How can I report a group ?
AvengerLK-ING
Posts: 2 ✭✭
How can I report a group of people in a city? They do many unfair activities: edit location of a pagoda to their home or edit location of many pokestop to 1 point ( the distance is very far). Submit a pokestop with harassment words. I reject many edit with wrong location. However, theyhave over than 30 accounts lv40 in pogo and they can do anything they want.
Do I report this location to Niantic to review? Many wrong location pokestop here but I can't reject them.
I also report some pokestop but no one review my report seriously.
My English is not good. Thank you so much!
Post edited by NianticGray on
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As an outsider, I honestly expected that Niantic would be able to detect and prevent this kind of abuse.
It shouldn't require that a person finds out and report it here or in other forums, is it really that hard to detect?
"ok, this is a location edit and now it's closer than 20 meters to another existing wayspot, and also now there are 3, 4, 5 pokestops in the same level 17 cell, maybe someone should manually review this to check that nothing strange is going on take a look at the accounts involved to request the location edits as well as approve them."
What's Level 17 cell?
The ones between level 16 and level 18.
You'd better search for the answer in Google because as soon as anything related to that topic is mentioned, there's people reporting the thread.
@AvengerLK-ING If you post more details about the location (ie. the gps coordinates, such as you can find via google maps) then very often @NianticGiffard can get the wayfarer team to investigate.
Niantic does indeed consider the editing of wayspots to positions away from their actual locations to be "abuse", and they normally take that pretty seriously.
It looks like this thread has come back from limbo lol @AlanAlice-ING
Hello @AvengerLK-ING! As mentioned by @0X00FF00-ING we require location details to have our team look into your report.
Why did this user @AlanAlice-ING banned, though?
It's just another account from that guy that had about 10 banned already.
What an annoying guy...
Back to the topic, judging from the network provider (and OP's story), I can tell that the cluster should be located somewhere in Vietnam (possibly Hanoi City), but I can't find its exact location. Maybe anyone else can filling in?
@NianticGiffard I'm an operations engineer for a large company that you know well-- my job is to keep a key part of a large website running well. Being on call and responding to immediate problems is only a small part of my job though-- the more important role is focusing on operational excellence, and solving recurring problems systemically rather than continuing to address them ad hoc. (I like to say that we want to fail in new and interesting ways rather than the old boring ones.)
I would like to respectfully suggest that Niantic should own the problem of bogus clusters internally, not continue to rely on user reports. Please note that I'm not criticizing you specifically... I'm pointing out a way that Niantic can do better as a company. (I recently had this conversation with a friend who works at Niantic... you guys desperately need a corporate Operational Excellence Czar to drive a culture of fixing the root cause of problems.)
I'm going to pretend that I encountered a problem in my job: "We have a recurring problem of users abusing the system to create artificial clusters in Pokemon Go." Here's how I would solve it:
The bottom line is this: Niantic has failed to properly own the problem of Wayfarer abuse. When I look at the map above I see a simple database scan that will find it and others like it. By now Niantic should understand that there's a systemic abuse problem and they should have built tools to manage it internally rather than relying on end users to spot problems and report them.
Let me ask you guys a question. Do you honestly think that Niantic doesn't have the capability to do this? Why, do you suppose, that they don't do it already? Really think about it.
I gotta say @NianticGiffard, I'm in agreement with @Hosette-ING , and that doesn't happen very often.
There is an extremely easy way to tackle this problem, and it is periodic, automatic rerolls of POIs within Level 17 S2 Cells for Pokemon Go. If a level L17 cell has 2 POI in it within PoGo at sync time, nuke one. Its that easy. The system already knows what to do if it detects an empty PoGo cell when there is a portal available to fill it - it adds a new stop (or gym). The system can clearly count how many POIs there are in a cell. time to put that infrastructure to work.
It is my understanding that the now-cancelled Catan game even had a feature where every "season" the POI within the gameboard would rerandomize. This type of feature would majorly disincentivize this type of abuse, and would also likely help weed out some of the bad portals as they entered a rotation within PoGo. It would also give PoGo submitters a chance to have their nominations appear in-game in locations that have had a longstanding ingress portal preventing it from showing up.
You also know you've really messed up when you have people from St. Cloud defending abuse 👇️
You mentioned on my latest St. Cloud thread that you are working with the abuse team to find a better solution to stopping their abuse. Dealing with Pokestop stacking is part of it. They are clearly going to keep doing it until there isn't a point to doing it any longer.
Avoiding these clusters (and other things such as duplicated photos being used to create fake wayspots) is something very trivial and it's hard to understand why it's not implemented.
These edits are certainly disruptive to the "integrity" of the Wayfarer database and removing incentive to making such edits should be a priority of the Wayfarer abuse team. I do, however, suspect that the actions you are suggesting would have to happen on the app developer side rather than the Wayfarer side.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't encourage the Wayfarer team to investigate ways to curb such abuse, just that the platforms have made it clear they don't intend to take such actions themselves.
@29andCounting-PGO asks:
Let me ask you guys a question. Do you honestly think that Niantic doesn't have the capability to do this? Why, do you suppose, that they don't do it already?
I think I have an answer to that. Yes, they have the technical capability. They don't have the corporate culture for it.
I've been in the software industry for around three and a half decades. During that time I've worked at a couple of very large, well-known tech companies, several startups, and companies that went from startup to not-startup. Startups, by necessity, have a drive to get things done quickly. They grow and change rapidly. Quality and operational excellence are not key drivers at startups, and that's OK-- they're lean and scrappy, they take risks, and they do a "just good enough" job.
Some startups do well enough that they grow into bigger companies. When that happens they need to develop a more mature corporate culture. Doing so takes time, but it also takes leadership...developing mature processes has to be a priority and those mindsets need to get baked into the culture. It's sort of like a child growing into an adult-- there's always an awkward teenager phase, but ideally the teenager gets good guidance and wisdom and learns how to be a grownup.
I think Niantic is at the point of learning how to be an adult company. My post above was basically my leaning over to them and saying, "Hey, umm, you're not 17 anymore. It's time to learn how to clean up your own messes."
I liked your puppy peeing on the floor analogy better.
In my city's downtown, there's a couple of spots where there are "too many" pokestops in a given L17 cell. Neither was done abusively or maliciously, each was just done via the normal "edit" functionality -- because the business or the monument itself had moved.
If those edits had been made with the current mechanics, then the moved wayspot would have simply vanished. Both spots are remarkably trivial to find just by looking at the map versus number-of-pokepoints. But given how many S2 cells there are in the world, it's likely prudent to only examine those cells in which location-edits had been made (assuming that historical data is still available).
But given that one of those wayspots had taken me (ick) 7 attempts, due to lazy reviewing, I know which one I'd be rooting for in that cell lol
I can only assuming it is Niantic being Niantic.
It is so obvious that if you have a large database that is being messed with, you need to have a programme checking it for anomalies.
Niantic are not short of a bob or two.
I personally hate the idea of an unstable gameboard.