What About A Solution?

sara22au-PGOsara22au-PGO Posts: 38 ✭✭✭
edited December 2021 in General Discussion

Sorry for my on joining mini flood of posts, but there is background for it. I stopped interacting with wayfarer completely in February 2020, for around a year, as the system as I found it was so flawed and open to abuse I found it intolerable. I did send Nia a 3 page email listing the issues ..and then walked away. I have however, been ghosting here occasionally, and, as expected, NOTHING has really changed.

I'm going to outline the problems as I'm seeing them.

First, this forum. There is very little engagement from Nia, and what there is is generally related to edit abuse/appeals, and giving non substantial info to AMA questions. Second, there are two major areas of concern that we wayfarers post about, repeatedly...but we don't offer any solutions except "punishment". Punish reviewers. Punish submitters. It doesn't work.

The two major areas of concern haven't changed since wayfarer was launched. The first is abusing/manipulating the system to gain fraudulent in game infrastructure. The second is the quality and bias of reviewers. To me, this is an inherent system problem, blaming the user's is counter productive, and solves nothing.

Why hasn't there been a solution, fix, or action taken to successfully resolve these issues?

Simply, no one has bothered to have a proactive discussion of options and actions that could be implemented. So I'll start the ball rolling.

Ideally, there would be a dedicated and isolated topic thread, as well as given times for a Nia representative to be present and engaged. Not just a brief read over, but actively participating in creating solutions,or explaining why something suggested Is unviable. We need to think of ways to limit the amount of abuse, former, current and potential, from occurring. On that, my first suggestion would be the immediate disablement of edits.

Edits, as given to reviewers In wayfarer, provide no evidence as to why the edit has been lodged, yet we are supposed to make an educated and knowledgeable decision. Well, that's not possible with what's been given.

From a submitters perspective, this makes abusing the system exceptionally easy. They don't need to provide any reasons, the work in creating the POI has been done for them, and the time required to sub the edit is minimal. The system itself is promoting and allowing abuse to occur without any restrictions or limitations. The issue with edits doesn't end there. Just look at the huge amount of appeals/edit requests in that thread on this forum. And look at what evidence Nia requests so that they can make an informed decision. If that evidence was requested when an edit is originally submitted into the wayfarer system, the amount of abusive edits would reduce significantly. Making a system harder to abuse is a very simple and effective way of reducing that abuse.

The second issue regarding abuse is the guidelines Nia has used. Abuse Reporting in wayfarer by reviewers isnt an accurate reflection of deliberate abuse. Flagging a Nom as abuse because in supporting the subber had directed the reviewer to look at a catagory that the sub should be approved under...isn't abuse, or an attempt to influence. Annoying the reviewer is also not a reason to flag abuse! Mostly, these are attempts by seasoned wayfarers to educate poorly educated reviewers...which is the second repeatedly brought up issue here.

But is it the reviewers fault that they aren't familiar with the guidelines, or the systems? Again, to me, it's a systemic unaddressed or actioned issue. Look at the requests for a centralised knowledge database. The AMAs are messy, without clear cut answers, and as usual, so much of the info available is open to interpretation. There should have been some strategies implemented here, but again, nothing has changed.

Let's work together to address and create solutions to the inherent flaws within wayfarer, in a constructive and supportive environment.

To do that though, we need to communicate. I'd like to see that happen.

Thanks for chewing through my rather long (even though it's abbreviated for all I want to say) post, and I hope we can form a collaborative environment 😁

Post edited by sara22au-PGO on
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