One-year-old submission in limbo
Qwizical-ING
Posts: 91 ✭✭✭✭
So I live in a limbo zone (East London). Central London has cleared twice in the last year.
Niantic cleared all the "old" stuff that was stuck a few months ago but only stuff as recent as May 2019. For me, everything that cleared was under 300 days old.
It's now been a few months and now I have a year old submission still in queue.
Niantic, what happened to clearing out the old stuff? All I've asked for the past 6 months is for you to set an upper limit on non-upgraded submissions to help Seers like me not have to grind your system for one potential new waypoint creation. I'm up to 94 nominations stuck (it was 100 earlier in the week but a few upgrades and submitting outside my review cell has lowered this number.
(NB I also still have two redacted submissions in the system).
Please stop ignoring this issue. There must be a problem when the centre of the biggest city in the UK gets reviewed and cleared with much more frequency than a much less dense borough on the edge of the city.
Thank you for reading,
Qwizical
Comments
A year? Jesus. That's a long time to be waiting for a submission to come back.
I'm amazed Niantic have done anything about it, though I suppose they're convinced their system works well and there's no backlog.
This limbo system needs looking at, Niantic told us 2 years ago they had changed the priority system to make low density areas high priority but it’s meant that certain areas get reviews back within days but other areas have subs for months in the queue.
it needs looking at again please @NianticCasey-ING to find better balance of prioritising low density areas but not making it almost impossible to get submissions through
A year sounds ridiculous. How is that even possible? Mine come back in less than a month and some in about a week.
This really needs sorting out, I don't mind waiting a little bit longer if say things that are 6 months old (or even 3) or more are continually cleared out, a bit like an auto upgrade for really old stuff.
Clearing them through the system quicker would stop a lot of the duplicates that are clogging it up too as they wouldn't necessarily know that it had already been submitted.
OP you have way more patience than I would. I'd have probably given up by now. I hope niantic have a more ongoing permanent solution for you and similar areas soon.
Can you still withdraw it? It's gotten caught in one of the filters and won't be seen by any more reviewers.
@TheFarix Trust me these cant be getting caught by a filter because:
1) Niantic would have cleared it like they did the other month with stuff incorrectly marked abuse etc.
2) it's literally every submission I do in my local area. I have to go East of the Meridian (the dividing line of every single cell) before I get stuff back in a reasonable time. I subbed there 3.5 weeks ago and just now got them all back.
3) there's been a theory about Niantic blacklisting the entire cell I live in because theres a park nearby that was notorious for hundreds of fake portal submissions and deliberate mislocations and duplications. If this turns out to be true I'll probably be crushed.
If the area is populated with Wayspots to the extent that you're trying to get this dandelion thing approved then you can't be doing too badly. Someone else would point out that this trail marker is not "off the beaten path".
I've seen limbo cell differences in my area, some areas just take far longer whether it's for nominations or edits. The system doesn't work properly, wish Niantic would actually take feedback here seriously and look into it.
Ignore what I've submitted. That's not part of the argument here. The point is that this has been sat in the system for 367 days and counting and has still not been seen by a single reviewer.
There comes a point where you have to start saying things like this are beyond ridiculous for anyone who submits in any area who experiences this kind of "system bias" like I do. I fully expect where I live to be near the back of the queue, but behind even central London? That's the joke.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, I would LOVE for Niantic to cap how long they reasonably expect any submission to sit in the system for without reaching consensus (e.g. automatically upgrade it after a year in the system). We know Niantic manually review upgrades that take too long, so why not clear old stuff this way too?
I know I am lucky to live in an area where I have the freedom to travel to a lot of insane places to play the game, but having a situation like this (which is across the entirety of East London FWIW) negatively impacts all the communities who are trying their best to get submissions accepted the only way they can - by **** Wayfarer.
Nobody should have to grind Wayfarer to guarantee their submissions in a certain area get seen by reviewers. If more people had to review in order to get stuff seen, maybe people would stop accusing me of just being a rubbish submitter?
Bumping this up.
@NianticCasey-ING you said something was changed in the queue logic not too long ago and the UK communities saw a flood of old Redacted subs coming from a limbo state, it wasn't just 1 or 2, the flood gates opened and we saw lots of them, then all of a sudden they stopped and we never saw anymore, so clearly your dev team changed something and then changed it back again.
I ask you to step up and take responsibility here, find what changed and do it again, open the flood gates for us again, there's no reason not to at this stage, I can provide examples for you if needed, and I'm not the only one, I know many others who were suddenly tagging @Qwizical-ING in the Telegram chats for why we were suddenly seeing very specific area that we haven't seen in months.
