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Do roofed benches count at "gazebos"?
SiIverLyra-PGO
Posts: 952 ✭✭✭✭✭
Hello all,
I really don't know how it is in the rest of the world, but here we have roofed street benches, that are about as common as the regular ones.
They are very commonly submitted to Wayfarer under the justification of "gazebo", and I was wondering if that's an accurate umbrella term for those, or if they're closer to regular street benches (and therefore ineligible).
I'll note that they're usually approved, but there's also a large tendency here to approve nearly anything, even if it's against Niantic rules (individual devices in playground are a huge example, every playground gets multiple wayspots for each slide and swing...).
The benches look like this:
Thanks in advance!
Answers
Oh no... these are definitely not gazebos, as you suspected, and they don't meet any criteria. It seems like a case of your local area accepting everything, unfortunately.
What about 東屋 (Azumaya) in parks in Japan? They are basically a bench with a roof, but a bit more than these. I see them accepted all over the place and usually labelled as Gazebos.
Some can be quite nice structures, while others are pretty minima (random images from Google)l:
http://www.aisf.or.jp/~jaanus/deta/data_image/image_a/azumaya.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Azumaya_%28Summer_house%29_near_Konan_frontier_park.jpg
Certainly the first would be accepted by most reviewers
On this note, what about 東屋 (Azumaya) in parks in Japan? They are basically a bench with a roof, but a little more of a structure than these. I see tons of them accepted and basically labelled as Gazebos.
Some can be quite nice, others are pretty minimal (random images from Google):
I would accept either of those examples that you provided.
I really wish Niantic would release guideline clarifications regarding this. Not that it'll make users here change their minds, but at least I'll have something to back my decision to decline these submissions.
As for my local area accepting everything - tell me about it! Just yesterday I was kicked out of the country's main Wayfarer messaging group because I dared to mention the Niantic guidelines! They're literally telling other people to ignore the guidelines and approve whatever they like! And seeing as I live in a tiny country, these "local" decisions are literally on a nation-wide scale. It's incredibly frustrating... Niantic built this system relying on the assumption that people will be honorable about it, but in reality there's this "mafia" of players who rely on getting favors from others and deciding what to approve based on their liking and not the guidelines - and harassing everyone who dares have a different opinion. But, well, nothing I can do about it... Just hoping karma will get them eventually.
That really s.u.c.k.s.
And yeah... there's not a ton you can do to change it, other than report stuff that meets the removal criteria (which, those benches would not get removed- only certain things do- stuff on school grounds, blocking emergency services, private property, something no longer exists at all/never existed, etc).
You might be able to talk to people and point out that if they get caught making a bunch of bad POIs, they could get banned and all their stops deleted (happened in this forum to one place in Belgium, I believe). Scare them into compliance maybe? Lol
If I would add a question, would you guys think this one as a gazebo?
This one is a security hut ("pos ronda" in Indonesia) used for locals to patrol the area every night. The culture part is, in some places in my country, mostly villages, there is some kind of shift that some people in the village would have to patrol the entire village so the village is safe every night (no robbery, no fire, etc.). And so people built the security hut as their basecamp to patrol, yet its structure mostly look less appealing, just like that one.