Does it get any better?
Dasquinz-PGO
Posts: 2 ✭✭
I started submitting and reviewing waypoints a few months ago, and so far I have the impression that the whole process is completely random...
So far, I had about 75% of the submissions rejected, most of them with nonsense reasons, like "Mismatched Location" and "Location Inappropriate" on a playground that is clearly visible on google map and the arrow is exactly on the slide which is also in the picture, "Temporary or Seasonal Display" on things that are clearly unmoveable and have been there for ages, "Low Quality Photo" on pictures that are definitely not low quality, "Natural Feature" on a public platform with benches, and much more, including lots of "Location Inappropriate" and "Other Rejection Criteria" on valid waypoints. I appealed for a few of these, but I suppose there is a limit on the number of appeals that you can open at the same time, so now I just keep getting rejected valid waypoints and there is nothing I can do.
My impression is that people is rejecting with random reasons in order to get to the upgrade faster. It is embarrassing how easier it is to click one star and choose a random rejection reason, compared to filling all the fields. I'm pretty sure that in order to get 100 agreements faster, some people is just rejecting anything. I also had the same impression after seeing my rating drop from great to fair, since I'm pretty sure of the waypoints I've been reviewing. I'm 100% sure that most of these rejected waypoint would be accepted if someone else reviewed them.
I've read about people suggesting to submit the same waypoint again several times, until it gets accepted, but this sounds mental.
So, my question... Does it get any any better? The process so far has been very frustrating... I submit a proposal, wait for months to get a review, which is just random, and eventually appeal and wait again for months (so far I haven't received any answer to any of my appeals, or perhaps submit the proposal again? Honestly, this made me nervous and I lost all the enthusiasm I had at the beginning, so I'm considering to just give up.
Comments
Without seeing your nominations, I can’t comment on how good they are. They may not be as great as you think unfortunately.
You can review and earn Upgrades which moves things through faster. As for Appeals, they’ve only just started to be processed, and Niantic have more to deal with than they thought, so don’t expect a quick turnaround.
I agree that it’s bad practice to submit the same POI multiple times. Wait for a decision firstly before resubmitting.
At risk of sounding insincere, my first thought is along with @PkmnTrainerJ-ING above. I know a lot of my early rejections caused frustration for me, but looking back I agree with (or at least understand) the rejections.
Rejections generate frustration. I totally understand that.
I submit things since more than a year now, and sometimes i get many rejections and that's always very frustrating, especially when the rejection reason is totally non-sense. (Like this week: many rejections. I don't understand why. Sometimes i get 100% acceptations, and sometimes it's 80% rejections... There is no explaination for that. )
Appeal was a solution for that... But Niantic disable them. Just hope they will re-enable appeal quickly and allow us to appeal more than 1 submission per month. If not, that's won't be a solution.
Fortunatly, Niantic change the submission system, and we now are able to submit one thing per day (of way 40 day to submit 40 things in one day) That's better and allow us to re-submit falsly rejected submissions quickly.
That's not the best, but it's better than before.
Maybe in some months Niantic will manage to solve the problem of mass rejections without reasons...
As others have said, showing some of your rejections would help.
I harp on this a lot, but there are two important aspects to submitting wayspot candidates. The first is obviously to find a high-quality candidate, and people focus mostly on that. The second aspect is to present your candidate well, to make it easy for reviewers to understand and approve the thing you've submitted. That second part often gets overlooked by people until they've done a fair number of reviews and understood the difficulty of figuring out what's been submitted, why it's qualifying/interesting, and whether it's legitimate.
I've rejected so many candidates that probably would have been good wayspots but the submitter just didn't give me enough information to do so. I'm reminded of a mural I encountered once, one of the coolest pieces of street art I've ever seen, but the pin got placed in the middle of a large parking lot. The artwork was almost certainly somewhere on one of the buildings surrounding the parking lot, but which one? It was such a fabulous mural that I was willing to work for it and I used almost my entire 20 minutes of review time with street view trying to get a glimpse of the mural from one of the entrances to the parking lot. I finally had to reject it with mismatched location because it obviously wasn't in the middle of the parking lot but I was very sad to do so. If the submitter had taken a decent supporting photo rather than a picture of the parking lot, if they'd put the pin in the proper place, it would have been a slam dunk 5*.
Yes, it gets better. My first couple years nominating, I got a lot of rejects. But the last couple years, I have 80-90% acceptance rate. You need to learn how to "play the game" - pictures, titles, description, supporting.
I have to go with the others above me. Reviewing is absolutely weird in my area and the poorest quality of portal are getting through (traffic signs are being accepted. Even multiple ones on the same pole). On the other hand monument can get stuck for many months. I do feel like the nature of pokemon go (wanting many portals nearby) is partially to blame but I see really bad portals being submitted and accepted by ingress players as well. The problem is that this is not easy to fix. Many people suggest a ranking system but this would fail as these portals are going through now as well and as such people who submit these portals would just rank up. It would probably be best to work with a trust system that slowly adds reviewers and really hammers on quality submission but that seems unlikely to happen.
Where I agree that it takes time to nominate well. There's always something your could have done to improve your nomination. There will be no short of people to say how you should have done it this way or that way.
Yet you can learn all the tricks, take the photo in the best light, best photo composition, best title, best description, and there will be many examples of simular POIs that are in the games as stop your city ..... yet you will still get the rejected outcome.
I don't cope with this well.
I don't have answers.
You do learn how to better present things to reviewers but ultimately there's still going to be situations where people say the new mural you found is temporary and a live animal.
I only submit valid POI's, and have been submitting for years. In my personal experience, 50% of my valid submissions get rejected (sports pitches, park name signs, trail markers etc).
I can recommend to
1) try to work on nominating well - really make an effort with a good photo and a good supporting photo, plus a good write up
2) re-nominate your good submissions. 50% of what I had rejected goes through the second time, just because other people submit it
3) try to not take it to heart when you get unfair rejections. We all know that people can be ... unusual.
Dealing with 'Mismatched Location' from my experience :
I see... The only thing that I get from the comments above is "re-nominate the same waypoint again and again until it gets accepted (because you get better, or because you get lucky)", explained with different words.
This really sucks, what kind of review system gives you no feedback on how to improve, does not give you an opportunity to fix your mistakes, gives you no way to appeal to someone else mistake, and rejects your suggestions for no good reason after several months?
Am I supposed to get back to the place where I was 2 months ago, in order to re-submit the same (valid) waypoint, because someone decided that something clearly built by men is a natural feature?
Seriously this is very wrong.
Anyway, this is definitely not worth the trouble, I'm out.
While the review system doesn't give you feedback, you have may posts here doing just that. And, yes, many times you do have to improve your nomination and resubmit. That can be difficult when the submission was far away from where you live, but the more you submit, the better understanding you'll have about what information reviewers need.
Things like location, community value, and cultural importance aren't as obvious to reviewers because they only have the background information you choose to give them in your submission. This is something you get a feel for with practice.
In the meantime, don't focus on ridiculous rejection reasons because Niantic's feedback system is poor. Focus on plausible things. If you see rejection location and rejection natural feature for a statue, ignore the second and make a photosphere. There are also appeals (hopefully to be re-enabled soon) for things that your local community is just wrong on.
Or stop submitting. I mean, if something stresses you out, don't do it.
Exactly. Without screenshots of the submits in question it's hard to determine if the rejections were valid or not and the post just looks like a gripe/soapbox.