Geoblocking Military Bases
Daemare-PGO
Posts: 95 ✭✭✭
So recently I've been getting several submissions from Army and Air Force bases. Of course I reject for emergency services reason, but I have a feeling some people not recognize when something is on a military base (i.e. the city of Fort Worth, TX, versus seeing a Fort Belvoir, VA or Patrick AFB, FL). I'm not here to argue for PoI on military bases to be acceptable because I know why Niantic isn't supposed to allow it. I know Niantic has geoblocked Pokemon spawns on military bases, so I wonder why they haven't just done that for submissions as well using the same information.
Comments
I'm surprised they haven't donethis with schools of all places. OSM has a tag for school areas.
It's nuts and really frustrating. We have had ~50 POIs appear on the military bases locally and they keep on coming. Report them and NIA say they should stay on the game board. OWM tags and geoblocking has been mentioned so many times, yet they allow them into the queue and careless reviewers just wave them through, even when they are in the more secure areas of the bases 🤷♂️🤦♂️
I agree, even though OSM tags can be very unreliable, especially in countries where English is not a widely used language. I've seen many locations tagged as "school" which are not schools in the K12 sense: colleges, dormitories, driving schools, skiing schools, language schools etc.
But if this OSM-based geoblock would be combined with much more frequent OSM-updates, it could be an ideal solution.
I get so many from North Carolina bases and it is frequently hard to tell whether it is on base or not - especially with all the approved wayspots already existing. Absolutely, if they have the ability to geoblock spawns, they should geoblock nominations!
I am reaching the point of giving up on "correctly" rejecting base stuff because it is almost always getting approved anyway. All the other threads have been locked once they get into the same old arguments. I think Niantic is trying to have it both ways here (officially say that they should be rejected, but pretend not to notice that they are constantly getting approved).
If there's a lawsuit regarding this, it will be totally obvious that despite saying "don't accept" they haven't take any action at all to prevent nominating wayspots inside military bases, nor their approvals and that they have always rejected any request to remove them after being approved.
That's just a pose and it doesn't hold any water given their proven lack of action.
@cyndiepooh-ING If you suspect a nomination is inside a guarded fort or base: try to pull your map streetview guy over to it. See what roads light up as possible for street view. If the nomination is in a huge area without streetview - it's behind the guarded barricade.