Since Niantic, Ingres, and also PokemonGo recently explicitly call for submitting new stops via Wayfarer to discover many new things, I share the demand of many again publicly on the subject of MeetYouOutThere.
We call for standardization of the appearance rules of POIs, especially in PGo and no cell system, or at least a drastic reduction in the size of the stop cells! We want to have ALL accepted POIs in PGo, like Ingress, bc all are based on the same database! For more MeetYouOutThere!
Last year, we added over 3.8 million new Wayspots. That’s almost 4 million new Gyms, Pokéstops, and Portals that our players can interact within the real world. Explorers, how many more Wayspots do you think we can add in 2022? (Niantic, 01/29/22)- there is sooo much more possible in PGo without or with a reduction of the cell system when you compare PGo and Ingress!
Because we could have so many more stops to go out and discover new places, that’s the general slogan, right? (#MeetYouOutThere)
Especially in Pokémon, we have been calling for the reduction of the stop cells to a minimum or rather the removal of the stop cells for years. The system is simply outdated and we want a revolution here too! Because this system is the main problem because the cells are just too large and many things can’t be submitted to Pokémon or even appear. But these have their raison to be there too. There is a reason that they have been accepted and are present in the database! They also contribute to discovering the world and going out. There are so many beautiful places in all the cities that can be rediscovered. I also don’t know all the places in my city and have been able to explore many only through new stops.
Wayfarer should also comment on this because it’s getting more and more frustrating and it’s a pity that groups of players in individual games are being cheated on this point and only a small fraction of them can benefit from all the work, because
•How many stops are there but only in Ingress?
•People do the work, submit it and rate it for upgrades, but only get the answer that they’ve been declined, or you get the promise and nothing appears even though it’s been accepted!
•Players submit for all games but benefit from only a fraction and players from other games submit things that others cannot benefit from either!
I don't think there have ever been so many wrongly rejected as they are now. Many simply declined for "other reasons", "cultural reasons" or "temporary or seasonal establishment", while complying with the rules and seeing that they are permanent.
Stops that are intentionally submitted to an occupied cell instead of their actual location, which can also often be seen on Google, are currently being discovered. Instead, they are often pushed forward 15 meters so that they CANNOT appear in Pokemon.
Many changes have to be submitted and Wayspot requests have to be made in such a way that a slightly changed location has to be specified for them to appear in the games at all. If both games have the same waypoints, editing requests are greatly reduced, especially when moving.
Most reviews on Wayfarer are no longer taken critically, but rather arbitrarily. Many rates it, but not to rate suggestions according to their quality, but to get matches for their upgrades. It’s sad, but the quickest way to get an upgrade is with rejections, without even looking at the image, the text, and the additional information or the location.
In addition, many places and countries invite more people to play and have more stops than others. This is also used by spoofers. Why does Niantic support this so openly? These places are hopelessly crowded and local players are deprived of any fun. Also, the places are sometimes more or less equipped with stops due to old regulations. This systematically favors or disadvantages places. It doesn’t have to be like this. Pokémon has been connecting everyone for years. Regardless of age, culture, or place of origin. This could be further promoted.
And don´t be silly. Niantic will probably process or even pass on any data. They were also able to benefit from a change.
Why don’t we approach this in general, but only about Wayfarer challenges for individual countries? A change would benefit everyone, but mostly the small towns and countries, which in turn would lead to more fun and more players. It’s sad that in small places only one or maybe two submissions made it, otherwise the cells are all over the place. This means that you can’t and don’t want to play there either. Why not make the game attractive there and win more players and earn more money?
Do you even notice that you are currently just breaking the game, especially for players in the countryside or small towns?
You can't always assume that everyone lives in big cities with lots of stops where it's really worth playing. Not everyone lives in San Francisco, NY or Tokyo, or Japan, i.e. where you have your offices. No, most of them don't live and play there and you're currently making this game almost impossible with stop cells or the latest changes to the smoke.
We understand that you want to make us go out more and do something. But not like this! Even with more stops, the game can be well balanced, even without big timeouts. Not every stop has to be a spawning point and it’s not about getting thousands more arenas. Depending on the stops, new arenas should appear in the arena cells.
Cross-game changes have already been made to the games. Our friends have already been connected. Completion of playing cards could lead to more satisfaction, acceptance, and fairness.
Listen to the players. Especially after the removal of many stops (Niantic Support 11. 10. 21) in Pokémon and the subsequent outcry from players, the desire for more stops is well known. We do not want to hear it may be that we will use this proposal in the future. -No, use them now, for everyone!
Please rethink this and develop general rules that apply to all games so that we can all benefit from it! There is so much more to discover!
Otherwise, at least a test phase starts. You can change it again apparently quickly, as you have noticed when deleting many stops.
Instead of really giving incentives, players are currently being punished. The smoke was systematically rendered useless, making catching more difficult. Then why don't you give new incentives with new places to go out and discover places with other people?
Even if it's a Pokemon problem, the consequences and the resulting consequences can be seen and felt very strongly here in Wayfarer. I also oblige you to initiate a rethink and to speak to the Pokemon team.
First of all, the area covered by the bonus location could be set to 8+1 L6 S2 cells. The strange "Home" location could be made to another bonus location. The location switches could be made more often, maybe 2 or four times a year.
Those are the three things most easily done.
After that, maybe teams of revs, especially targeting low density countries/areas could be set up. I'm a member of a group already doing that in Africa and the Middle east, and we've had some success. But the system is hampering us greatly.
This is why we need to drag swing sets, sandboxes next to the nature trails / middle of the forest so we can make more playground stops x) . I think those are overly presented as of late.
Jokes aside, and knowing that this place is "not just for pokemon go players", but that's how I got here in the first place, so I'll give my point of view on this. Story time:
I started playing on 2016 when the game was officially released during summer time. I was able download the first version of the game on my crappy Ipad and off I went to catch all rattatas and zubats I could find. I was disapointed when I couldn't find any pokemons "off the grid", as in any area that wasn't paved sidewalk / road marked on the map. Lack of stops also made the game more of an test of patience but if you have to think something positive about it, it did promote to move around more. I think during summer times, I spent about 3-4 hours outside / daily.
I've been living most of my life in a small town / city areas with population of 6000-11 000 people, which technically isn't that big but not that small either. There are multiple small towns like this driving distance away from eachother but all of these shared the same concern: some places had less than 10 pokestops around 50 km radius, while others had around 20 in same radius. Sometimes 2 stops had anywhere between 7 to 14 kilometres distance between eachother, despite being on the same "area". Compared to the friend of mine who lives in Finlands capital (Helsinki) he had the same amount of stops just around 2 city streets away, less than 2 km walk distance. He could spin 5 of them from balcony.
It took me over 3 years of playing around these small town areas to level up enough to just make it to the point where we can contribute more stops and make them more bearable to play. It's been fun process of updating all the area maps to Openstreetmaps to the point I was at one point, one of the top contributors in my country and I was approached by the guy who makes living by doing these map updates.
