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Nominations: 60 seconds or bust

0X00FF00-ING0X00FF00-ING Posts: 769 ✭✭✭✭✭

I’ve had this feeling for a while, but only today managed to confirm it. In short, when making a nomination, the “timeout” that cancels the upload is not based on the lack of data being transferred, but is incorrectly based on an arbitrary clock timer running out.

I have done all my submissions via Ingress, so cannot confirm how my experience matches up with Pogo nominations. Usually I am out in the field, using my phone’s cellular LTE data plan, and the majority of my submissions work fine.

But as much of my surrounding rural and semi-rural terrain can be rocky and hilly, sometimes I don’t have the best cellular reception, and my cellular “bars” are low. But that’s also where the various trailheads happen to be (and their markers).

There’s always enough data bandwidth to play, the games themselves never lag — but that data speed will just be “slow”. But when trying to nominate something new I’ve just discovered? That slower speed just causes timeout after timeout after timeout. Until I finally find a spot where I get more “bars”, the upload finally manages to finish, and I can continue playing my game(s).

But today, I accidentally did something new, and unexpected. My home internet is DSL-based, which basically means that my upload speed is usually slower than my download speed, and those speeds are often negatively impacted by the weather. Today’s weather caused some relatively slower upload speeds.

Today I remotely-from-home resubmitted some things that had been previously rejected unfairly, such as playgrounds. Every single time I tried to do the upload from here at home, it timed out at one minute (sixty seconds, give or take a second). Consistently and repeatedly.

If it had ANYTHING to do with actual network transfers timing out, I would have expected there to be SOME variance in the timing — because then the time would depend on a myriad of other factors, including what else was happening (or not happening), such as concurrently streaming videos.

But nope, it was consistent across some 5-6 different attempts. I started an upload, counted the ticks on my wristwatch, and at the one minute mark the uploads fail. After going through that loop enough times to be sure, eventually I switched my phone to cellular-only mode, and the uploads then completed without a hitch.

Now, in the past, I’ve personally called for one specific improvement in the submission process, ever since Ingress switched from the [REDACTED] procedure that “simply” left everything running in the background (with the minor advantage that we could keep playing immediately, and the bigger disadvantage that restarting the app could lead to the loss of the submission):

We need a progress bar that shows how far along a nomination’s upload has progressed

Also, to add to this, we need for the “timeout” to be based instead on the lack of DATA TRANSFER, and not on a simple clock.

Thank you for your attention.

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Comments

  • bilde2910bilde2910 Posts: 79 ✭✭✭

    This is true, and there's an even more problematic issue at play here: if your nomination times out on the 60 second mark, the photos will keep uploading in the background until all the data has been transferred, despite the nomination already having timed out. This means that if you immediately try to resubmit, that new attempt now has to compete for bandwidth with the old nomination that is still being uploaded to some void on Niantic's servers. You can verify this by turning on a bandwidth meter (if that's a feature of your phone) or download an app that shows that data, and observing how data is still being used after a timed out upload.

  • 0X00FF00-ING0X00FF00-ING Posts: 769 ✭✭✭✭✭

    More remote nominations today timed out after 60 seconds. Any with a quicker upload worked fine

  • 0X00FF00-ING0X00FF00-ING Posts: 769 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited October 2021

    Bump.

    Today’s remote nomination from home over wifi took about 90 seconds and change, and didn’t fail at the 60-second mark this time. Previously it would fail over and over at precisely 60 seconds in.

    Has there been backend work on the server for this? Or some change in the recent version of the Scanner client?


    Bump 2: a second submission failed at the 60-second mark. Makes me kind of wonder if there are multiple servers each with slightly-differently tinkered settings.

    Post edited by 0X00FF00-ING on
  • Xaerfaal-PGOXaerfaal-PGO Posts: 86 ✭✭✭
    edited October 2021

    This explains a far amount of frustration I've had with submitting things through Pokemon Go and part of the reason why I stuck to leveling up my Ingress account to level 10 for those coveted remote submissions.

    Thank goodness they finally put remote submission capability into Go. This issue is pretty much mitigated because of that.

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