I know you can't openly talk too much about what happens in the background @NianticCasey-ING, your probably under some sort of silence order of what you can and can't say here for fear of exposing your systems inner workings, I'm not asking for detailed report, I just want you to admit that something DID change, and do it again.
There’s areas of London that definitely seen perpetually stuck in limbo. There’s too much disparity in the rates at which areas are seen in the UK, and the area it’s set is too wide as well.
Take Cambridge as an example - massively historical city, bursting with waypoints, but also not close to any other large settlements - stuff flies through in a matter of days even in the city centre.
Similar sized settlements such as Wakefield, surrounded by other big cities, can take months and months. Obviously nothing compared to the East London issue posted though.
There’s two fixes I’d like to see personally:
Hopefully @NianticCasey-ING notices your post @Qwizical-ING and can at least provide a reasonable explanation of why this is happening, and what can be done to fix it given the inherent unfairness of it.
I always found the waypoint density relation to priority strange anyways - areas with more waypoints likely have more active players who’ll interact with them, and in some cases may just have more points of interest of value to the system (certainly more than areas of countryside with just fields and the occasional trail marker). But that’s just my thoughts :)
I still have two from 2018. The rest usually go into voting within 60 days.
Sorry, one Year seem to be al long time to you, but it is not unusuel especial in big Citys. If you submitt things in rual areals with low number of POIs you can hope for some weeks.
But in a city like London shoult be so much POIs that the submissions from that areal get a verry low priority in the System.
I submit stuff since the closed beta of Ingress an I learnd one thing: Don't waite for an ancer. It can take years. My oldest open submissions are from 08.2019 and too weeks ago I got a Portal live I submited in 2018. So just forget that on, an be happy if you got an ancer one day.
Bumping up again.
East London is pretty dead in terms of agents. There's hundreds and probs thousands of unsubmitted POI around here but I can't justify going out to look for them if I have to upgrade everything.
I'm up to maybe 98 subs in the system again. I hate having to grind upgrades and it makes the whole process much less fun.
The issue @Qwizical-ING is having is that Niantic has cleared the limbo dramatically and apparently got all the old submissions through but they still have a lot of submissions in the system. Even after NIA allegedly cleared limbo. It's not fair on Qwizical, or any other player if they have to wait such a long time to get an answer back.
This is not the thread to be asking about this. Please don't hijack a thread about the system bias to ask about pokestops.
It's not fair on me or any of the communities I sub for.
"East London is pretty dead in terms of agents"
There must be hundreds of level 40 players.
Doesn't mean they submit. AFAIK very few actually do submit. But I can't tell because the whole entire area is stuck in an endless limbo. What's the point in having hundreds of agents submitting if you essentially lock new discoveries behind Wayfarer reviewing?
This is my issue, in East London the system forces you to review to get new wayspots appearing in game. For almost anywhere else in the country this is not the case.
Last night, I calculated it would take approximately ***144 hours*** to earn the agreements I need to clear my backlog.
If you think this is fair just because of where I live then I don't want to read your comments on this thread.
I have stated Central London has cleared more often than my home area has, and I know because I submit in both cells.
Why is CENTRAL FREAKING LONDON easier to get wayspots accepted in without the need for upgrades than East London?
That's my problem.
This is why I have asked and begged and whatever for @NianticCasey-ING or any Niantic employee to just be open and honest with me about how much longer I should realistically have to wait. If they say that 374 days and counting is too long, I ask that they please do something about it. I'm not even asking them to clear the entire cell's backlog, I'm just asking for the system to set an upper limit of time for how long I should realistically have to wait to get a response so that I don't have to spend almost a week of my life reviewing in Wayfarer.
You don't understand the limbo issue if you can just submit and do *nothing* to get a final response on your submissions.
If you had to do what I'm doing, you'd be pretty freaking upset and angry as well. You'd want Niantic to do anything to make your experience a little less of a chore.
That doesn't necessarily mean that the PoGo lot will be submitting, let alone reviewing. We have plenty of PoGo players that are level 40 in my town, none of them submit. They leave it to the three ingress agents.
As @Qwizical-ING as already stated, what's the point in having loads of people submit if it's locked behind Wayfarer reviewing? The fact that they have grind 144 hours a week just to get one upgrade, so their submissions can be seen, is honestly a joke. Especially when NIA have cleared the cells surrounding the one that Qwizical plays/submits in.
Absolutely no one should be waiting a year at least before their submission goes into voting. It's fine when @NianticCasey-ING or another NIA rep say they're clearing the backlog, but there's a difference between saying they're clearing it and actually clearing. In this case, it's just been all talk on NIA's end.