I can't take all the credit for updating the map and making these games more fun to play for others because it has been culmination of persistence over long period of time and handful of dedicated people. And the process still goes to this date.
But I can't help but feel we are missing out on so much, especially during community days and what not gatherings that cities have and anything remote / small town olayers / rural players. I can't help but feel scuffed.
Technically rhat was England you described, not UK 😜. Seeing as Glasgow and Edinburgh would be cities but in terms of size and population aren't aren't a percentage of London, its still different in the UK. Even what you describe as a hamlet I describe as a village.
Theres also housing estates that are remote and don't have anything in them, ive driven through a couple of them and they didn't even have a post box, just a shop
It's hard to see how to do anything for rural areas, simple because, rural areas would want to submit things like lakes, lochs, rivers, forest areas. In Scotland at keast the proper forests do have signage for entrances to walking paths so thats not end of the world, but bodies of water will never pass as they would fall under natural features. The only way rural could really, truly, be helped is if natural feature was removed as a rejection criteria and certain acceptable examples made for natural features, I again mention lochs or lakes, but could also be water falls along walking paths, beauty spots etc., none of these would have signs, but they would make for amazing waypoints.
If you mean for how to get things submitted and reviewed faster, yeah, nothing can be done for submitting, unless someone happens to drive through and atops, or plays in the area. I've done some remote subs, but thats only if I see it in passing, I can't know what's in an area if I'm not there
Thats not true, they are going to Edinburgh this weekend d for that whole niantic community day thing this weekend, so they at least know that place exists
Naturally speaking, rural and remote communities will have far less resources than urban areas to support a nomination's review. The Street View could be from 2008, the satellite view is fuzzy and outdated, and for the most part, such nominations will be reviewed by people who don't have any plans to visit such communities or could not care any less about reviewing something that doesn't benefit them. There's also the nuances of pedestrian access which has been previously mentioned in this thread, because some people expect tarmac across the entirety of the world. I strongly support and welcome any changes to more frequently update the bonus locations.
We could take a slice out of another certain community's project browser. It's called the Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT). You could get a whole bunch of places, cities, cells or even entire countries or nations that are in dire need of reviewers based on backlog, average review time, and the current number of reviewers. Start projecting places in terms of when their backlogs might be caught up to a certain baseline from the amount of reviewers against the number of nominations coming in. Is this supposed designated bonus location for beginners, for reviewers starting out, or do they have a complexity that might be a bit more to handle for more seasoned, intermediate reviewers?
In today's case, review mileage varies. Typically speaking, a photo in New South Wales will be approved within a week or two (mostly, unless it's in a certain backlog snake that is currently in Hurstville atm). Nominations also get approved moderately quickly within a week or two as well. But for some reason, edits are a whole different story. While Sydney will also have razor fast edit timeframes to reach a decision, Canberra which is about 225km south-west on the other hand will take months or even upwards to a year to get an edit in the main city back. But even go outside to Bathurst which is 200km west of Sydney and edits there will take almost forever. This is caused by the way edits are designed within the S2 system and are allocated as such.
There are some nuances where an edit should be localised and reviewed by people with the local knowledge (such as location edits and such) but the current constricted allocation of edit reviews means that some places like rural New South Wales will never ever see an edit being resolved. The same applies to other communities with a severe lack of reviewers. Expand the cell ranges in which more trusted reviewers see a pool of edits. I'm sick of seeing "Good work!" pseudo-cooldown messages when I could be reviewing even more edits in rural places like Ivanhoe (gross) or just smashing through the never-ending photo reviews and I would like myself to see the real end, not some arbitrary system-induced one.
One thing that people keep bringing up is reducing bonus location change times, and they're absolutely correct. By editing one variable in the code they could significantly increase the amount of reviews from the most dedicated reviewers and improve the quality of life of everyone else. It's just one of those changes that makes Wayfarer less of a slog and more of a fun exploration game, and it needs help with that sometimes so that would be an easy win.
Another thing that needs to be changed is the size of the cells that get their reviews put in the back of the line. Since major cities can land anywhere in them, or be split across several, they often end up dragging down suburbs and other communities that have the misfortune of being in the same quadrilateral as them. Conversely, if the cell includes a bit of the city and then the rest is ocean, the city might not even be impacted. Just a little more precision in the borders of the areas that get slowed down would help, even if it's just cells one or two sizes smaller.
My thoughts and suggestion I can give about rural areas, submissions, improving the speed of the queue/backlog and so on.
Let people change bonus location more often, especially when people end the pile of submission to review it would be a good incentive to continue reviewing. As someone else suggested, a list of suggestions of cities or countries with huge backlog or almost none wayspot to choose from would be really appreciated.
A review of the "system that chooses the speed" of nominations is necessary. I think that using smaller cells (not L9 S2 cells or even bigger) to determine the "speed" which a submission go trough would be better. This because with the current system there are 50k+ people cities in empty cells where submissions go through in 1 week, and real rural villages with 50 people in the middle of nowhere where it takes 6+ months because is in the same cell of a big city. Anyway, the difference between rural areas and cities, in term of waiting times, is too much. There is no need to have a submission accepted in 2 days, I would say that 2-3 weeks is acceptable (just to give an example, I still think that rurals should be preferred but this could give a "sprint" to city submissions).
Advertise more in game the ability to submit new wayspots (and then to review!) with popups when the level requirement is reached, not hiding these functions (like in Pogo where it is kinda hidden). With this I would say more education to what can be a good wayspot and what not. Anyway, I think that the key to populate rural areas is to push players from cities to go explore and submit stuff because a player without portals/pokestops can't do a lot. Next point related to this.
Let people submit in areas where they have been in the past days or weeks, even if more distant than 10km or whatever. Sometimes I do a trip or vacation in far cities or villages and I don't have the time to submit stuff but I do take pictures for myself of the family. When I get home I'm too far to submit though. Yes, there is the "submit later" function but sometimes there is just no time to stop and open the game.
Make a section here on the forum where rural players can ask to nearby players to submit wayspots for them or even ask directly to Niantic. If correctly advertised in game for new players, of course with limitations like 1-2 requests per account and only in super rural areas without a single wayspot, I think could be a good idea to incentivize the games for new players.
Give players more reasons to submit and (in particular) review. Even a small amount of exp (or dust in PoGo and Xm in Ingress) could be good.
Last thing, a PoGo related problem but still a rural problem. Remote and very small villages have, at best, a church and a playground or a postal office, many times next to each other in the same S2 L17 cell. This is actually depressing for rural players and players from other cities as well who like to request new pokestops. This demoralize rural players, both rural and foreign players are less prone to submit wayspots and it high encourage abuse because most of people would choose a gym over a correctly positioned wayspot. Abuse (location edits) that sums up to the backlog.
Lets not confuse "lack of Waypoints in my village" with "lack of potential Waypoints".
