Wayfarer only ban
Mazur994-PGO
Posts: 173 ✭✭✭
Today about a hour after I get answer for my ">10m edit" that i submitted through New chat option i refresh wayfarer page. After sign in with Facebook I have message about ban, when i try to use Google I can't pick account and "Something terrible has happened" message shows up.
There's no email about ban and no ban in games. So for what reasony wayfarer account was banned?
Comments
It's not a ban, just an error. It should clear eventually.
Maybe it is an error but my wayfarer account is blocked for almost a month.
I tried to contact niantic support and nothing happened. Niantic support on Twitter told me to use on game help or send ticket from helpshift page and answer was (twice):
I think Tthey just checked my Pokemon GO account and ignore the part about wayfarer.
Hello, I received a ban after appealing a pokestop. They still don't want to return my account and they also deleted all the pokestops I've made over the years.
You can try appealing the removal of the pokestops in the Invalid Wayspot Appeals section of the forum, if you can provide evidence that the points of interest you've originally nominated still exist and your submission pins were accurately placed.
As it turned out, it is a 30-day ban for submitting nominations that do not meet the criteria.
And no i didn't get any email notification about the ban.
This nomination was a repeatedly rejected local comic book store, which is "A great place to be social with others" according to the Niantic's eligibility criteria. I was rejected many times because many evaluators do not really have a clue about the eligibility or acceptance criteria.
I was also informed that my appointments have been checked and that the account blockage is right ... I am sure that nothing has been checked, otherwise I would not have received such a message.
Woah! Details!
Well, what's the difference between submitting a nomination that doesn't meet criteria... and submitting a nomination that doesn't meet criteria and will result in being suspended? I swear to God, there are so many nominations that I am reviewing that should all get a 30-day suspension.
So let me get this straight. You submitted a +10m location edit for an existing wayspot to the Niantic Wayfarer Help support chat and their response was to suspend you for 30 days? It's difficult to believe if you have good evidence about it, if they needed more evidence then they would have just asked for photographic evidence or something.
But it sounds like the local comic book/game store just moved premises but that location edit was accepted? Soo confused.
For me at least, there is a world of difference between nominations which "do not meet criteria" (or that do meet criteria and local reviewers are not following the critera) and nominations which are designed to be dedeptive or otherwise abusive. Some people simply get unlucky with who reviews their nomination. Are we criminalising the nominators now simply because they might have received a bad batch of reviewers?
Countless times on this very forum I have seen users say things to the effect of: "you just got unlucky with the reviewers, re-submit".
Instead banning users for submitting non-abusive nominations which do not meet criteria, Niantic should instead invite people to get educated on the criteria. If people are simply noy informed of the criteria, I don't see why the first thing to do should be to ban them. If - after acknowledging they have been educated - they are still making crummy nominations, we can look at penalties then. But not before people have at least had a chance to get educated with the criteria.
@NianticGiffard is it possible to have that bookstore nomination being appealed here, since OP's account got banned because of the reviewers?
It's only the Wayfarer account that got suspended, not the actual game account, so not really an issue.
If, as the OP said, he had submitted the same nomination 17 times (notwithstanding it was finally accepted after this many attempts / "brute forced" through ), perhaps Niantic considered it a case of "spamming the nomination queue" and the suspension was for that.
The thing is that GAMING/COMIC STORES are great POI according to niantic, so my nomination meet the acceptance criteria, but still there is a lot of people who have no idea that such thing exist and gives 1* to the nomination...
As for the main photo of some of the nominations, I had the owner's consent to use the store's logo.
So was I banned because of the stupidity of the reviewers?
As for editing, the first time I only provided the geographic coordinates of the existing POI and the coordinates of the new store location. The second time, when reporting the edition, I provided a link to the POI on the Intel map, and the link to the store marker on the Google map. I only have a screenshot of the answer after the second editing attempt, but as I wrote above, the difference when reporting was that the first time I gave the geographical coordinates, and the second time the links to the maps (to the same coordinates).
You can't use a third-party image (such as the store logo) as your wayspot image, regardless of whether or not you have permission. You have to use a photo that you took yourself. I think there's a good chance that you submitting the nomination with that image several times is at least part of the reason for the ban.
That list are just examples of what may meet that eligibility criteria. It doesn't mean everything on the list is automatically acceptable. Especially if you provide no further information that backs up the assertion that it is a local gathering place.
Does that mean you would reject a library q park or a post office if the submitter didn't say they were great gathering places to socialise? If not, then why does a comic/gaming store need to meet a different level?
