Taking action against bots is appreciated but without detailed explanation you’re just scaring people off.
What makes it enough to get suspended? Are those warning emails really educating? Don’t just tell them they are doing wrong and not tell what they’re doing wrong. As being one of those wayfinders who gat a warning email for reviewing incorrectly, I am really worried that you wouldn’t get a chance to correct what you’re doing and get banned eventually because the email doesn’t say anything specific.
What if someone had a slight misunderstanding in the criteria and submitted a few bad quality nominations without knowing? What if someone wasn’t up to date with AMA? What if a criterion in your language has different meaning from the original one? (“A great place to be social with others” is still something like “a place where you can interact with others” in my language, and that’s a big difference when reviewing and submitting.) What if someone reports you for reviewing badly even though you were trying your best? What add-ons are OK to use and what are bad?
I can come up with more and more questions but instead I feel like I would just stop reviewing/submitting until I’m sure I won’t get my PoGo account suspended. In fact I’m already reviewing/submitting less and less after last Global Challenge when I didn’t receive the right tier reward and got demotivated. Why should I risk my Lv50 account for just a little satisfaction of helping Niantic and other users?
Personally I stopped submitting anything due to that, most of my submission are valid and in the acceptance criteria.
They even have a good description and publicly visible on Street View but I have to send them 2/3 times on average due to ridiculous rejection reasons.
Until then personally I gave up on some submission due to the time it takes to send them, no reason to do that when reviewers can reject for stupid reasons.
Want an example?
Inside a park, permanent and publicly accessible and with a historical meaning behind it.
Rejected 6 time for many reasons (private property, not visually unique, not historic or cultural, mismatched location and many others), personally I gave up.
Before you start going off about how" bad reviewers need to be punished", you must first need to realize that particular rejection reason is not one that reviewers can choose from. It is often attributed to when a nomination is a duplicate, but not enough reviewers choose that reason to form the majority.
This is precisely why I think all these recent calls to "punish reviewers" because certain nominators don't like the results they got need to be nipped in the but. @NianticAaron can we get an amendment to the Community Guidelines to prohibit calls for bans or punishment of reviewers because it creates a rather hostile atmosphere and is almost always baseless?
Wish that was the case, but I'm the only one that submit things around my area, that one I'm still trying to get it approved. I submitted it in March for the first time.
That one seems close to the another nearby wayspot, if it is within 20 meters you can't see it in Ingress. Pokemon Go allows to see all the existing wayspots during the nomination process.
I'm not sure if it's still available though as it was meant for developers. There is the ability to submit, make edits in it etc but those features don't function correctly and it adds them to the map without adding them to any game so they will never appear so it's not worth doing and it causes kittens and fairies to die if you do.
Yes and it has been placed in the wrong position as well...probably that's the reason why I couldn't see it (unless it's a recent approved one).
I submit Wayspots only through my Ingress account, I don't like using PoGo due to the fact that I'm used to take photo and upload everything when I'm home.
I know I can upload it later in PoGo but I tend to use Ingress because of habit...my bad.
Wayfarer is damned if they do and damned if they don't. And they have to start somewhere.
I think this is first and foremost aimed at those people creating havoc with the higher than normal submissions - in particular of bad POIs/Objects
Then there is the other issues being spoken about here - 1) Generally poor nominations -- 2) Poor reviewing.
Which Niantic are slowly addressing by cleaning up the criteria more how to nominate when you submit. But to be frank. Will never be enough. Unless it is sustained with onboarding training and ongoing retraining, much clearer language (let alone format of the criteria and how images/words used), removal of rewards around the nominations/review process, clean up of the DB of bad accepted nominations IE because people see accepted shyte - they nominate/accept shyte - it is called human behaviour and marketers love it.
With limited resources they had to start somewhere. I applaud that.
As for scaring people off. Well I would ask. Who? Will the vast majority of nominators ever ever see let alone take on board this abuse message. No. And hey, if you do nothing wrong, then what is there to worry about.
I managed to download it from the Play Store and make it to work.