Niantic games, with their reliance of real world feature, will always be "better" in urban areas, thats just the way it is. Without changing the criteria for rural communities (theres a whole can of worms you do not want to open) I'm not sure what more can be done - if there are only a limited number of things to nominate at a loction there are only a limited number of things.
Some of the suggestions above are good, such as allowing smaller bouns areas and faster and easier changing of these for reviewers, so they can "drop in" and help get those limited Waypoints that have been nominated in rural areas voted on and hopefully in game. If Niantic want to run "Wayfarer events" - ie do something with the reward being a "Wayfarer Event" logoed badge that appears in EVERY game you play then they need to look into this and be more flexible over changing bonus or "event" locations. A "Wayfarer Blitz" in game badge and / or avatar gear would be good, provided all the usual problematic questions about "reviewing quality, not just quantitiy" can be ironed out. If it is too much effort to fix the player accounts, then give us a special portal in Wayfarer that only brings up nominations for a specially selected area - there has to be a way of doing this rather than struggling to get upgrades and revised bonus locations sorted one at a time by @NianticGiffard .
How about it - something like "Wayfarer Blitz Event - Madagascar Madness" - Tiered badge - 10 "correct" reviews - Bronze, 50 "correct" - Silver, 100 "correct" - Gold. Increment the "special event badge" counter in PoGo as well as the badge. All reviwing for this to be done over a 1 week specified period.
Link the events. Another all game badge - "Wayfarer World Explorer" - participate in one Blitz, base badge WITH incremental unlimeted counter, 5 Blitzes - Silver - 25 - Gold - 50? Platinum. THe majority of player I know would rather earn a badge than buy some decoration for their stats.
someone mentioned heat maps before and it would be really useful to areas that might prove possible. There are some places that are just pretty barren. There are also some rural areas where the issue is mobile connectivity. There is a valley area near me where I have to shuffle around for a signal. For this reason I do think actually being at the location is important - no point in getting waypoint approved that no one can use. But I think having some sort of encouragement for experienced submitters going to a recognised low density area and submitting would be a positive move. They are certainly very satisfying - both in terms of exploration, research and end result. It often gives me some of my wayfarer mojo back. It needs some teasing out, and part of that might might be a lower hurdle to cross in terms of reviews required. If these new waypoints could be recognised as being like a bonus area and have a low number of these agreed to award an upgrade it could be an incentive.
I don’t want attention to solely focus on the rural areas as the part that destroys my wayfarer mojo is the lack of movement on my normal suburban submissions (2 years plus) unless I work for upgrades. So a way to earn an upgrade (bankable) I could use would be a welcome reward for the effort.
On this site, when someone new posts a rejection - often our kind experienced Explorers look at their map, and suggest other places that could make good wayspots. Churches, parks, etc. Not for a gain for themselves. To help that person. And help make Niantic games better all over the world.
How about... Lightship lists coordinates for areas without Wayspots... Trusted Explorers can sign up for a place... and they can make nominations there, even tho they're nowhere near it. (Maybe this privilege could be allowed once for every 1000 review agreements and 25 nominations accepted. Very exclusive.) These nominations would have to be without pictures, but that is acceptable on Lightship. Inexperienced gamers on the ground would have a better time understanding submitting a picture than a whole waypoint.
Also, along the "review blitz" discussion... We could have a different place as theme each week. Alaska, India, Middle East, etc. Niantic could throw the 4Square data in the review pot for the place being highlighted. Anyone who reviews, um, 100 nominations there gets a badge with a map of the place. Even if this badge is only on our Wayfarer - it could be fun to collect them. Maybe they could show in this community too. (But remember that people crave game badges most.)
@NianticTintino You don't need our help with reviewers in rural areas-- you can handle this inside Wayfarer, and do it in a systematic way that works for every single location on the globe.
How? Set a time limit for things in review, X days. I don't know what X is because I don't have access to your internal data but the precise value doesn't matter. If something has been in review for X days then automatically extend its review area and reset the timer. If it goes another X days and still hasn't reached consensus then repeat the process. Keep doing this until the candidate has had enough reviewers to reach consensus.
Here's a quick hacky illustration. I used the Solomon Islands because I know that player reviewers staged a campaign to help them process their queue, and because they're a fairly remote location. I've drawn an initial review area in the center around Honiara, the capital, and expanded the review area by two layers of cells at each increment. Even in this remote location three expansions gets a potential base of new reviewers. Four expansions includes Cairns, five gets Brisbane, and if it goes as far as eight then Sydney is in the reviewer pool.
Does this mean that rural/remote areas will be slower to be reviewed? Yes, but that's the case right now, and my proposal would be a lot faster than letting things languish in voting for months. You could also build a smart, dynamic review system so that it learns and adapts to an area's conditions-- if a particular area always requires three expansions to get consensus then you can start that area with a larger reviewer area and/or expand those areas more rapidly. Once the Solomon Islands got a critical mass of wayspots I think they built up a large enough player base that they could become self-sustaining, and thus would no longer need the larger review area... and the system could learn that too. That is an excellent outcome both for remote players and for Niantic.
What is important in this issue is to separate the two and discuss whether we are talking about low-density areas in a country that already has many wayspots, or whether the country itself is a low-density area of wayspots.
It seems to me that some people are confusing the two.
The former is a problem that can be self-resolved since there are many wayfinders.
However, the latter is not self-solving because there are few Wayfinders themselves.
In the former case, for example, Japan, where I am located, is one of the densest countries in the world with about 9% of the world's wayspots and one wayspot for every 300 square meters of dwellable area.
However, even in such a country, there are players who say that there are few Portals and Pokestops.
But when I look at the nominations they claim so, most of them have a wayspot within 300 meters.
Honestly, this just tells players to walk.
Also, nominators can apply upgrades to have their nominations reviewed by reviewers throughout Japan. So this is a problem that can be self solved by players in that country.
But if you look at the latter, for example, the African continent, there are still countries where there are only a few dozen wayspots.
Naturally, the majority of countries do not have street view in place, smartphones are expensive and have low penetration rates, and there are various barriers such as lack of high-speed, high-capacity communication environments.
There are fewer players in these countries and, of course, even fewer reviewers.
This makes it almost impossible for them to solve their own problems.
So it is these places we should be looking at.
And Niantic should also encourage them to solve the problem by improving their system.
I'm going to take a different take.... I think we need some criteria adjust for rural.
Starting with Restaurants. If there is no other restaurant within say 5 or 10 miles, it's going to be a community gathering spot. Even in the case of chain restaurants.
Secondly, sports fields and schools. If field is over 100 yards from a school building it gets used heavily by the community and things in America like Friday Night Football become huge gatherings.
Numbers might need tweaking. But more flexibility in criteria in rural submissions can help too
I'd love it if Niantic could provide some guidance on community involvement, including demonstrations or tutorials for kickstarting community projects that could lead to more IRL POI for various communities. Maybe hopeful submitters can help with Eagle Scout projects, other youth organization efforts, or get involved with local government or art clubs to enhance their real-world neighborhoods and provide interesting stuff for all (not just those focused on phone games) to enjoy.
