With the new policy, can somebody from Niantic tell us how many accounts are suspended right now? In the NL-Topic there was a number of 33 or so, but I think this is only in comparison to the reports in NL.
Interesting to see review rings mentioned. I recall you telling me again and again that you couldn't control what people do outside of Wayfarer, when I reported someone who always brags about their impressive stats - after they mentioned how they had a "local community" where everyone agreed what to vote on everything...
I have a question: Do you know that when you take photos on an Android phone they are automatically uploaded to the cloud and Google then uses them as references on marked sites, and they appear in their references of sites, local businesses, etc. So they can appear as if they are owned by Google / Business Owner. The problem is that sometimes we have proposals that have been waiting for a long time to be voted on and when they finally pass, the evaluators investigate the origin and find the photos uploaded by Google. It is not possible to mark our photos in any visible way, watermarks, or anything similar are not allowed. I just saw a case like this and it turns out that even though the user presented evidence of his authorship of the photo and that he had made the proposal BEFORE Google referenced his photos, it was denied, even after the appeal (Very bad way, by the way) the question is: If it happens to us and with the new more robust policies regarding false proposals, what will happen if we are in that case?
The description will be quite important. If it is the same level as the current education / warn emails, it will be useless.
A message of "You violated our policies" and won't be able to mention which policies was violated, with (at least a couple of) examples which one it affects (in case of nominations and / or reviews) and unwilling to clarify it further, it just about: "we think you did something wrong, this is your penalty."
Some do by default, although it can be turned off. I can't ee why someone can't use their photos how they want to. It's not difficult to check the date a photo was uploaded to google so it shouldn't cause issues.
This is something that has to be turned on by the user. It isn't a setting that is on by default, though Google Photo is rather aggressive at prompting users to turn it on.
Is the ban level related to how many we've had in Pokemon Go so far? Let's assume that I had a 7-day ban in Pokemon Go and a 30-day ban for Wayfarer in July 2022 imposed on the platform itself. So what will be the next ban for the offense on Wayfarer? @NianticTintino-ING
1. It really should have been a warning, then first ban etc.
2. You've nit told anyone it was coming, you just did it
3. You've nit explained in the ban emails what the ban was for, just "bad submissions" or low quality or whatever the wording g was
4. The ban system started retrospectively banning before it was announced, if a law was passed that singing Christmas songs before december 1st was going to be illegal, but you announce it and bring it into place after you start arresting people, they have every right to be annoyed
So mainly the issue is, as always with niantic, really poor communication
Thank you for your help. I haven’t been successful yet, but I’ll keep trying. There has to be an actual human being who provides something resembling customer service somewhere at Niantic. I’ve also today filed a complaint with my state’s department of consumer affairs for Wayfarer’s failure to respond to my requests to terminate my account and provide me with my data in accordance with it’s published policies. I’m going to seek to have its license to do business in my state suspended for failing to respond.
Have you simply not had an acknowledgement response to the email? What date was it sent?
Have you double checked all emails that you have used for any Niantic Game and junk mail? I ask because there have been bugs where old emails have somehow been used for messages out from Niantic. This is because the request for data will be dealt with "centrally" and not by the wayfarer team.
I have run a local Pokemon Go group since 2016. We are not a big group. We're in the suburbs. We don't have thousands of pokestops locally...but a handful of us are responsible for the vast majority of Wayspots in our area (hundreds each). Our area is largely saturated at this point, because it's 95% residential. We all know how cells work, but if we see something interesting, we submit anyway, knowing it will get into Ingress or one of the other games, even if it won't get into Pokémon Go. We enjoy what we do.
But let me tell you...and this is not because of fear mongering from social media.... It's just common sense. We have all decided to stop submitting and reviewing entirely. We've worked really hard to make the game better for everyone, in all the games. Like everyone else, we've had plenty of rejections that we submitted again to get accepted. Lots of appeals too. No one is fudging their nominations.
But even if there is a one in a thousand chance of one of us getting banned, and all of us are level 50s who have worked really hard to get where we are in the game, then it's just not worth it.
Perhaps it would be better to request one thing at a time. First, request the personal data, and then, when you get the data, request your account to be deleted. Just in case, what if requests are processed by separate departments, and the "delete" request is processed faster..