Take that Wayspot as an example: it's completely off from the real position.
So...what should I do to correct the location since it's not in any game?
Not in PoGo or Ingress and the correct location should be more that 20m away from the current location.
I have at least one more Wayspot in that situation (this one completely off as well, but since I can't ask for a location change in ANY game it's stucked in a limbo rn)
I have reconsidered my thoughts, and although I once stated that I generally agreed with the proposal, I am changing my opinion. I disagree with these sanctions as they are pointless. As I mentioned before, truly abusive Wayfinders create accounts that can victimize Wayfarers. They are not afraid of any of your sanctions. Only Wayfinder who faithfully abides by the niantic rules and uses one account with care will be dissuaded by the sanction.
This is a criticism of you, but it is a fact, so please bear with me and listen to it.
You have come to the Expo Park in Suita, where I live. I welcomed you very much. But you must have seen a number of trainers there who put three or four smart phones on the drawing board and swiped them cruelly. Did you pay attention to them? You must have missed most of them. You are the ones who have been watching and overlooking the multi-accounting, even though you know it is against the rules.
My first real Pokémon GO event was in Okinawa. I had a great time. But when I woke up a little at night in my hotel, there were sparks and dust in the Pokemon gyms around me. I thought why a gym battle at this time of night, but it soon made sense. I realized it was because there were undetectable location spoofers, attacking the gyms in Okinawa with location spoofers from overseas.That there is a time difference between when we in Japan sleep and when it is morning or afternoon, so they are enjoying the gym battles.I thought they were enjoying the gym battles because of the time difference from when we in Japan sleep, which is in the morning or afternoon.It should be easy to detect such location disguises. They are enjoying the gym battles because there is a time difference from the time we in Japan sleep, and for them it is morning or afternoon. How can an event in Japan be accessed by an IP address of an American or European Internet provider? It is an organization called Niantic, Inc. that should be able to detect the IP address and round them up, but they leave it alone.
Wayfarer accounts can be created with any number of multi-accounts and location disguises. This is because the lock on the entrance is broken. Do not touch game accounts unless you have a good reason to do so. You will lose the Wayfinders who are sincere in keeping their promises to you and are really having fun, and you will be left with only fools who abuse the game. Please reconsider.
Create a topic in Location Edit Appeals, enter the location I gave above and the location where the object is actually located. Include photos that confirm it.
I see in aerial view this object in 46.062583, 11.250340. Thats more than 80 meters.
Isn't what you're describing the purpose of the appeal function?
Things that are obviously eligible should smoothly go through. The onus is on the nominator to make it as clear as possible. Sure there are some bad actors who will disproportionately reject things but their Wayfarer rating would suffer. Whether or not that is a good enough deterrent is a whole other thing.
It's been a few days since the announcement, and the news has many casual wayfarers shaking in their boots. I've already seen many--who must've not have known that even before this announcement, game accounts could be suspended from Wayfarer abuse--saying they are going to stop reviewing and submitting. For example, in a local Pokemon Go discord (which is also part of the "Niantic Community Ambassador" program for Pogo), a user has warned others not to submit any wayspots and is spreading misinformation. The admin/owner of the server put a reaction on the post but didn't attempt to correct the misinformation or call out the charged language for the benefit of that community. (And it's not my responsibility to do the emotional labor of correcting the misinformation that even the admin abides.)
I'm not sure what to make of so many users pulling back from the Wayfarer system, so I'm mainly sharing the observation, as no doubt others have observed the same in their local communities. If it results in less coal being submitted because of the "worth a try" mentality, then I'm okay with that at least.
I've had a friend from a local group message me a link to a news story which was based on a reddit post.
I had to try and explain maybe they did something to deserve it or maybe they didn't or maybe they were part of the Netherlands abuse or maybe they were innocently caught up in the Netherlands abuse.
Maybe you should review or maybe you shouldn't etc etc
I've had others ask me questions along the same line. Having to say I honestly don't know doesn't really fill them with confidence.
These are day 1 players who have added a few things here and there, have somewhere between 100 - 1,000 reviews.