The first problem for rural is the lack of wayspot. The consequence is it's difficult or impossible to play Niantic games in rural area, so it's impossible to be able to submit something to create a wayspot.
There is many possibilities to solve this problem:
-Give the possibility to every player without level requirement to submit at least one thing per month (and keep the level requirement to unlock one submission per day).
-find a way to encourage submitters to go into low wayspot area to submit things in theses area in priority.
The second problem is a pokemon go problem (and just a little wayfarer): it's the lack of pokemon spawn in rural area. (some place have litterally no pokémon despite having wayspots).
It's just a little connected to wayfarer because something this problem exist because the map is not correct, or because of a lack of wayspot.
The third problem is eligility. In rural area we have trail markers that are eligible but very difficult to get validated. That's a problem.
We also have many natural places... that are not eligible despite they are very good point of interest...
The solution would be to allow natural features as wayspot, and do something against bad reviewers who reject trail markers.
One issue is priorization of "Rural nominations" so people can start playing in zones with not enough wayspots around them.
So there's one person that has been able to nominate some PoI in a zone that is "empty", at the moment we know that Niantic has a system to prioritize Rural areas and most of us would agree that it needs some tweaking:
1) Reduce the cell size. There are many places that share the cell with a big city many Km. away and so they lack the priorization that they would get otherwise.
2) Increase the requirement for "number of wayspots" to be considered a high priority zone. It's not fun for a city player to see that some villages get their nominations processed in a few days and they have to wait years or upgrade all their nominations, this also has lead to abuse areas where people can nominate anything over and over again until it pass without worrying about reviewing at all or the quality of their nominations.
A proposal to address these issues would be for example to define a cell size of maybe level 10, that's small enough so one town shouldn't affect another one, and mark as "high priority ones" those that have less than 6 wayspots in that cell, and then assign to each of those cells 10 high priority slots (minus existing wayspots).
By assigning a maximum of priority slots on each cell the goal is that whenever someone submits a new nomination in one of those cells they get the high priority so it can be processed faster, but at the same time prevent abuse by people (multiple users/accounts, one user spamming their 40 nominations, ...) because each time a nomination is processed in that cell, it will use one of the priority slots, so it should be possible for any rural area to get enough wayspots, and if people have sent fake nominations that are rejected or removed from lightship, the priority slots have been used and that area can't keep on spamming bad nominations.
All the numbers that I've provided are only examples, it should be studied and analized but I think that allowing a rural area to stop being a rural area is very important so city players can feel that they are not working for free, and also if the number of rural areas decrease, their priority can increase even further and expand the review zones more easily.
A suggestion I gave ages ago is that nominations older than X days should be pushed out to reviewers a further distance away. The area could increase every X amount of days.
There would never be a shortage of reviewers then.
Obviously it's not that simple and a few extra checks need to be done.
First I think wayfarer should ask all users at sign-up or a one of at next sign-in what languages they speak/Understand and what are they happy to take submissions in languages other than these.
This is something I think needs to be done anyway. It's no good getting French submissions if you are in the south of England and dont understand French for example, unless you are willing to translate or has a browser to do it.
Back on topic, the increasing area either needs to rely on these language settings. Either give the voting to those who can/are willing in the extended area or push put to areas that speak the same language if the area is remote/borders other countries.
That means people in France on the borders of say Spain would either get Spanish/English reviewers who speak the language or reviewers in Canada who have the same language set as an example.
There are places inside the M25, 10 miles from the centre of London where reviews are stuck in the queue or voting for almost a year. One of mine in Weybridge has only just gone in to voting after being submitted in August 2021. It boggles my mind that they take so long when you would think there would be plenty of voters within range. I even have an embassy in London that has been in the queue for almost a year and another one that's only recently gone in to voting submitted at the same time. So I think there is more issues than just rural voting.
My rural issue is that some small village areas dont have pavements. Some areas the roads are used to walk on as traffic is limited and very slow. But anything along these gets rejected as no pedestrian access. There might be a post box there or an old telephone box so utility companies believe there is safe pedestrian access but no point in submitting a 150 year old post box or red telephone box (maybe converted to a community library) that's on the grass verge because reviewers will reject for no access.
Continuing with my previous post, another of the issues with rural/remote areas is the lack of enough reviewers to reach an outcome.
As many people have stated, one possibility is to expand the review radius when a nomination has been in the "Review" status for too long.
An additional option would be to offer a subset of reviewers (let's say those that are in good or great status, and a minimum of 1000 agreements), the option in their settings to declare themselves "global reviewers", those that opt-in to this status would get nominations from all over the world that have been queued or in review in a FIFO order, so those that get the message that "there's nothing more to review" and want to keep on contributing would get an infinite queue of nominations that have been waiting without the need of changing the bonus location and risking ending up in a place with very few pending nominations.
By restricting the option to those that have a minimum requirements should prevent that people that don't properly understand how Wayfarer works could get there and mess with the nominations and being opt-in prevents that people that don't feel confident about foreign location or languages would try to skip them.
We definitely need a definition of "rural". I've seen people say it's anywhere that has no other wayspot in a 1 km radius. Wow, I'd never thought of it being that small. I would have said: if you have 6 Wayspots in 10 km, you're not "rural". But maybe I'm wrong. What does Niantic think?
USE CASE: Ingress drones can only hop to portals within 1 km. So if mine got stuck, I'd go nominate something to get it through. (Often a neighborhood tennis court.) Then I'd have to decide if to (a) do ~150 reviews and prioritize this nomination above anything else I'd nominated, OR (b) accept that it would take 6 months to a year to get approved, and withdraw my drone to send it in another direction, and maybe come back when it's approved. OR (c) Learn to care a lot less.
It would be a lot more fun if my nominations came back in a few days without upgrades. I would have let my drone wait for it. (Instead, I eventually chose option c.)
The trouble with this is that places in the US are a lot more spread out than places in the UK as an example. There was a social media anecdote doing the rounds about this not too long back. So if you look at rural from a US definition using nothing but an arbitrary radius, it may be possible that pretty much nothing in the UK would reach rural status when that arbitrary radius is applied here.
Let's clarify the definition of rural and remote areas that should be at issue in this topic.
And the rural and remote areas that should be discussed in this thread are "places where high quality POIs exist but the nominations do not return results due to lack of reviewers".
This is not a thread to discuss creating WAYSPOT in "places where POIs themselves do not exist."
Let me offer one topic on this matter of local and remote areas.
There is a Twitter account called "nauru_japan".
This popular account, which is supposed to be sent out by the government tourism office of the Republic of Nauru on the Pacific Ocean (no official accreditation attached), currently has 296,000 followers.
The account was created in October 2020 and became a hot topic in Japan around January 2021.
Since it was quite a hot topic, it naturally became a hot topic among wayfinders in Japan.
