i havent seen the website, but i think it meant that the culprit would get $ from a customer, and gets the account data to farm the upgrade for that account. it wouldnt have worked otherwise.
Alot of these schemes are relying on the stupid customer to hand out his data.
also another "Business Idea" ? to get photos and a location from someone, or just even a location if someone wanted a homestop/gym.
There are two pricing options. One is they use the customer's account. The other is they use the bot accounts. In the case of using the bot accounts, the customer sends pictures, descriptions, and locations of the stops they want the bots to add.
Hi all! Just to reiterate from NianticDanbocat's comments we keep working in the background towards the issue/matter although there might be a lack of conversation from our end. Some problems take longer than others to look into and this is an example of one of those.
For this matter, we have collaborated with two teams and have been assessing all the reviewers. If we come across a region where there are a high number of rejections or reports giving a gist of abuse involved we are tagging along our abuse team to look into them. Whereas for cases, where a user has reported their rejections individually that doesn't belong to massive rejections in that area, our Wayfarer team is looking into those. It would be great if folks in such cases can appeal their rejections.
That being said, I would also request you to report your rejections to the Wayfarer support chat for 1:1 feedback and a quick conversation.
So we can appeal them without using the original appel option, just because of the situation being abused? Only appealing 1 nomination per 30 days, will never get close to make up to what the abusers mass reject.
I refer to your last sentence, in addition, or generally with the help of a ticket at the Wayfarer bot to draw attention to such rejections.
I know that I am not the only Wayfinder who struggles with such problems. I know there are many others.
Nevertheless, a great many explorers and evaluators have also had their hard-earned upgrades downright burned by this wave of abuse.
It's good to read that your team is investigating in the background. I can also imagine that it is not easy to find the "perpetrators" and punish them accordingly.
Back to the topic:
If you already suggest to open an additional ticket, because the rejection reasons are just absurd, then it would be nice not to get a standard answer like the one below:
Hello Explorer,
Thank you for submitting a Wayspot nomination!
We are unable to provide specific details for each nomination that is ineligible in this thread. If you feel that your rejected nomination should have been approved, you can appeal it. However, at this time, we have temporarily disabled the Appeals feature until further notice while we work on fixing the bug. This means that you won’t be able to make any more appeals until it’s fixed. But we will review the already submitted appeals.
Once the Appeals feature is re-enabled, please follow the below steps to appeal:
3. Click the nomination you'd like to submit an appeal for
4. Click the Appeal button and enter a note on why this nomination should be accepted.
5. Click Submit nomination.
Note you can submit only one appeal per 30 days. If you have already submitted an appeal, you may see an error when you try to appeal another nomination. Alternatively, we suggest re-submitting the Wayspot candidate after improving the title, description, and/or photo. Also, feel free to join our Niantic Wayfarer community and discuss your nomination with other players: https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/
Please do let us know if you have any other questions.
and i dont even know how i should tell the person that is reading the chat that i am abused by the guy in southern germany. what do they need? Loc? Wayspot name?
I want to give you a small hint. It seems like the abusers are using "light rejections". They don't one-star the first question 'Should this be a Wayspot?', but they seem to use the sub-criteria (Title and Description, Historic or Cultural Significance, Visually Unique, Safe Access and Location Accuracy) to reject the nominations. They intentionally avoid the normal rejection (one star for 'Should this be a Wayspot') so they won't get caught by the abuse detection system (cooldowns, captcha etcetera). I know one of your employees once said these have never been valid rejection reasons in the past. For some reason they still seem to trigger a rejection and this goes somewhat unnoticed.
I hope you can detect this form in the abuse in the future. A restructure of the reviewing process is also planned, so I'm excited to see that!
I got the same standard answer from the support chat, although I explained my case and why I think it is a bot-induced rejection, also attaching the statement from @NianticGiffard.
As with others in this thread, I have opened a ticket, but it really doesn't feel like "1:1 feedback and a quick conversation", but rather a copy-pasted answer. Any chance the support team can be informed of your comment?
@NianticGiffard I saw the abuse team did something. They removed the bus stop at the meadow. Why not all the other abused junk wayspots?
Is the first sentence of the rejection criteria (the one, that mentions generic mass produced aspects) totally unimportant?
Are all the discussions about bus and tram stops as wayspots now redundant? Result was, that bus tram and subway stops in urban area are ineligible - only the big transit hubs are valid wayspots in urban area. Lots of people (including me) think, that the standards for "transit hubs" should be lower in rural area ..... but nethertheless Kempten is a 60k inhabitants town - so no village bonus, and ordinary bus stops are ineligible in towns of that size.
So I'd like to remind the abuse team, that we saw the most likely highest degree of wayfarer abuse ever in this case.
Bot reviewing software, that made 5 months of work of volunteer wayfinders from Germany, Austria and Switzerland worthless. Someone made a lot of money with this stuff. And a well known faker town abused this to replace former fakes with new real existing junk, that doesnt fulfill any criteria.