Might be regional difference but most of the comic book stores I've been to have been just that. Stores that sell comics. No community aspect, not gathering places.
e-Legion is also a community, before covid the owner organized many meetings, MTG tournaments, learning to play board games or painting models and much more. So it's a great place to meet friends or meet new ones.
Because many comic/gaming stores aren't places to gather. They are retail outlets and nothing more. It being a place to gather is not something I'm going to presume simply because someone nominated it.
The nominations are so frequent - it looks like you nominated another whenever you got a slot, without waiting for results on the prior. Where I live, you would have had 16 nominations of the same thing outstanding at the same time. That would be spamming.
Maybe it is regional. But in my area, if they aren't one of the chain ones (a1, games workshop or warhammer, whaTever thay one was called or forbidden planet) then the gaming and comic stores tend to host gaming nights and have regular customers, so they would be community and social places. Even the chain games workshop/warhammer have games nights too
Most post offices arwnt places to gather either, they are places to drop off or pick up letter/parcels. Libraries mught to an extent, but they are more for quiet reading, not for socialising. So again I ask, would you reject these 2 if someone didn't say they are for socialising? Maybe you seriously need to look at your way of reviewing, you always want to find reasons to reject (remember the post of rejecting cause children were in the supporting photo) rather than reviewing fairly
I reported each subsequent nomination immediately after receiving the rejection e-mail. I have never made the same nomination several times at the same time.
You are comparing apples to coconuts there and repeatedly bringing up a completely unrelated topic that has nothing to do with the current topic in order to discredit and **** me needs to stop. Otherwise, I will start reporting such posts as harassment and personal attacks.
Just remember, Niantic have built a fair amount of "wiggle room" / reviewer flexibility into the criteria. If you read the criteria you will see that, although plenty of places or objects are listed as "eligible", the inclusion on the list does not automatically guarentee that the nomination should be accepted.
What makes a place or object eligible to be a Wayspot?
A note on eligibility: if a Wayspot nomination meets one of the below criteria, that's great! But remember that eligibility alone isn't sufficient to turn a nomination into an accepted Wayspot. Carefully consider the eligibility criteria, along with the acceptance criteria, rejection criteria, and content guidelines, when evaluating nominations.
There's the wiggle room, in that comment. Post Offices, I'm not going to argue, mainly because they are well established and accepted Waypoints and if I keep rejecting them my ratings are going to suffer because for the majority of the community they are an automatic acceptance. For "Gaming Stores", it depends where on the spectrum from "Generic business" to "Community Hotspot" they fit, and most of the time they are at the bottom of the spectrum.
Wayfarer's biggest problem (apart from the fake nominations) is the lack of knowledge of most reviewers and their laziness. Reviewers often do not check nominations, they just reject them as soon as they appear on screen. This can be seen from the reasons for rejection, which are often unfounded and randomly selected.
They are all on the same list as places to gather or be social, like, literally the list has been posted n this same thread. And it is relevant when you constantly look fo reason to reject, so it's not harrassemtb to tell you to have a look at how you review, if you see it as harassment, then that's on you, not me
Not entirely. You as the submitter did reuse the same photo over and over. Maybe the reviewers who rejected this at your first attempt were tired to see your nomination.
You still didn't show its description or supporting information yet, so we didn't know if you're improving your nomination at each attempt or you just copy-and-paste the same information instead.
Oops, wrong comment to be replied to.
I do not have access to the account at the moment, so I cannot show the support photos, but apart from the support photos, there was also a spherical photo on google maps:
How could I improve my submissions? Since I gave the reviewers all the information about the store's activities and about the community it created. Unfortunately, the reviewers who rejected my nomination had no idea of the criteria as the main reason for rejection was "private property". At one point, I think on 10 ~ 13 nominations, I even used a screenshot of the eligibility criteria as a support photo. In the main and the additional description, I drew attention to the events conducted by the owner of the store.
@NianticGiffard
Since gaming/comic stores meet the eligibility criteria. So for what nominations that did not meet the criteria that Oren wrote about in his emails, I was banned?
In addition, I would like to point out that I have not received a single e-mail with a notification that my account has been blocked.
I know that the ban has already expired, but could you please help me and indicate which of my nominations did not meet the criteria and for which I got a wayfarer ban? I would like to emphasize once again that I did not receive any e-mail with the message about the blocking of the account at that time. @NianticAtlas @NianticVK @NianticGiffard @NianticAaron