At this time, there were only four wayspots in the Republic of Nauru.
Later, certain wayfinders set up bonus locations, or POIs that had been nominated but remained dormant in Nauru without being reviewed due to geographical conditions, were able to see the light of day.
As a result, there are now 41 wayspots (see Mission Authoring Tool) in a country with a population of only about 10,000 and an area of 21 square kilometers.
And there are probably many more such places on the planet.
Comments
Since Niantic, Ingres, and also PokemonGo recently explicitly call for submitting new stops via Wayfarer to discover many new things, I share the demand of many again publicly on the subject of MeetYouOutThere.
We call for standardization of the appearance rules of POIs, especially in PGo and no cell system, or at least a drastic reduction in the size of the stop cells! We want to have ALL accepted POIs in PGo, like Ingress, bc all are based on the same database! For more MeetYouOutThere!
Last year, we added over 3.8 million new Wayspots. That’s almost 4 million new Gyms, Pokéstops, and Portals that our players can interact within the real world. Explorers, how many more Wayspots do you think we can add in 2022? (Niantic, 01/29/22)- there is sooo much more possible in PGo without or with a reduction of the cell system when you compare PGo and Ingress!
Because we could have so many more stops to go out and discover new places, that’s the general slogan, right? (#MeetYouOutThere)
Especially in Pokémon, we have been calling for the reduction of the stop cells to a minimum or rather the removal of the stop cells for years. The system is simply outdated and we want a revolution here too! Because this system is the main problem because the cells are just too large and many things can’t be submitted to Pokémon or even appear. But these have their raison to be there too. There is a reason that they have been accepted and are present in the database! They also contribute to discovering the world and going out. There are so many beautiful places in all the cities that can be rediscovered. I also don’t know all the places in my city and have been able to explore many only through new stops.
Wayfarer should also comment on this because it’s getting more and more frustrating and it’s a pity that groups of players in individual games are being cheated on this point and only a small fraction of them can benefit from all the work, because
•How many stops are there but only in Ingress?
•People do the work, submit it and rate it for upgrades, but only get the answer that they’ve been declined, or you get the promise and nothing appears even though it’s been accepted!
•Players submit for all games but benefit from only a fraction and players from other games submit things that others cannot benefit from either!
I don't think there have ever been so many wrongly rejected as they are now. Many simply declined for "other reasons", "cultural reasons" or "temporary or seasonal establishment", while complying with the rules and seeing that they are permanent.
Stops that are intentionally submitted to an occupied cell instead of their actual location, which can also often be seen on Google, are currently being discovered. Instead, they are often pushed forward 15 meters so that they CANNOT appear in Pokemon.
Many changes have to be submitted and Wayspot requests have to be made in such a way that a slightly changed location has to be specified for them to appear in the games at all. If both games have the same waypoints, editing requests are greatly reduced, especially when moving.
Most reviews on Wayfarer are no longer taken critically, but rather arbitrarily. Many rates it, but not to rate suggestions according to their quality, but to get matches for their upgrades. It’s sad, but the quickest way to get an upgrade is with rejections, without even looking at the image, the text, and the additional information or the location.
In addition, many places and countries invite more people to play and have more stops than others. This is also used by spoofers. Why does Niantic support this so openly? These places are hopelessly crowded and local players are deprived of any fun. Also, the places are sometimes more or less equipped with stops due to old regulations. This systematically favors or disadvantages places. It doesn’t have to be like this. Pokémon has been connecting everyone for years. Regardless of age, culture, or place of origin. This could be further promoted.
And don´t be silly. Niantic will probably process or even pass on any data. They were also able to benefit from a change.
Why don’t we approach this in general, but only about Wayfarer challenges for individual countries? A change would benefit everyone, but mostly the small towns and countries, which in turn would lead to more fun and more players. It’s sad that in small places only one or maybe two submissions made it, otherwise the cells are all over the place. This means that you can’t and don’t want to play there either. Why not make the game attractive there and win more players and earn more money?
Do you even notice that you are currently just breaking the game, especially for players in the countryside or small towns?
You can't always assume that everyone lives in big cities with lots of stops where it's really worth playing. Not everyone lives in San Francisco, NY or Tokyo, or Japan, i.e. where you have your offices. No, most of them don't live and play there and you're currently making this game almost impossible with stop cells or the latest changes to the smoke.
We understand that you want to make us go out more and do something. But not like this! Even with more stops, the game can be well balanced, even without big timeouts. Not every stop has to be a spawning point and it’s not about getting thousands more arenas. Depending on the stops, new arenas should appear in the arena cells.
Cross-game changes have already been made to the games. Our friends have already been connected. Completion of playing cards could lead to more satisfaction, acceptance, and fairness.
Listen to the players. Especially after the removal of many stops (Niantic Support 11. 10. 21) in Pokémon and the subsequent outcry from players, the desire for more stops is well known. We do not want to hear it may be that we will use this proposal in the future. -No, use them now, for everyone!
Please rethink this and develop general rules that apply to all games so that we can all benefit from it! There is so much more to discover!
Otherwise, at least a test phase starts. You can change it again apparently quickly, as you have noticed when deleting many stops.
Instead of really giving incentives, players are currently being punished. The smoke was systematically rendered useless, making catching more difficult. Then why don't you give new incentives with new places to go out and discover places with other people?
Even if it's a Pokemon problem, the consequences and the resulting consequences can be seen and felt very strongly here in Wayfarer. I also oblige you to initiate a rethink and to speak to the Pokemon team.
#HearUSNiantic
I'm happy this is finally being adressed.
I have been nagging about it several times.
First of all, the area covered by the bonus location could be set to 8+1 L6 S2 cells. The strange "Home" location could be made to another bonus location. The location switches could be made more often, maybe 2 or four times a year.
Those are the three things most easily done.
After that, maybe teams of revs, especially targeting low density countries/areas could be set up. I'm a member of a group already doing that in Africa and the Middle east, and we've had some success. But the system is hampering us greatly.
This is why we need to drag swing sets, sandboxes next to the nature trails / middle of the forest so we can make more playground stops x) . I think those are overly presented as of late.
Jokes aside, and knowing that this place is "not just for pokemon go players", but that's how I got here in the first place, so I'll give my point of view on this. Story time:
I started playing on 2016 when the game was officially released during summer time. I was able download the first version of the game on my crappy Ipad and off I went to catch all rattatas and zubats I could find. I was disapointed when I couldn't find any pokemons "off the grid", as in any area that wasn't paved sidewalk / road marked on the map. Lack of stops also made the game more of an test of patience but if you have to think something positive about it, it did promote to move around more. I think during summer times, I spent about 3-4 hours outside / daily.
