New Wayfarer Abuse Enforcement Ladder Policy - Discussion
NianticTintino-ING
Posts: 996Niantic › admin
Hello Explorers,
As you know, these last couple of months the Wayfarer Team, our Ambassadors, along with many others from across Niantic have been working hard to understand and combat ways in which bad actors abuse Wayfarer. These types of abuse can take form in the ways of low-quality contributions, review rings, and many other ways.
The Wayfarer Map and the Explorer Community shapes the game board for every part of the Niantic ecosystem which is why we invite only dedicated players to this community. Bad actors can negatively influence the map across many of our products, and as such abuse in Wayfarer will be taken very seriously.
That is why we want to announce our new Wayfarer Abuse Enforcement Ladder. This ladder will be utilized whenever we come across any form of abuse and illustrate the steps we will take to both warn the offender, suspend the offender, and introduce an official suspension appeal process for overturning what could have been a wrongful suspension.
Please visit our Wayfarer Help Center to view our new policy.
Original post HERE.
Safe Exploring!
Comments
Will step one on the ladder be updated to include information on what activities have been flagged as abusive? In the past, some reviewers acting in good faith have received warning emails saying they've been reviewing incorrectly but with no information on how, so they have no way of improving and have to either stop reviewing entirely or risk getting their game accounts banned.
Brief reaction: the article claims that "Every enforcement will be accompanied with a notification to inform and educate the offenders on their policy violation." Yet each of the steps of the ladder says that they will "receive an email to the email address associated with [their] Wayfarer account informing [them] that we have detected abusive activities on [their] account."
So I have to ask, which is it? Are you going to educate people on what they actually did wrong, or are you going to continue sensing vague emails with no helpful information? I ask because the mention of education in the first part seems like a welcome change, but the details just seem like the status quo.
This ladder will be utilized whenever we come across any form of abuse
Sooooooooooooooooo?
Then i demand from you to take action on everyone who rejected my hiking and bikling trails so far. Especially the recent days I got complete arbitrary reason for rejction such as no pedestrian acces, 3rd party material use and ehatnot. I probably collected dozens of rejections due to people who don't know the rules and bots.
My hiking trails all come with sufficient titels and descriptions, the routes themselves are marked with unique symbols and mostly names to them, they are permanent and my additional comments includes a link to a page where all necessary information such as official and hiker made trail maps with exact positioning are found as screenshots with sources attached.
There is legit 0 reason to reject any of them. They all follow the rules.
This clearly is an abuse of the rejection system.
Example wanted? I could have been done with this village 2 years ago and took care of other places around. But no, thanks to incapability I still have to use many submission possibilities a month to take care of this place.
I'll add my vote to this. People should be able to understand what they did wrong, at least in some general terms.
Great and about time. But if only there was a way ingame to report the mass of low quality contributions that came through in the pas months. Too much coal on the gameboard now and no way ingane to get rid of it.
I'm skeptical about this policy will make any difference.
email only --> 30 days --> 90 days --> 10 years
That escalated quickly.
Its good to see clarification of what will happen if someone engages in really bad abuse and gets banned from Wayfarer until 2034. And then wants to still review and comes back and does a really good job until 2035. That they won't get the past 10 year ban removed from their record.
Demanding retribution because of individual reviewers seems harsh and a step in the wrong direction to be honest.
@MsPacman111-PGO @4All2NJoy-PGO @29andCounting-PGO Some reading material for you 😃
These people violated the acceptance rules and abused the rejection system. They are doing this for years and harm everyone who wanna add Wayspots of value to the system. The are causing Niantic and us a load of uneccesary work and eat time which could be used to add more things which meet the acceptance rules. I do not plan to have to deal with a 1/10 acceptance rate forever you because some people don't get their head out off their butts or ignore the rules.
There is no such thing as making your own rules. They broke the rules, they gotta face the consequences.
We need disciplinary action for reviewers who tank legit nominations. I've had several submissions that have been rejected for BS reasons. Most of those when appeals went live (months later) did pass.
Until Niantic takes measures to discipline poor reviewers, this process will remain broken.
If you are referring to people working together in large groups to deny people or individuals willfully rejecting something when they know it should be accepted that's fair.
Applying the same strict punishment to people with a lack of knowledge or understanding isn't fair.
The only way I can see that action can be taken on those who "don't vote correctly" is for their wayfarer rating to drop.
That's how its supposed to work, if you don't vote with the consensus of the others your rating goes down and you have less weight when voting.
The call for retribution by @RyuuVanDraco-PGO and @Cyduck1763-PGO is not the way to go, and we've seen people come in here many many MANY times complaining that their perfect pokestop was wrongly denied, only for them to post the submission and have it found to be ineligible or have blatant issues that could be fixed in a resubmission. Not saying that you two submitted trash, but going on a witch hunt for those who rejected your submission is wrong and will hurt voters. As well as I very much doubt Niantic has the man power to do that for everyone... Considering how slow appeals are...
I have had many submissions be rejected for crazy reasons, multiple times, only for it to finally get approved on try #5 or after 2 appeals. Its not a perfect system but I don't see how this can be fixed?