I see that we have responded to some of your messages. Few are still open and are in queue to be addressed. It may take us some time to address all requests we get at times due to high inflow. Please be patient and you'll definitely receive a response.
My nomination always going to fake nomination , private property,etc .that is all happened for some player ,and my request going to others countries like Bangladesh , and those people hate Indian temple ,and they are rejected all of my criteria, if u should notice my comment , pls don't allowed one country nomination to another country
A single removal of a stop can already be reason to send such emails. Or if you review in good faith, like a couple of active wayfarers (like in https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/40142/education-emails) you can get those as well. Don't expect any further clarification, why and what you did wrong, or a couple of examples or types of violation. Even if you ask it.
According to him, his play area is reasonable filled with stops and fun to play. Not worth the risk to review further and spend time on it to help other parts of the country by review and add further waypoints. So I can perfectly understand his response.
Can confirm that even ONE removed stop can be reason for a 30-day ban. A player in my local community apparently faked a little free library at his house for a home Pokestop, and that's all he ever did on Wayfarer. That stop got removed recently and he got a 30-day ban for it.
Are you sure about that? Because a 30-day ban is for repeated violations of the ToS. If they got that ban, then more than one Wayspot was involved or they had a previous Wayfarer ban on their account.
How would one know for sure? :) If you ask for clarification, you'll only receive a message like: "We’ve reviewed your account and confirmed you have been violating our policies. As a result, we have notified you about it after our investigation. We will not be able to provide any specific information related to this warning. Please review the Candidate Criteria before submitting any contributions/new submissions."
So it would be a big guess. Perhaps some older nominations. Or he reviewed a number of items incorrectly. Or he overlooked one removed, when he had to go through manually each accepted nomination, and verify it existence on the map.
Nonetheless, having that stop removed makes sense; that would if it's a clear case of abuse / fake nomination.
"In the body of the email, it will also include a description of the cause for the suspension or warning."
What time does this "will" refer to?
If you're saying that this has already been implemented and emails include a decription of the alleged wrongdoing, this is a blatant lie. We know what these emails look like. Social media exists. The emails notifying users that they have been banned currently include zero useful information about their actual wrongdoings, making it impossible for them to actually learn from their mistakes.
If you are only planning to implement this at a later date, why didn't you wait until everything's ready to go? The current emails inevitably lead to panic and misinformation spreading across the userbase, because all anyone can do is guess. Actual abusers can pose as martyrs because you fail to include any specific information in emails you send out, so they can simply say "All I did was nominate this plaque". People who got caught up in it ("false positives", as you refer to them elsewhere) are entirely left in the dark.
How do you expect people to form informed opinions and stop panicking if you insist on not giving out any specific information and threatening people based on vaguely described transgressions? How can you expect people to trust in your decision-making process when you have never, never ever disclosed any information whatsoever about said process and your entire communication strategy can be boiled down to repeatedly saying "trust me, bro"?
Please, hire a communications expert. Or a second-year communications student, or just a random person who has ever held a front-desk job.
A voting ring exists to bring fake wayspots into the Database, so people gather to share their fake nominations with other reviewers in the same area and they agree to vote them 5 Stars even if they clearly dont meet the criteria or are blatant fakes.
What you describe is a wayfarer chatgroup where people discuss nominations together and share their opinions to getter a better review quality and better stats for them. That's not a violation of anything, its just working together.
The point of a review ring beeing detected is not them chatting with each other, its them voting their respective fake nominations 5 Stars to bring them into the Database. To prevent to get falsely caught in a review ring, people should definitely resist the urge to upvote nominations of people they know or in the Area where they live because for Niantic there is no way to tell those apart, and furthermore its also a violation of the rules anyways, so you couldn't even complain if Niantic accuses you to be part of a voter ring.
" Not worth the risk" when there is literally no risk at all.
I imagine they never drive because they risk having an accident. Never go swiming because they risk drowning. Never play pokemon go because they may be banned for whatever reason independant of wayfarer.
What I see here is just players scared because they know they bent the rules.
Comments
You see?
With the new policy, can somebody from Niantic tell us how many accounts are suspended right now? In the NL-Topic there was a number of 33 or so, but I think this is only in comparison to the reports in NL.