I've been living most of my life in a small town / city areas with population of 6000-11 000 people, which technically isn't that big but not that small either. There are multiple small towns like this driving distance away from eachother but all of these shared the same concern: some places had less than 10 pokestops around 50 km radius, while others had around 20 in same radius. Sometimes 2 stops had anywhere between 7 to 14 kilometres distance between eachother, despite being on the same "area". Compared to the friend of mine who lives in Finlands capital (Helsinki) he had the same amount of stops just around 2 city streets away, less than 2 km walk distance. He could spin 5 of them from balcony.
It took me over 3 years of playing around these small town areas to level up enough to just make it to the point where we can contribute more stops and make them more bearable to play. It's been fun process of updating all the area maps to Openstreetmaps to the point I was at one point, one of the top contributors in my country and I was approached by the guy who makes living by doing these map updates.
I can't take all the credit for updating the map and making these games more fun to play for others because it has been culmination of persistence over long period of time and handful of dedicated people. And the process still goes to this date.
But I can't help but feel we are missing out on so much, especially during community days and what not gatherings that cities have and anything remote / small town olayers / rural players. I can't help but feel scuffed.
That is why I do research before selecting a bonus location. Have been helping out 4 rural areas over the years now.
I like your idea of a fourth location, which should be chosen randomly for you, if you have great trackrecord and a minimum number of agreements.
Yes cannot agree more, I want to contribute where there is the biggest impact.
Technically rhat was England you described, not UK 😜. Seeing as Glasgow and Edinburgh would be cities but in terms of size and population aren't aren't a percentage of London, its still different in the UK. Even what you describe as a hamlet I describe as a village.
Theres also housing estates that are remote and don't have anything in them, ive driven through a couple of them and they didn't even have a post box, just a shop
It's hard to see how to do anything for rural areas, simple because, rural areas would want to submit things like lakes, lochs, rivers, forest areas. In Scotland at keast the proper forests do have signage for entrances to walking paths so thats not end of the world, but bodies of water will never pass as they would fall under natural features. The only way rural could really, truly, be helped is if natural feature was removed as a rejection criteria and certain acceptable examples made for natural features, I again mention lochs or lakes, but could also be water falls along walking paths, beauty spots etc., none of these would have signs, but they would make for amazing waypoints.
If you mean for how to get things submitted and reviewed faster, yeah, nothing can be done for submitting, unless someone happens to drive through and atops, or plays in the area. I've done some remote subs, but thats only if I see it in passing, I can't know what's in an area if I'm not there
To Niantic and any US based companies, only London exists in the UK anyways. 😂
Thats not true, they are going to Edinburgh this weekend d for that whole niantic community day thing this weekend, so they at least know that place exists
Ah yes. That will be good for them to see things that are a bit different.
Even then, Edinburgh is like the entry portal into Scotland, it's much posher there than say Glasgow lol
Naturally speaking, rural and remote communities will have far less resources than urban areas to support a nomination's review. The Street View could be from 2008, the satellite view is fuzzy and outdated, and for the most part, such nominations will be reviewed by people who don't have any plans to visit such communities or could not care any less about reviewing something that doesn't benefit them. There's also the nuances of pedestrian access which has been previously mentioned in this thread, because some people expect tarmac across the entirety of the world. I strongly support and welcome any changes to more frequently update the bonus locations.
We could take a slice out of another certain community's project browser. It's called the Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT). You could get a whole bunch of places, cities, cells or even entire countries or nations that are in dire need of reviewers based on backlog, average review time, and the current number of reviewers. Start projecting places in terms of when their backlogs might be caught up to a certain baseline from the amount of reviewers against the number of nominations coming in. Is this supposed designated bonus location for beginners, for reviewers starting out, or do they have a complexity that might be a bit more to handle for more seasoned, intermediate reviewers?
In today's case, review mileage varies. Typically speaking, a photo in New South Wales will be approved within a week or two (mostly, unless it's in a certain backlog snake that is currently in Hurstville atm). Nominations also get approved moderately quickly within a week or two as well. But for some reason, edits are a whole different story. While Sydney will also have razor fast edit timeframes to reach a decision, Canberra which is about 225km south-west on the other hand will take months or even upwards to a year to get an edit in the main city back. But even go outside to Bathurst which is 200km west of Sydney and edits there will take almost forever. This is caused by the way edits are designed within the S2 system and are allocated as such.
There are some nuances where an edit should be localised and reviewed by people with the local knowledge (such as location edits and such) but the current constricted allocation of edit reviews means that some places like rural New South Wales will never ever see an edit being resolved. The same applies to other communities with a severe lack of reviewers. Expand the cell ranges in which more trusted reviewers see a pool of edits. I'm sick of seeing "Good work!" pseudo-cooldown messages when I could be reviewing even more edits in rural places like Ivanhoe (gross) or just smashing through the never-ending photo reviews and I would like myself to see the real end, not some arbitrary system-induced one.
One thing that people keep bringing up is reducing bonus location change times, and they're absolutely correct. By editing one variable in the code they could significantly increase the amount of reviews from the most dedicated reviewers and improve the quality of life of everyone else. It's just one of those changes that makes Wayfarer less of a slog and more of a fun exploration game, and it needs help with that sometimes so that would be an easy win.
Another thing that needs to be changed is the size of the cells that get their reviews put in the back of the line. Since major cities can land anywhere in them, or be split across several, they often end up dragging down suburbs and other communities that have the misfortune of being in the same quadrilateral as them. Conversely, if the cell includes a bit of the city and then the rest is ocean, the city might not even be impacted. Just a little more precision in the borders of the areas that get slowed down would help, even if it's just cells one or two sizes smaller.
My thoughts and suggestion I can give about rural areas, submissions, improving the speed of the queue/backlog and so on.
Last thing, a PoGo related problem but still a rural problem. Remote and very small villages have, at best, a church and a playground or a postal office, many times next to each other in the same S2 L17 cell. This is actually depressing for rural players and players from other cities as well who like to request new pokestops. This demoralize rural players, both rural and foreign players are less prone to submit wayspots and it high encourage abuse because most of people would choose a gym over a correctly positioned wayspot. Abuse (location edits) that sums up to the backlog.
Lets not confuse "lack of Waypoints in my village" with "lack of potential Waypoints".
Niantic games, with their reliance of real world feature, will always be "better" in urban areas, thats just the way it is. Without changing the criteria for rural communities (theres a whole can of worms you do not want to open) I'm not sure what more can be done - if there are only a limited number of things to nominate at a loction there are only a limited number of things.
Some of the suggestions above are good, such as allowing smaller bouns areas and faster and easier changing of these for reviewers, so they can "drop in" and help get those limited Waypoints that have been nominated in rural areas voted on and hopefully in game. If Niantic want to run "Wayfarer events" - ie do something with the reward being a "Wayfarer Event" logoed badge that appears in EVERY game you play then they need to look into this and be more flexible over changing bonus or "event" locations. A "Wayfarer Blitz" in game badge and / or avatar gear would be good, provided all the usual problematic questions about "reviewing quality, not just quantitiy" can be ironed out. If it is too much effort to fix the player accounts, then give us a special portal in Wayfarer that only brings up nominations for a specially selected area - there has to be a way of doing this rather than struggling to get upgrades and revised bonus locations sorted one at a time by @NianticGiffard .