The point Qwizical is making is that Wayfarer shouldn't be a chore and that there needs to be some transparency and actual communication from NIA on this issue.
Yes, but if there are a lot of level 40 Pokémon players and they don't submit and they don't review then they don't want more Pokéstops. They might like some more but they don't want them.
(Players of some other games don't seem to want more Wayspots in general.)
Have you been able to figure out the cell areas that are in limbo @Qwizical-ING ? Like is there a distinct cell border where nominations work on one side and are in limbo on the other side? I see limbo areas at s2 cell level 11 size for reference.
You are literally missing the point @Qwizical-ING is making.
Even if there isn't reviewers in their part of London, there will be reviewers from neighbouring cells that aren't seeing the submissions because they're in limbo.
I'm an active reviewer and I see plenty of submissions from central London, west London, South London, etc but never any from Qwizical's part of London. I'm not even anywhere near London since I live in Yorkshire.
The point is that the only way that Qwizical's submissions are seen is when they upgrade them, and this is even after NIA allegedly cleared the backlog, which evidently they didn't.
You are using the same empty reasoning that NIA uses. We have an incredibly active Wayfarer community in the UK, and the fact that Qwizical still has submissions that are over a year old and haven't been seen by *ANYONE* is an absolute joke. A lack of active reviewers isn't the issue. The issue of that NIA have got something wrong with their system and they're being deliberately ignorant at this point.
Yeh and because I live close to the Meridian it's easy to work out. The Eastern boundary is the Meridian line, western boundary is somewhere between Islington and Dalston, the Northern boundary is somewhere around Chingford Mount (Memorial Park had redacted subs that got cleared a few months ago). I don't sub south enough to know where that boundary is.
It's not a fixed cell either which is weird. It's some where between a L9 and L10 S2 cell has been mentioned by the UK Wayfarer group because none of the locations I've specified match up to cell boundaries (the Meridian is always a boundary).
This kinda suggests that if cells aren't involved, areas are blacklisted. I'll post a map too of where I know the East London boundaries to be based on when and where my subs have been clearing.
Trying not to dox myself here lol.
Where I've drawn shows where I have observed the limbo area to exist (note: I don't know the southern boundary and some have argued that it stops short of Stratford.)
I know it stops short of Islington because I've had subs accepted there without upgrades that cleared last November.
I also think I've drawn the Northern boundary a little too far south because I've never subbed that far north in this review cell. This is only what I've observed, but limbo is definitely between the right and left lines.
Another bump @NianticCasey-ING @NianticBrian-ING
I have evidence to suggest the southern boundary of limbo does stop just on the north tip of Stratford, and the northern boundary stretches as far up as Waltham Abbey, as when limbo started clearing a few months back when Casey admitted they changed something, I was seeing Redacted subs from a small park just to the north of Enfield and I haven't seen anything from there since, I know there's still plenty in the system from that area from what my sources have told me.
Casey, you really need to do something and stop being so silent here, it really shows badly on you and the team when we get nothing but silence after tagging you multiple times over the course of a week. For information, we have reached out to external media companies, perhaps some media buzz about this will kick you into action.
The lack of response from anyone at NIA is somewhat worrying. Their silence speaks volumes.
Following on from what @Belahzur-ING said, I've also contacted media outlets, and even took this issue to Twitter.
@NianticCasey-ING Being silent about such a serious issue with the Wayfarer tool does not reflect well. The lack of moderation in these forums is bad enough but turning a blind eye to a player's genuine request for an answer and help, especially after you said that the backlog was getting cleared some months ago, is an absolute mockery.
Never mind media companies / outlets, get straight on to the ombudsman (Ofwayspot).
Media companies are better since they have greater reach.
Thank you, your diagram looks like the L10 S2 cell to the left of the Meridian line, but could be larger in cell size. Pleased to see your group is looking at this type of cell based limbo. I really feel there are more undiscovered bugs in the nomination review distribution, beyond like what Niantic supposedly found back in early April.
For example, recently I made an edit move which was from a limbo L11 cell into one where edits get resolved fast. Meanwhile in the rest of the L11 cell some edits are waiting a couple of years, and just never had any feedback. The same L11 cell was in limbo for nominations, prior to upgrades coming out.
Hopefully more nominators out there will add input and some pressure can be put on Niantic to really look into what is going on.
This thread now has over 1000 views, up from just above 500 yesterday, after myself and a few others from the UK collective contacted external media companies, with several more in mind to reach out to... we can keep this going for a long time to come @NianticCasey-ING
For comparison, 2 out of 3 of your pinned posts at the top of Generic Discussion have just above 2000 views, this thread has counted 500 views just overnight.
Please do something Casey and we can end this, until then... spread the word.