Interesting to see review rings mentioned. I recall you telling me again and again that you couldn't control what people do outside of Wayfarer, when I reported someone who always brags about their impressive stats - after they mentioned how they had a "local community" where everyone agreed what to vote on everything...
Interesting indeed.
I have a question: Do you know that when you take photos on an Android phone they are automatically uploaded to the cloud and Google then uses them as references on marked sites, and they appear in their references of sites, local businesses, etc. So they can appear as if they are owned by Google / Business Owner. The problem is that sometimes we have proposals that have been waiting for a long time to be voted on and when they finally pass, the evaluators investigate the origin and find the photos uploaded by Google. It is not possible to mark our photos in any visible way, watermarks, or anything similar are not allowed. I just saw a case like this and it turns out that even though the user presented evidence of his authorship of the photo and that he had made the proposal BEFORE Google referenced his photos, it was denied, even after the appeal (Very bad way, by the way) the question is: If it happens to us and with the new more robust policies regarding false proposals, what will happen if we are in that case?
The description will be quite important. If it is the same level as the current education / warn emails, it will be useless.
A message of "You violated our policies" and won't be able to mention which policies was violated, with (at least a couple of) examples which one it affects (in case of nominations and / or reviews) and unwilling to clarify it further, it just about: "we think you did something wrong, this is your penalty."
Mine has never auto-upload photos to cloud?
Some do by default, although it can be turned off. I can't ee why someone can't use their photos how they want to. It's not difficult to check the date a photo was uploaded to google so it shouldn't cause issues.
This is something that has to be turned on by the user. It isn't a setting that is on by default, though Google Photo is rather aggressive at prompting users to turn it on.
Is the ban level related to how many we've had in Pokemon Go so far? Let's assume that I had a 7-day ban in Pokemon Go and a 30-day ban for Wayfarer in July 2022 imposed on the platform itself. So what will be the next ban for the offense on Wayfarer? @NianticTintino-ING
I think the biggest issues are
1. It really should have been a warning, then first ban etc.
2. You've nit told anyone it was coming, you just did it
3. You've nit explained in the ban emails what the ban was for, just "bad submissions" or low quality or whatever the wording g was
4. The ban system started retrospectively banning before it was announced, if a law was passed that singing Christmas songs before december 1st was going to be illegal, but you announce it and bring it into place after you start arresting people, they have every right to be annoyed
So mainly the issue is, as always with niantic, really poor communication
Thank you for your help. I haven’t been successful yet, but I’ll keep trying. There has to be an actual human being who provides something resembling customer service somewhere at Niantic. I’ve also today filed a complaint with my state’s department of consumer affairs for Wayfarer’s failure to respond to my requests to terminate my account and provide me with my data in accordance with it’s published policies. I’m going to seek to have its license to do business in my state suspended for failing to respond.
@Csmccalliv-PGO
Have you simply not had an acknowledgement response to the email? What date was it sent?
Have you double checked all emails that you have used for any Niantic Game and junk mail? I ask because there have been bugs where old emails have somehow been used for messages out from Niantic. This is because the request for data will be dealt with "centrally" and not by the wayfarer team.
I have run a local Pokemon Go group since 2016. We are not a big group. We're in the suburbs. We don't have thousands of pokestops locally...but a handful of us are responsible for the vast majority of Wayspots in our area (hundreds each). Our area is largely saturated at this point, because it's 95% residential. We all know how cells work, but if we see something interesting, we submit anyway, knowing it will get into Ingress or one of the other games, even if it won't get into Pokémon Go. We enjoy what we do.
But let me tell you...and this is not because of fear mongering from social media.... It's just common sense. We have all decided to stop submitting and reviewing entirely. We've worked really hard to make the game better for everyone, in all the games. Like everyone else, we've had plenty of rejections that we submitted again to get accepted. Lots of appeals too. No one is fudging their nominations.
But even if there is a one in a thousand chance of one of us getting banned, and all of us are level 50s who have worked really hard to get where we are in the game, then it's just not worth it.
Perhaps it would be better to request one thing at a time. First, request the personal data, and then, when you get the data, request your account to be deleted. Just in case, what if requests are processed by separate departments, and the "delete" request is processed faster..
I see that we have responded to some of your messages. Few are still open and are in queue to be addressed. It may take us some time to address all requests we get at times due to high inflow. Please be patient and you'll definitely receive a response.