Imho this degree of abuse here is far beyond reviewer cabals like St.Cloud or all the nasty arrangements from the Spanish towns like Sevilla, Zaragoza or Las Palmas ....
So back to the two questions from above: I'm aware, that the removal criteria have big discrepancies compared to the approval/rejection criteria, so that lots of junk and fakes are grandfathered by the staff. But in this case it's not a simple request to remove wayspots like in other cases. Here the topic is to undo all the damage of the last 5 months - and wayspots, that only could be created by bot review, don't have any excuse to be somehow grandfathered.
Regarding the 5 months of Wayfarer work rendered worthless: In the last five months I've collected quite a list of rejections with strange reasons. So far 3 were approved on appeal - in my case this goes a long way towards re-establishing trust. However, in light of the situation, one appeal per month is inappropriate. I would hope something like this could be considered:
1) One appeal per week for nomination in Germany, Austria, Switzerland
2) Automatic appeal for nominations with upgrade that were rejected
I'll start reviewing and submitting again when all my latest rejections have gone through appeal. Even if it takes a year.
I did open a ticket in the support chat, but after a week still haven't received an answer.
Comments
@patsufredo-PGO Spread that out across 50 bots and see how the math works out.
@NianticGiffard @NianticVK @NianticTintino any chances you would look at this? This is frustrating already.
If I didn't misunderstand anything, 50 bots would be helpful only for the case of the new Wayspots using external accounts.
But the 50 upgrades only make sense for the own account (whoever gives out his account data...), so only one bot.
[Or 50, which log in alternately!? It would be absurd, if this would avoid the captchas...]
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
i havent seen the website, but i think it meant that the culprit would get $ from a customer, and gets the account data to farm the upgrade for that account. it wouldnt have worked otherwise.
Alot of these schemes are relying on the stupid customer to hand out his data.
also another "Business Idea" ? to get photos and a location from someone, or just even a location if someone wanted a homestop/gym.
There are two pricing options. One is they use the customer's account. The other is they use the bot accounts. In the case of using the bot accounts, the customer sends pictures, descriptions, and locations of the stops they want the bots to add.
Why do you think that it takes 6 hours?
If you follow the link you'll find this:
50 Upgrades
We will use your Wayfarer account to farm 10 upgrades for YOU.
Requires: Login (Google/Facebook)
Duration 2-3 months
Next question, how close is too close for spots?
Example: A smaller playground with two or three benches, a sandpit and a swing cramped together. About 15m across everything. Too close?
If I have a Playground where everything is spaced nicely, would you suggest to submit the items individually or as one big playground submission?
@pikatzu1983-PGO A playground is one wayspot, not one for each item.
Thank you and sorry for interrupting, I meant to post in another thread. 😅
Hi all! Just to reiterate from NianticDanbocat's comments we keep working in the background towards the issue/matter although there might be a lack of conversation from our end. Some problems take longer than others to look into and this is an example of one of those.
For this matter, we have collaborated with two teams and have been assessing all the reviewers. If we come across a region where there are a high number of rejections or reports giving a gist of abuse involved we are tagging along our abuse team to look into them. Whereas for cases, where a user has reported their rejections individually that doesn't belong to massive rejections in that area, our Wayfarer team is looking into those. It would be great if folks in such cases can appeal their rejections.
That being said, I would also request you to report your rejections to the Wayfarer support chat for 1:1 feedback and a quick conversation.
So we can appeal them without using the original appel option, just because of the situation being abused? Only appealing 1 nomination per 30 days, will never get close to make up to what the abusers mass reject.
Die Stadt Königswinter und Umgebung ist auch von Bots betroffen.
Hier eine seltsame Nachricht von den Täter:
https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/29698/doxing-fakers-invalid-wayspot-section-needs-to-be-anonymous
@NianticGiffard
I refer to your last sentence, in addition, or generally with the help of a ticket at the Wayfarer bot to draw attention to such rejections.
I know that I am not the only Wayfinder who struggles with such problems. I know there are many others.
Nevertheless, a great many explorers and evaluators have also had their hard-earned upgrades downright burned by this wave of abuse.
It's good to read that your team is investigating in the background. I can also imagine that it is not easy to find the "perpetrators" and punish them accordingly.
Back to the topic:
If you already suggest to open an additional ticket, because the rejection reasons are just absurd, then it would be nice not to get a standard answer like the one below:
Hello Explorer,
Thank you for submitting a Wayspot nomination!
We are unable to provide specific details for each nomination that is ineligible in this thread. If you feel that your rejected nomination should have been approved, you can appeal it. However, at this time, we have temporarily disabled the Appeals feature until further notice while we work on fixing the bug. This means that you won’t be able to make any more appeals until it’s fixed. But we will review the already submitted appeals.