How about it - something like "Wayfarer Blitz Event - Madagascar Madness" - Tiered badge - 10 "correct" reviews - Bronze, 50 "correct" - Silver, 100 "correct" - Gold. Increment the "special event badge" counter in PoGo as well as the badge. All reviwing for this to be done over a 1 week specified period.
Link the events. Another all game badge - "Wayfarer World Explorer" - participate in one Blitz, base badge WITH incremental unlimeted counter, 5 Blitzes - Silver - 25 - Gold - 50? Platinum. THe majority of player I know would rather earn a badge than buy some decoration for their stats.
Thinking out loud…..so it may be nonsense 😂
someone mentioned heat maps before and it would be really useful to areas that might prove possible. There are some places that are just pretty barren. There are also some rural areas where the issue is mobile connectivity. There is a valley area near me where I have to shuffle around for a signal. For this reason I do think actually being at the location is important - no point in getting waypoint approved that no one can use. But I think having some sort of encouragement for experienced submitters going to a recognised low density area and submitting would be a positive move. They are certainly very satisfying - both in terms of exploration, research and end result. It often gives me some of my wayfarer mojo back. It needs some teasing out, and part of that might might be a lower hurdle to cross in terms of reviews required. If these new waypoints could be recognised as being like a bonus area and have a low number of these agreed to award an upgrade it could be an incentive.
I don’t want attention to solely focus on the rural areas as the part that destroys my wayfarer mojo is the lack of movement on my normal suburban submissions (2 years plus) unless I work for upgrades. So a way to earn an upgrade (bankable) I could use would be a welcome reward for the effort.
On this site, when someone new posts a rejection - often our kind experienced Explorers look at their map, and suggest other places that could make good wayspots. Churches, parks, etc. Not for a gain for themselves. To help that person. And help make Niantic games better all over the world.
How about... Lightship lists coordinates for areas without Wayspots... Trusted Explorers can sign up for a place... and they can make nominations there, even tho they're nowhere near it. (Maybe this privilege could be allowed once for every 1000 review agreements and 25 nominations accepted. Very exclusive.) These nominations would have to be without pictures, but that is acceptable on Lightship. Inexperienced gamers on the ground would have a better time understanding submitting a picture than a whole waypoint.
Also, along the "review blitz" discussion... We could have a different place as theme each week. Alaska, India, Middle East, etc. Niantic could throw the 4Square data in the review pot for the place being highlighted. Anyone who reviews, um, 100 nominations there gets a badge with a map of the place. Even if this badge is only on our Wayfarer - it could be fun to collect them. Maybe they could show in this community too. (But remember that people crave game badges most.)
@NianticTintino You don't need our help with reviewers in rural areas-- you can handle this inside Wayfarer, and do it in a systematic way that works for every single location on the globe.
How? Set a time limit for things in review, X days. I don't know what X is because I don't have access to your internal data but the precise value doesn't matter. If something has been in review for X days then automatically extend its review area and reset the timer. If it goes another X days and still hasn't reached consensus then repeat the process. Keep doing this until the candidate has had enough reviewers to reach consensus.
Here's a quick hacky illustration. I used the Solomon Islands because I know that player reviewers staged a campaign to help them process their queue, and because they're a fairly remote location. I've drawn an initial review area in the center around Honiara, the capital, and expanded the review area by two layers of cells at each increment. Even in this remote location three expansions gets a potential base of new reviewers. Four expansions includes Cairns, five gets Brisbane, and if it goes as far as eight then Sydney is in the reviewer pool.
Does this mean that rural/remote areas will be slower to be reviewed? Yes, but that's the case right now, and my proposal would be a lot faster than letting things languish in voting for months. You could also build a smart, dynamic review system so that it learns and adapts to an area's conditions-- if a particular area always requires three expansions to get consensus then you can start that area with a larger reviewer area and/or expand those areas more rapidly. Once the Solomon Islands got a critical mass of wayspots I think they built up a large enough player base that they could become self-sustaining, and thus would no longer need the larger review area... and the system could learn that too. That is an excellent outcome both for remote players and for Niantic.
What is important in this issue is to separate the two and discuss whether we are talking about low-density areas in a country that already has many wayspots, or whether the country itself is a low-density area of wayspots.
It seems to me that some people are confusing the two.
The former is a problem that can be self-resolved since there are many wayfinders.
However, the latter is not self-solving because there are few Wayfinders themselves.
In the former case, for example, Japan, where I am located, is one of the densest countries in the world with about 9% of the world's wayspots and one wayspot for every 300 square meters of dwellable area.
However, even in such a country, there are players who say that there are few Portals and Pokestops.
But when I look at the nominations they claim so, most of them have a wayspot within 300 meters.
Honestly, this just tells players to walk.
Also, nominators can apply upgrades to have their nominations reviewed by reviewers throughout Japan. So this is a problem that can be self solved by players in that country.
But if you look at the latter, for example, the African continent, there are still countries where there are only a few dozen wayspots.
Naturally, the majority of countries do not have street view in place, smartphones are expensive and have low penetration rates, and there are various barriers such as lack of high-speed, high-capacity communication environments.
There are fewer players in these countries and, of course, even fewer reviewers.
This makes it almost impossible for them to solve their own problems.
So it is these places we should be looking at.
And Niantic should also encourage them to solve the problem by improving their system.
This will ultimately benefit us and Niantic.
I'm going to take a different take.... I think we need some criteria adjust for rural.
Starting with Restaurants. If there is no other restaurant within say 5 or 10 miles, it's going to be a community gathering spot. Even in the case of chain restaurants.
Secondly, sports fields and schools. If field is over 100 yards from a school building it gets used heavily by the community and things in America like Friday Night Football become huge gatherings.
Numbers might need tweaking. But more flexibility in criteria in rural submissions can help too
I'd love it if Niantic could provide some guidance on community involvement, including demonstrations or tutorials for kickstarting community projects that could lead to more IRL POI for various communities. Maybe hopeful submitters can help with Eagle Scout projects, other youth organization efforts, or get involved with local government or art clubs to enhance their real-world neighborhoods and provide interesting stuff for all (not just those focused on phone games) to enjoy.
Supporting rural is not a wayfarer-only problem.
The first problem for rural is the lack of wayspot. The consequence is it's difficult or impossible to play Niantic games in rural area, so it's impossible to be able to submit something to create a wayspot.
There is many possibilities to solve this problem:
-Give the possibility to every player without level requirement to submit at least one thing per month (and keep the level requirement to unlock one submission per day).
-find a way to encourage submitters to go into low wayspot area to submit things in theses area in priority.
The second problem is a pokemon go problem (and just a little wayfarer): it's the lack of pokemon spawn in rural area. (some place have litterally no pokémon despite having wayspots).