Thanks,
Dear admin,
My nomination always going to fake nomination , private property,etc .that is all happened for some player ,and my request going to others countries like Bangladesh , and those people hate Indian temple ,and they are rejected all of my criteria, if u should notice my comment , pls don't allowed one country nomination to another country
No reason to be afraid if you don't do fake nominations or have a circle to accepte things that don't meet the criteria.
You really have a weird logique.
Can you share some of your nominations in a separate thread?
A single removal of a stop can already be reason to send such emails. Or if you review in good faith, like a couple of active wayfarers (like in https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/40142/education-emails) you can get those as well. Don't expect any further clarification, why and what you did wrong, or a couple of examples or types of violation. Even if you ask it.
According to him, his play area is reasonable filled with stops and fun to play. Not worth the risk to review further and spend time on it to help other parts of the country by review and add further waypoints. So I can perfectly understand his response.
Can confirm that even ONE removed stop can be reason for a 30-day ban. A player in my local community apparently faked a little free library at his house for a home Pokestop, and that's all he ever did on Wayfarer. That stop got removed recently and he got a 30-day ban for it.
Are you sure about that? Because a 30-day ban is for repeated violations of the ToS. If they got that ban, then more than one Wayspot was involved or they had a previous Wayfarer ban on their account.
How would one know for sure? :) If you ask for clarification, you'll only receive a message like: "We’ve reviewed your account and confirmed you have been violating our policies. As a result, we have notified you about it after our investigation. We will not be able to provide any specific information related to this warning. Please review the Candidate Criteria before submitting any contributions/new submissions."
So it would be a big guess. Perhaps some older nominations. Or he reviewed a number of items incorrectly. Or he overlooked one removed, when he had to go through manually each accepted nomination, and verify it existence on the map.
Nonetheless, having that stop removed makes sense; that would if it's a clear case of abuse / fake nomination.
That's his fault. However removed Pokestop doesn't always result a ban for the submitter.
Ignore this
"In the body of the email, it will also include a description of the cause for the suspension or warning."
What time does this "will" refer to?
If you're saying that this has already been implemented and emails include a decription of the alleged wrongdoing, this is a blatant lie. We know what these emails look like. Social media exists. The emails notifying users that they have been banned currently include zero useful information about their actual wrongdoings, making it impossible for them to actually learn from their mistakes.
If you are only planning to implement this at a later date, why didn't you wait until everything's ready to go? The current emails inevitably lead to panic and misinformation spreading across the userbase, because all anyone can do is guess. Actual abusers can pose as martyrs because you fail to include any specific information in emails you send out, so they can simply say "All I did was nominate this plaque". People who got caught up in it ("false positives", as you refer to them elsewhere) are entirely left in the dark.
How do you expect people to form informed opinions and stop panicking if you insist on not giving out any specific information and threatening people based on vaguely described transgressions? How can you expect people to trust in your decision-making process when you have never, never ever disclosed any information whatsoever about said process and your entire communication strategy can be boiled down to repeatedly saying "trust me, bro"?
Please, hire a communications expert. Or a second-year communications student, or just a random person who has ever held a front-desk job.
That's what he told everyone in the group chat. I don't know if he had any prior punishments.
A voting ring exists to bring fake wayspots into the Database, so people gather to share their fake nominations with other reviewers in the same area and they agree to vote them 5 Stars even if they clearly dont meet the criteria or are blatant fakes.
What you describe is a wayfarer chatgroup where people discuss nominations together and share their opinions to getter a better review quality and better stats for them. That's not a violation of anything, its just working together.
The point of a review ring beeing detected is not them chatting with each other, its them voting their respective fake nominations 5 Stars to bring them into the Database. To prevent to get falsely caught in a review ring, people should definitely resist the urge to upvote nominations of people they know or in the Area where they live because for Niantic there is no way to tell those apart, and furthermore its also a violation of the rules anyways, so you couldn't even complain if Niantic accuses you to be part of a voter ring.
" Not worth the risk" when there is literally no risk at all.
I imagine they never drive because they risk having an accident. Never go swiming because they risk drowning. Never play pokemon go because they may be banned for whatever reason independant of wayfarer.
What I see here is just players scared because they know they bent the rules.
I wouldn't count that as confirmation.