Once the Appeals feature is re-enabled, please follow the below steps to appeal:
1. Log in to Wayfarer
2. Go to your Nomination Management page: https://wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/new/nominations
3. Click the nomination you'd like to submit an appeal for
4. Click the Appeal button and enter a note on why this nomination should be accepted.
5. Click Submit nomination.
Note you can submit only one appeal per 30 days. If you have already submitted an appeal, you may see an error when you try to appeal another nomination. Alternatively, we suggest re-submitting the Wayspot candidate after improving the title, description, and/or photo. Also, feel free to join our Niantic Wayfarer community and discuss your nomination with other players: https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/
Please do let us know if you have any other questions.
Regards,
Thanks for the input! Where is the Wayfarer support chat? Is that just the regular Appeals forum?
You can access it by visiting the Wayfarer-Help page! Scroll down a little bit and a chat symbol should pop up! 🙂
I don't think many people know about this feature yet!
and i dont even know how i should tell the person that is reading the chat that i am abused by the guy in southern germany. what do they need? Loc? Wayspot name?
I want to give you a small hint. It seems like the abusers are using "light rejections". They don't one-star the first question 'Should this be a Wayspot?', but they seem to use the sub-criteria (Title and Description, Historic or Cultural Significance, Visually Unique, Safe Access and Location Accuracy) to reject the nominations. They intentionally avoid the normal rejection (one star for 'Should this be a Wayspot') so they won't get caught by the abuse detection system (cooldowns, captcha etcetera). I know one of your employees once said these have never been valid rejection reasons in the past. For some reason they still seem to trigger a rejection and this goes somewhat unnoticed.
I hope you can detect this form in the abuse in the future. A restructure of the reviewing process is also planned, so I'm excited to see that!
I got the same standard answer from the support chat, although I explained my case and why I think it is a bot-induced rejection, also attaching the statement from @NianticGiffard.
Pretty frustrating ...
Same for me, I guess Giffards plans have not reached the help team yet
As with others in this thread, I have opened a ticket, but it really doesn't feel like "1:1 feedback and a quick conversation", but rather a copy-pasted answer. Any chance the support team can be informed of your comment?
@NianticGiffard
The abused junk wayspots are still out there, and they are still in the spotlight of the people in Southern Germany and Austria....
For example this one right now:
Title: wahre Bank
Location: https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=47.718698,10.319916&z=17&pll=47.718698,10.319916
Further there are lots of hiking trail markers submitted. Lots of them are okay, since they are directional signs and have text on them. Those are okay imho. Example: https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=47.741174,10.297053&z=17&pll=47.741174,10.297053
Those, that are not enough:
Also havent had success with the Wayfarer chat. What to do now?
So I've never seen it that bold.
The additional information says "historical snowman that might be accepted by the bots."
Next Kempten junk wayspot .... very symbolic for the situation there:
Title: Müllhalde (=junk yard)
Location: https://intel.ingress.com/intel?ll=47.719002,10.319605&z=17&pll=47.719002,10.319605
Sign translated: carry your trash home, dont leave it here
In fairness, that may be someone who has gotten frustrated by the bots and is trolling Niantic.
@NianticGiffard I saw the abuse team did something. They removed the bus stop at the meadow. Why not all the other abused junk wayspots?
So I'd like to remind the abuse team, that we saw the most likely highest degree of wayfarer abuse ever in this case.
Bot reviewing software, that made 5 months of work of volunteer wayfinders from Germany, Austria and Switzerland worthless. Someone made a lot of money with this stuff. And a well known faker town abused this to replace former fakes with new real existing junk, that doesnt fulfill any criteria.
Imho this degree of abuse here is far beyond reviewer cabals like St.Cloud or all the nasty arrangements from the Spanish towns like Sevilla, Zaragoza or Las Palmas ....
So back to the two questions from above: I'm aware, that the removal criteria have big discrepancies compared to the approval/rejection criteria, so that lots of junk and fakes are grandfathered by the staff. But in this case it's not a simple request to remove wayspots like in other cases. Here the topic is to undo all the damage of the last 5 months - and wayspots, that only could be created by bot review, don't have any excuse to be somehow grandfathered.
Well i really hope that this gets fixed soon, because reviewing and nominating really is not motivational right now, due this abuse...
Regarding the 5 months of Wayfarer work rendered worthless: In the last five months I've collected quite a list of rejections with strange reasons. So far 3 were approved on appeal - in my case this goes a long way towards re-establishing trust. However, in light of the situation, one appeal per month is inappropriate. I would hope something like this could be considered:
1) One appeal per week for nomination in Germany, Austria, Switzerland
2) Automatic appeal for nominations with upgrade that were rejected
I'll start reviewing and submitting again when all my latest rejections have gone through appeal. Even if it takes a year.
I did open a ticket in the support chat, but after a week still haven't received an answer.
Afaik there is no report about successful actions after support chat reports. I wait with that until I hear something positive.
And there are still persons at Kempten, that want their Accs suspended: