Disallow uploading existing photos when creating Wayspots
Itsutsume-ING
Posts: 1,056 ✭✭✭
It seems that since the ability to upload existing photos when creating Wayspots was introduced in Niantic games, a lot of fake Wayspots started to appear. It is easy to submit such fake Wayspots, but extremely hard to remove them.
I would like to petition Niantic to reverse this ability. If anyone wants to create a new Wayspot, they should take a picture of it in the process, not take a picture first. This is how it used to be in Ingress for many years.
Comments
People have been using fake camera apps since the beginning of OPR. I don't expect that Niantic can do anything to prevent it.
And other people just submit photos of computer/tablet screens with the photo that they want to submit, it used to be fun to check the GPS data of the photos in the OPR times.
I am not saying it's impossible to still upload fake photos to create fake Wayspots. But there's no reason to make it easier to do. Again, it's just my personal observation that since the ability to upload existing photos was introduced, the number of fake Wayspots increased because I see more and more appeals to remove these fake Wayspots.
The first and foremost thing that must be done is to:
Two years ago we had a massive problem with someone submitting Google Street View screenshots as their photos, and although we reported these things to Niantic, no action was taken whatsoever. So they now have entire swatches of suburb filled with Google Street View photos.
The worst part is that they actually upvote their photos when a member of our community tries to take a real photo of the POI, but we get swamped with upwards of 5+ thumbs so we can't do anything.
But I must also disagree with taking a photo of the nomination during the process at the place. At best especially in rural areas and mountainous hikes, the internet connection is not stable enough lest even getting a connection and the upload process will consistently fail. Find the fake wayspots, find the creator, eliminate the creator. They don't get in trouble at all. If it meant that submitting completely garbage nominations and consistently not following the rules meant they could possibly lose nomination privileges permanently or even their hard-earned Level 40 PoGo/Level 10 Ingress account, they would absolutely think otherwise not to submit their bag of mulch.
I totally agree that people who manipulate Wayspots in any way should be considered cheaters and should be punished accordingly.
But let me talk about one point you mentioned - submitting Wayspots in locations with unstable connection, or no connection at all. If you create a Wayspot in such location from another place, you will get a Wayspot in location where no one will be able to interact with it. Yes, it will be great for exploring and exercising, but it also will be frustrating for players to find out they have no signal to play.
Has Niantic fixed the problems with nominations timing out if the image upload takes too long in a low single zone? What about being able to submit in an area with no signal which can be sent later like we could in Ingress Classic? If not, then I cannot support this at all. That was, after all, the entire point of the feature.
I used Ingress Classic and submitted a few portals with it, but I never had to use this feature you described. Could you please tell me more about how it worked?
They haven't fixed it. The only way I've been able to submit anything with Prime is by remote-submitting the wayspots with my home wifi or other fast connection.
Trying to submit on-sit always times out.
It requires significantly stronger signal to complete a submission than it does to interact with a portal/pokestop/gym/inn/greenhouse.
For me, the ability to use stored photos results in substantially better submissions. I can take a dozen photos and cherry pick the best ones. I can take the time to craft a much stronger description while submitting from home. (I take a screenshot of the "where I'm standing" pin on the map on the first page of the submission process if there's any doubt in my mind as to where the pin belongs so that I can make sure the location is absolutely correct.) In the case of my submissions, Niantic gets a better database if I'm allowed to use pretaken photos and submit from home. I strongly suspect I'm not the only one.
Just because the submitter has a ropey connection due to the network they are on, it doesn't mean everyone will and in a few years we'll have Elon Musk's space internet to keep us connected everywhere.
I am glad that there are people like you who don't just take a quick photo from a car at red light thru closed windows at night time, but between picking a perfect photo from home and not having fake POIs I chose not having fake POIs.
In such case another player with better connection can submit a new wayspot.
Fake wayspots are a bad reviewers problem. We don't have a problem with fake wayspots in my area and I use the existing photos option all the time. If people are reviewing correctly, it should be very difficult to get fake wayspots approved.
I somewhat agree to that, but reviewing is a whole separate issue - I've seen enough threads about OPR/Wayfarer used to remove legit portals just because they were close to a player of opposite faction, crappy pictures been approved and upvoted, POIs relocated from their correct locations. There's a new POI in my area, and its correct location is about 50 meters from its incorrect current location. Nobody gave a damn, got approved as submitted. I am now waiting for Niantic to review my request to relocate it.
How would wayfarer be used to remove portals? Only Niantic has that ability, sounds like a lot of hyperbolic rhetoric without much to back it up. None of the things you've mentioned are affected by removing the ability to use existing photos when submitting.
You said that fake POIs are bad reviewers problem. I said that reviewing is a whole separate issue and gave additional examples of bad reviewing cases besides approving fake portals.
You said, "I've seen enough threads about OPR/Wayfarer used to remove legit portals just because they were close to a player of opposite faction"
So, again, my question is how would wayfarer be used to remove portals?
I thought that all reviewing is done by players. Is it not true for removal requests?
Nope, removals are exclusively handled by Niantic.
Then they do really crappy job. Really, really crappy job.
It does not look like anyone answered this for you.
The old scanner when used to submit, if it had low signal it would hold the nomination in the background and try to upload later when you would re connect with a better signal. It did this in the background and you might never known it to happen. Only evidence would be instead of getting your email confirmation immediately it would come later. Prime does not do this. Would be nice if it did like with the Portal Scans they are doing.
Thanks for the explanation. I wasn't aware it worked like that. Yes, it would be nice to have this feature back, then there will be no need to upload existing photos.
The feature also had really, really negative ramifications for iPhone users, as submissions would often (about 40-50% of the time in my case) get stuck on the phone and never upload. Since there was no way on an iPhone to upload remotely, it often meant multiple trips to a location to get a submission to work and made the process miserable at times.
And speaking of bad photos, it meant I had to use a borrowed ancient Android with a dreadful camera to do my submitting, which led to wayspots with far worse photos than necessary.
So frankly, I am selfishly thrilled that this feature is gone.
Although you are correct that having this feature may increase the number of fake waypoints it is also helpful. I know this is a very rare case but for me I used the feature when I could not submit a waypoint for myself I would send all of the information to a member of my community and they submitted it for me.
I'd say it's not the feature itself that was the problem, but that it was buggy and should have been fixed.