Only solution I can personally think of is, if a waypoint was successfully appealed, then those who voted to reject that submission originally should have their agreement removed and marked as non-agreement for that submission. IDK how feasible that is but in theory if there is chronic rejecters their rating will tank from having all their rejections not count as agreements and at that point have little weight in voting or be forced to re-take the exam due to a poor rating.
Yeah, like it's unfair to randomly punish people, when there is no proof of intent. (unless niantic was to specifically look for those who only reject things or have a high ratio of rejections).
I think my suggestion would be the way to go? IDK if there could be any other solution.
I would like to know what the plans are for the whole tons of coal that entered the base in recent months.
Welcome real life. Not knowing something doesn't prevent you from facing consequences.
They take the test and are being asked to take a look at the rules. They have been lazy and didn't do that? Well, their fault. I as someone who followed the rules am not supposed to face consequnces for their doings you know?
I have to deal with stuff like that for years by now. I could have been done with this place years ago and helped another place which needs help. Yet hundreds of people like that prevent me from progressing.
So far, every piece of junk added by scammers is going in. Removal is almost impossible. Even if it is effective, another one enters in its place. Immediately. On forums and discord channels, abusers of the system laugh and "wait for steps from Niantic", which are not there. "If needed, I have several +40 accounts in PoGo". Unfortunately, but you are no longer able to fix it in any way.
Real life? It's a map of interesting points around the world, we are not curing cancer, ****.
I know lots of people, normal everyday people who play Go that would have taken part in Wayfarer but the process was so slow and convoluted, a lot of time making no sense that they gave up pretty quickly.
Handing out bans for a lack of knowledge will make Wayfarer a toxic place that 90% of people will not want to take part in.
M
A
T
E
That was a nice word :)
An example from the last few days at my place:
1. abusers taking photos of sewer manhole-style garbage stuff
2. submitting it in a place where they do not exist (each in a separate S17 cell) in the bustle of crooks
3. after appearing in WAYFARER (how? impossible! not SV, fields on river), immediately moved (>3km) to the place where the photos were taken and where there should be no more portals/pokestops
4. now we have 20 coal wayspots not to be removed
5. pokemon players satisfied :-P
I don't give a s h i t, clean it up yourselves if you allow it. i have no intention to report it.
Considering how horrific Niantics rule enforcment was so far, how unncessary complicated the report process is and how bad / non existent their communication and "education" about mistakes was... i dont see this leading to anything. Is there really even anything new here? What difference does a this fancy ladder system make when every process connected to it is broken.
I also fear this will lead to wrongfull punishments, seeing how many process lately have been badly automated (automatic rejections of legit submissions based on the picture, automatic acceptance of routes in Pokemon Go that are dangerous, automatic deletions of wrongfully reported routes in Pokemon Go)
Happy for you that you are ok with a 1/10 acceptance rate :)
but the process was so slow and convoluted, a lot of time making no sense that they gave up pretty quickly.
And you know why? Because people have to re-submit their dozen of rejected submissions again and again and again and again and again and again and again, clogging the system, because of those who make their own rules or such who are lazy to read them (which takes 2 minutes) as they are told to . And because of such submitting coal because they don't know the rules. :)
But hey, keep ignoring reality and protect the offenders if that is your way to go.
Before anything develops, this is a topic that can create strong differing opinions.
A preemptive reminder we are all entitled to have different views and disagree, just try to ensure that posts are respectful to others.
Tell that to your fellow ambassador.
accessing Wayfarer clients or backends in an unauthorized manner, including through the use of third-party software or add-ons.
Really?
Are you gonna ban some of your ambassadors?
Not knowing the rules and bots are two different things. This is about the bots. The policy cites examples, but it's clear the intent is to punish the people who are submitting fake nominations and the people using bots and many accounts to get those fake nominations into the games and reject good nominations elsewhere. Many of us have complained about these exact abuses repeatedly for years here.
If you have a good way of detecting them now, great. Do it! Ban them, Niantic. But only if you have a very solid way of applying this only to abusive accounts.
Every enforcement will be accompanied with a notification to inform and educate the offenders on their policy violation.I hope that Niantic will make an effort to customize their responses for each situation, avoiding the adoption of a limited set of generic, unclear statements that fail to provide meaningful clarification.
I appreciate that there will be all sorts of questions out of this post. However the wayfarer team is not available immediately to answer them. So feel free to raise points you want clarified but don’t expect a quick response.
It gives a framework for punishing the most obvious abuses of fake nominations and voting cabals that some countries see but I doubt it will do anything to help the average submitter who gets everything badly rejected by pedantic reviewers.
As for add ons and other ways of accessing wayfarer being punishable, there are plenty of examples of people using add ons on this forum. They are often the same people that like to reject everything but suspect they will be allowed to continue rejecting and using add ons against these rules...
You can see all the people afriad of being punished for bad rejections by all the down votes given to those posts suggesting you act on bad rejections. Parodying their ill voting tendencies via the forum 😉