I've found the large majority of local players would laugh at the thought of adding a bin, Sainsbury's etc.
They might attempt to add a coffee shop, an EIIR box but I would say that's perfectly reasonable when you look at the way Niantic have structured their information and what they have allowed onto the map and allowed to remain on the map.
The percentage who willfully add coal to try and get M0aR stops is very low in my experience.
Completely agree with you that this is gonna lead to less coal submissions. Seems like a good thing. Even with the first consequence being a warning, a lot of players are still acting like they weren't expecting their consequences. Maybe on the front end of things the Wayfarer training could be revamped to help inform players that submitting blatantly awful nominations could lead to these consequences - no one should be surprised with a suspension.
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.
I'm not sure even that is fair. It is possible for a correct rejection to be fairly overturned upon appeal. Maybe street view has been updated or the submitter included important supporting information in the appeal statement. Furthermore, the criteria evolve and things that were explicitly not qualified are later allowed (e.g. trail markers without trail names or things in residential areas of military bases :) ).
There is way too much gray in Wayfarer and Niantic's own reviewers are too flawed for hard punishments, in my view.
Comments
Taking action against bots is appreciated but without detailed explanation you’re just scaring people off.
What makes it enough to get suspended? Are those warning emails really educating? Don’t just tell them they are doing wrong and not tell what they’re doing wrong. As being one of those wayfinders who gat a warning email for reviewing incorrectly, I am really worried that you wouldn’t get a chance to correct what you’re doing and get banned eventually because the email doesn’t say anything specific.
What if someone had a slight misunderstanding in the criteria and submitted a few bad quality nominations without knowing? What if someone wasn’t up to date with AMA? What if a criterion in your language has different meaning from the original one? (“A great place to be social with others” is still something like “a place where you can interact with others” in my language, and that’s a big difference when reviewing and submitting.) What if someone reports you for reviewing badly even though you were trying your best? What add-ons are OK to use and what are bad?
I can come up with more and more questions but instead I feel like I would just stop reviewing/submitting until I’m sure I won’t get my PoGo account suspended. In fact I’m already reviewing/submitting less and less after last Global Challenge when I didn’t receive the right tier reward and got demotivated. Why should I risk my Lv50 account for just a little satisfaction of helping Niantic and other users?
We need punishment for bad reviewers as well.
Personally I stopped submitting anything due to that, most of my submission are valid and in the acceptance criteria.
They even have a good description and publicly visible on Street View but I have to send them 2/3 times on average due to ridiculous rejection reasons.
Until then personally I gave up on some submission due to the time it takes to send them, no reason to do that when reviewers can reject for stupid reasons.
Want an example?
Inside a park, permanent and publicly accessible and with a historical meaning behind it.
Rejected 6 time for many reasons (private property, not visually unique, not historic or cultural, mismatched location and many others), personally I gave up.
We need punishment for bad reviewing as well.
Before you start going off about how" bad reviewers need to be punished", you must first need to realize that particular rejection reason is not one that reviewers can choose from. It is often attributed to when a nomination is a duplicate, but not enough reviewers choose that reason to form the majority.
This is precisely why I think all these recent calls to "punish reviewers" because certain nominators don't like the results they got need to be nipped in the but. @NianticAaron can we get an amendment to the Community Guidelines to prohibit calls for bans or punishment of reviewers because it creates a rather hostile atmosphere and is almost always baseless?
It doesn't help but someone has had it accepted.
Wish that was the case, but I'm the only one that submit things around my area, that one I'm still trying to get it approved. I submitted it in March for the first time.
That's my point.
Is this it?
Yes it is, I gave up submitting it around June.
I was about to resubmit it a few days ago but I had no time to do it, may I ask you which app is that?
Would be useful as it's currently not in Ingress or any other game.
It'd be really useful to prevent submitting duplicates.
And I'm glad that I'm not the only one submitting things 😄
That one seems close to the another nearby wayspot, if it is within 20 meters you can't see it in Ingress. Pokemon Go allows to see all the existing wayspots during the nomination process.
