecting?
I think they could solve all that by any 1* need a written comment. Then actually send the written comments. I have had several submissions I 1* today because they obviously had someone's driverside window and side mirror in them. Great nominations otherwise.
At first, in OPR, there were no rejection reasons - you just hit 1* and went to the next nomination.
People begged Niantic to add reasons, so REVIEWERS could understand what should be rejected. After about a year, Niantic gave in.
But NOMINATORS still had no idea. People begged Niantic to send rejection reasons to the nominator. After about a year, Niantic gave in.
So now we're going back one step. I don't think Niantic sees that as a big problem. It's not emotional to them, even if we're frustrated.
I think they could solve all that by any 1* need a written comment. Then actually send the written comments
When I am starting to get fed up with the amount of coal, near the end of a review session I don’t think a comment of;
”**** the **** off, this is a poster in your house.”
would be well received but I get your point.
@charlahinkle-PGO For a while at least some 1* rejection reasons required a written comment. People worked around that by using different rejections. I suspect that requiring text for all 1* rejections would get people to vote 2* 1* 1* instead of having to type a rejection reason.
I'm pretty sure that Ingress comm has well and truly taught Niantic their lesson about letting players type messages to each other in games.
IMHO, the rejection reasons given in the mails were often pure BS anyway, so it isn't a big loss.
Imagine the unfiltered trolling and abuse that would go in if reviewer comments were sent directly to the subitter without any moderation or filtering by Niantic............
Not a good idea, though I do wish I could make the odd comment direct myself for some nominations. 😉