It's just a little connected to wayfarer because something this problem exist because the map is not correct, or because of a lack of wayspot.
The third problem is eligility. In rural area we have trail markers that are eligible but very difficult to get validated. That's a problem.
We also have many natural places... that are not eligible despite they are very good point of interest...
The solution would be to allow natural features as wayspot, and do something against bad reviewers who reject trail markers.
There are different issues with "rural places".
One issue is priorization of "Rural nominations" so people can start playing in zones with not enough wayspots around them.
So there's one person that has been able to nominate some PoI in a zone that is "empty", at the moment we know that Niantic has a system to prioritize Rural areas and most of us would agree that it needs some tweaking:
1) Reduce the cell size. There are many places that share the cell with a big city many Km. away and so they lack the priorization that they would get otherwise.
2) Increase the requirement for "number of wayspots" to be considered a high priority zone. It's not fun for a city player to see that some villages get their nominations processed in a few days and they have to wait years or upgrade all their nominations, this also has lead to abuse areas where people can nominate anything over and over again until it pass without worrying about reviewing at all or the quality of their nominations.
A proposal to address these issues would be for example to define a cell size of maybe level 10, that's small enough so one town shouldn't affect another one, and mark as "high priority ones" those that have less than 6 wayspots in that cell, and then assign to each of those cells 10 high priority slots (minus existing wayspots).
By assigning a maximum of priority slots on each cell the goal is that whenever someone submits a new nomination in one of those cells they get the high priority so it can be processed faster, but at the same time prevent abuse by people (multiple users/accounts, one user spamming their 40 nominations, ...) because each time a nomination is processed in that cell, it will use one of the priority slots, so it should be possible for any rural area to get enough wayspots, and if people have sent fake nominations that are rejected or removed from lightship, the priority slots have been used and that area can't keep on spamming bad nominations.
All the numbers that I've provided are only examples, it should be studied and analized but I think that allowing a rural area to stop being a rural area is very important so city players can feel that they are not working for free, and also if the number of rural areas decrease, their priority can increase even further and expand the review zones more easily.
A suggestion I gave ages ago is that nominations older than X days should be pushed out to reviewers a further distance away. The area could increase every X amount of days.
There would never be a shortage of reviewers then.
Obviously it's not that simple and a few extra checks need to be done.
First I think wayfarer should ask all users at sign-up or a one of at next sign-in what languages they speak/Understand and what are they happy to take submissions in languages other than these.
This is something I think needs to be done anyway. It's no good getting French submissions if you are in the south of England and dont understand French for example, unless you are willing to translate or has a browser to do it.
Back on topic, the increasing area either needs to rely on these language settings. Either give the voting to those who can/are willing in the extended area or push put to areas that speak the same language if the area is remote/borders other countries.
That means people in France on the borders of say Spain would either get Spanish/English reviewers who speak the language or reviewers in Canada who have the same language set as an example.
There are places inside the M25, 10 miles from the centre of London where reviews are stuck in the queue or voting for almost a year. One of mine in Weybridge has only just gone in to voting after being submitted in August 2021. It boggles my mind that they take so long when you would think there would be plenty of voters within range. I even have an embassy in London that has been in the queue for almost a year and another one that's only recently gone in to voting submitted at the same time. So I think there is more issues than just rural voting.
My rural issue is that some small village areas dont have pavements. Some areas the roads are used to walk on as traffic is limited and very slow. But anything along these gets rejected as no pedestrian access. There might be a post box there or an old telephone box so utility companies believe there is safe pedestrian access but no point in submitting a 150 year old post box or red telephone box (maybe converted to a community library) that's on the grass verge because reviewers will reject for no access.
@Indigobolt-PGO It is definitely difficult in Remote locations. A very insightful post thank you for taking the time to explain your unique situation.
Continuing with my previous post, another of the issues with rural/remote areas is the lack of enough reviewers to reach an outcome.
As many people have stated, one possibility is to expand the review radius when a nomination has been in the "Review" status for too long.
An additional option would be to offer a subset of reviewers (let's say those that are in good or great status, and a minimum of 1000 agreements), the option in their settings to declare themselves "global reviewers", those that opt-in to this status would get nominations from all over the world that have been queued or in review in a FIFO order, so those that get the message that "there's nothing more to review" and want to keep on contributing would get an infinite queue of nominations that have been waiting without the need of changing the bonus location and risking ending up in a place with very few pending nominations.
By restricting the option to those that have a minimum requirements should prevent that people that don't properly understand how Wayfarer works could get there and mess with the nominations and being opt-in prevents that people that don't feel confident about foreign location or languages would try to skip them.
We definitely need a definition of "rural". I've seen people say it's anywhere that has no other wayspot in a 1 km radius. Wow, I'd never thought of it being that small. I would have said: if you have 6 Wayspots in 10 km, you're not "rural". But maybe I'm wrong. What does Niantic think?
USE CASE: Ingress drones can only hop to portals within 1 km. So if mine got stuck, I'd go nominate something to get it through. (Often a neighborhood tennis court.) Then I'd have to decide if to (a) do ~150 reviews and prioritize this nomination above anything else I'd nominated, OR (b) accept that it would take 6 months to a year to get approved, and withdraw my drone to send it in another direction, and maybe come back when it's approved. OR (c) Learn to care a lot less.
It would be a lot more fun if my nominations came back in a few days without upgrades. I would have let my drone wait for it. (Instead, I eventually chose option c.)
I also would definitely be open to reviewing in rural areas if it didn't lock me into a bonus location for a year.
The trouble with this is that places in the US are a lot more spread out than places in the UK as an example. There was a social media anecdote doing the rounds about this not too long back. So if you look at rural from a US definition using nothing but an arbitrary radius, it may be possible that pretty much nothing in the UK would reach rural status when that arbitrary radius is applied here.
Let's clarify the definition of rural and remote areas that should be at issue in this topic.
And the rural and remote areas that should be discussed in this thread are "places where high quality POIs exist but the nominations do not return results due to lack of reviewers".
This is not a thread to discuss creating WAYSPOT in "places where POIs themselves do not exist."
We can' t make WAYSPOT where there is no POI.
Let me offer one topic on this matter of local and remote areas.
There is a Twitter account called "nauru_japan".
This popular account, which is supposed to be sent out by the government tourism office of the Republic of Nauru on the Pacific Ocean (no official accreditation attached), currently has 296,000 followers.
The account was created in October 2020 and became a hot topic in Japan around January 2021.
Since it was quite a hot topic, it naturally became a hot topic among wayfinders in Japan.
At this time, there were only four wayspots in the Republic of Nauru.
Later, certain wayfinders set up bonus locations, or POIs that had been nominated but remained dormant in Nauru without being reviewed due to geographical conditions, were able to see the light of day.
As a result, there are now 41 wayspots (see Mission Authoring Tool) in a country with a population of only about 10,000 and an area of 21 square kilometers.
And there are probably many more such places on the planet.
We should make it our top priority.