I used the Wayfarer app.
I'm not sure if it's still available though as it was meant for developers. There is the ability to submit, make edits in it etc but those features don't function correctly and it adds them to the map without adding them to any game so they will never appear so it's not worth doing and it causes kittens and fairies to die if you do.
It's possible it has been there for years without you realising.
It's a shame you wasted all that time and effort for something you would never have known existed :/
Yes and it has been placed in the wrong position as well...probably that's the reason why I couldn't see it (unless it's a recent approved one).
I submit Wayspots only through my Ingress account, I don't like using PoGo due to the fact that I'm used to take photo and upload everything when I'm home.
I know I can upload it later in PoGo but I tend to use Ingress because of habit...my bad.
Wayfarer is damned if they do and damned if they don't. And they have to start somewhere.
I think this is first and foremost aimed at those people creating havoc with the higher than normal submissions - in particular of bad POIs/Objects
Then there is the other issues being spoken about here - 1) Generally poor nominations -- 2) Poor reviewing.
Which Niantic are slowly addressing by cleaning up the criteria more how to nominate when you submit. But to be frank. Will never be enough. Unless it is sustained with onboarding training and ongoing retraining, much clearer language (let alone format of the criteria and how images/words used), removal of rewards around the nominations/review process, clean up of the DB of bad accepted nominations IE because people see accepted shyte - they nominate/accept shyte - it is called human behaviour and marketers love it.
With limited resources they had to start somewhere. I applaud that.
As for scaring people off. Well I would ask. Who? Will the vast majority of nominators ever ever see let alone take on board this abuse message. No. And hey, if you do nothing wrong, then what is there to worry about.
Nah, probably it's a recent approval.
There was a medieval festival in that area about a month ago, probably someone attended it and submitted it.
The scuplture is there since the beginning of this year, it was inaugurated in January this year.
But in the wrong position, it's completely off 😅
You can request it be moved over in location edit appeals.
provide some evidence of correct location and state that it is a Lightship only wayspot.
Thanks, I figured it out it could've been that.
I managed to download it from the Play Store and make it to work.
Take that Wayspot as an example: it's completely off from the real position.
So...what should I do to correct the location since it's not in any game?
Not in PoGo or Ingress and the correct location should be more that 20m away from the current location.
I have at least one more Wayspot in that situation (this one completely off as well, but since I can't ask for a location change in ANY game it's stucked in a limbo rn)
By a long way :)
Same one, looks like some bad reviewers has wrong side because this is coffee shop, but why this is a fake nominatons?
We need improvement test to get busted out bad reviwers.
So does this mean they will starting sorting out Zaragoza, Dubai just to name a few? That would be a funny thing to witness.
They already did against Zaragoza, once. And that cluster in Vietnam. And soon with Gdańsk.
I have reconsidered my thoughts, and although I once stated that I generally agreed with the proposal, I am changing my opinion. I disagree with these sanctions as they are pointless. As I mentioned before, truly abusive Wayfinders create accounts that can victimize Wayfarers. They are not afraid of any of your sanctions. Only Wayfinder who faithfully abides by the niantic rules and uses one account with care will be dissuaded by the sanction.
This is a criticism of you, but it is a fact, so please bear with me and listen to it.
You have come to the Expo Park in Suita, where I live. I welcomed you very much. But you must have seen a number of trainers there who put three or four smart phones on the drawing board and swiped them cruelly. Did you pay attention to them? You must have missed most of them. You are the ones who have been watching and overlooking the multi-accounting, even though you know it is against the rules.
My first real Pokémon GO event was in Okinawa. I had a great time. But when I woke up a little at night in my hotel, there were sparks and dust in the Pokemon gyms around me. I thought why a gym battle at this time of night, but it soon made sense. I realized it was because there were undetectable location spoofers, attacking the gyms in Okinawa with location spoofers from overseas.That there is a time difference between when we in Japan sleep and when it is morning or afternoon, so they are enjoying the gym battles.I thought they were enjoying the gym battles because of the time difference from when we in Japan sleep, which is in the morning or afternoon.It should be easy to detect such location disguises. They are enjoying the gym battles because there is a time difference from the time we in Japan sleep, and for them it is morning or afternoon. How can an event in Japan be accessed by an IP address of an American or European Internet provider? It is an organization called Niantic, Inc. that should be able to detect the IP address and round them up, but they leave it alone.
Wayfarer accounts can be created with any number of multi-accounts and location disguises. This is because the lock on the entrance is broken. Do not touch game accounts unless you have a good reason to do so. You will lose the Wayfinders who are sincere in keeping their promises to you and are really having fun, and you will be left with only fools who abuse the game. Please reconsider.
Did they? I mean, did they even make a dent, because from what I know and seen in the forums it's the same sh*tshow as it used to be.
this is duplicate. 46.062898, 11.250708. sorry.
Create a topic in Location Edit Appeals, enter the location I gave above and the location where the object is actually located. Include photos that confirm it.
I see in aerial view this object in 46.062583, 11.250340. Thats more than 80 meters.
Isn't what you're describing the purpose of the appeal function?
Things that are obviously eligible should smoothly go through. The onus is on the nominator to make it as clear as possible. Sure there are some bad actors who will disproportionately reject things but their Wayfarer rating would suffer. Whether or not that is a good enough deterrent is a whole other thing.
It's been a few days since the announcement, and the news has many casual wayfarers shaking in their boots. I've already seen many--who must've not have known that even before this announcement, game accounts could be suspended from Wayfarer abuse--saying they are going to stop reviewing and submitting. For example, in a local Pokemon Go discord (which is also part of the "Niantic Community Ambassador" program for Pogo), a user has warned others not to submit any wayspots and is spreading misinformation. The admin/owner of the server put a reaction on the post but didn't attempt to correct the misinformation or call out the charged language for the benefit of that community. (And it's not my responsibility to do the emotional labor of correcting the misinformation that even the admin abides.)
I'm not sure what to make of so many users pulling back from the Wayfarer system, so I'm mainly sharing the observation, as no doubt others have observed the same in their local communities. If it results in less coal being submitted because of the "worth a try" mentality, then I'm okay with that at least.
I've had a friend from a local group message me a link to a news story which was based on a reddit post.
I had to try and explain maybe they did something to deserve it or maybe they didn't or maybe they were part of the Netherlands abuse or maybe they were innocently caught up in the Netherlands abuse.
Maybe you should review or maybe you shouldn't etc etc
I've had others ask me questions along the same line. Having to say I honestly don't know doesn't really fill them with confidence.
These are day 1 players who have added a few things here and there, have somewhere between 100 - 1,000 reviews.
I've found the large majority of local players would laugh at the thought of adding a bin, Sainsbury's etc.
They might attempt to add a coffee shop, an EIIR box but I would say that's perfectly reasonable when you look at the way Niantic have structured their information and what they have allowed onto the map and allowed to remain on the map.
The percentage who willfully add coal to try and get M0aR stops is very low in my experience.
Completely agree with you that this is gonna lead to less coal submissions. Seems like a good thing. Even with the first consequence being a warning, a lot of players are still acting like they weren't expecting their consequences. Maybe on the front end of things the Wayfarer training could be revamped to help inform players that submitting blatantly awful nominations could lead to these consequences - no one should be surprised with a suspension.
Assuming it all runs smoothly...
Less reviews but less submissions I guess.
That would mean more time for Niantic to clean up the map?
I have 7 memorial benches, 3 Wayspots on private property, 4 incorrectly placed and 1 on a school when they are ready.
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.
I'm not sure even that is fair. It is possible for a correct rejection to be fairly overturned upon appeal. Maybe street view has been updated or the submitter included important supporting information in the appeal statement. Furthermore, the criteria evolve and things that were explicitly not qualified are later allowed (e.g. trail markers without trail names or things in residential areas of military bases :) ).
There is way too much gray in Wayfarer and Niantic's own reviewers are too flawed for hard punishments, in my view.