I want to say thank you for removing the post. However a "warning" doesn't seem to fit with that level of abuse. Not only was the post mocking very situations, the original comment pre-edit included very offensive slur. The user also admitted that they would continue to abuse the system. Had this been a work type setting something like that would deem someone to be fired immediately. Letting someone off with a simple warning shows this kind of behavior is okay as long as its not too many times. But apparently once is fine though just to make sure everyone heard their threats and slurs.
I'm sure you can still view what this comment said prior to edit. It's pretty clear that those involved here knew they were abusing the system, intend to continue abusing the system, and will in fact start to abuse the system in new ways (targeted rejections) to "punish" the person who reported this.
if you want us to keep believing this whole thing works, there must be immediate and decisive action taken against these folks. Please issue immediate and permanent bans to all of them from wayfarer in its entirety. They clearly should never again be able to nominate or review.
I can see most of you are unhappy after the user was issued a warning. Having said that, I will have this discussed with my team to take stricter action against this user. Your understanding is appreciated in this case.
I don't know how much Niantic acknowledges this, but level 38 accounts are a dime a dozen. Even banning an account does very little to stop a community with dozens of reviewers, or even a person with several accounts at their disposal. Heck it might not even be the main account they play with. Issuing warnings or strikes against accounts does basically nothing to stop abuse. I urge you to make an example of St Cloud and show abusers everywhere that there are actual repercussions for vandalizing your database.
Not just deleting fake wayspots. Not giving them warnings. Not giving them cooldowns from reviewing. Ban their wayfarer and Pokemon/Ingress accounts.
The only possibility Niantic has to stop abuse efficiently is to (temporaily) ban every Account where bigger types of abuse were discovered. I needed to report the exact same Fakes three times in a city until they stopped. (3 warnings = (wf) ban) Now, it has been quiet there. With a new rule (and the posibility to see the creation date of the POIs), Niantic could hang harder punishments for newly faked POIs.
One posibility would be a WF ban when there is abuse detected. So you got no second chance.
Day in and day out I see reports of all the abuse in here. And so many times theres updates of continuing abuse AFTER Niantic "dealt" with it. Its obvious that Niantic doesn't punish the abuse at all, or in any way to strike fear into the abusers. In fact I wish @AisforAndis-ING would share all the negative DM's messages, etc he is currently going through because of this report.... all because the team is incapable of preventing the abuse in the first place, or even doing something about it when we fill out those useless "abuse reports" that clearly do nothing.
The problem seems to be an abusive group of players, probably with multiple accounts, creating fake portals and having enough influence in terms of the number of account reviewing abilities to overide the legitimate players in a small area. Niantic are looking at the portals at the moment. If they can get rid of all the fakes then they can leave the legit portals behind. Once they do this, a geo-block on the area, as well as banning all of the multiple accounts associated with the fake portals, will leave legit players with enough portals or Stops to play, but prevent the cheats from just repeating the excercise again.
Users who report abuse are already vilified - a geo-block of this kind would only make things worse. No one would want to report abuse again, and those who do will be hated by their communities for the collective punishments.
No, I think Niantic have all the tools they need to distribute specific and effective punishments only to abusive users. Abuse reports certainly provide them with a lot of material to work with, it's not like they have to deduce who the abusers are from nothing.
Niantic taking another look at this issue brings me a glimmer of hope but the past has me disheartened. I thought without a doubt, the abuser's comment confirming they would encourage their community to target high quality nominations from the original poster would cement their ban.
As this issue has clearly reached its boiling point, people who have intermingled in both local communities will be removed from such, which puts an entire community at risk. Who's to say this abusive group won't start rejecting quality nominations from the entire area, hoping they might be the reason one of @AisforAndis-ING’s gets denied? This will result in first time submitters having their eligible submissions denied and not trying again, therefore missing out on this (mostly) wonderful community.
Niantic, please take real action against these accounts.
Nominations submitted by accounts with a history of spamming inappropriate nominations
If we believe you are spamming nominations inappropriately, you will receive a warning and may lose nomination privileges for repeat offenses.
I'm sorry but I fail to see how what's been reported here plus the atrocious comment targeting the person who reported doesn't rise to the level of "losing nomination privileges"
Do "repeat offenses" have to be separate reports? There are hundreds of intentionally faked nominations in this city. They repeated the offense hundreds of times. Seriously, stop messing around and ban these people Niantic. Those of us trying to play fair have lost our patience.
A well targeted geo-block could make nominations from the area to remain in queue forever unless upgraded. That'll preserve some ability to nominate for the players who live there while diluting the influence of the local cabal of reviewers on what gets approved (or denied).
And yet this wouldn’t stop them. As someone who voted on the Tortise Education Board sign, I can tell you it was upgraded and still went live in a falsified location.
@NianticGiffard I think its safe to say that your warning was not effective. Can we please get an actual solution applied to all the abusers involved in this?
And I think this guy here already derailing the thread so, would you please just straight ban this guy and lock this thread for another comments? @NianticGiffard
Niantic, they are openly taunting you on your own resource.
How this person was still able to comment on this thread is beyond me. Surely you will not allow someone who is clearly promoting self harm to members of your community to remain an active part?
I hope Niantic is taking notice of the "SC" name scheme in these account names. There are definitely other accounts within the abuse ring with the same similarity in their name which are all likely the same person. They definitely don't all have the SC though. I'm happy to provide a list of suspect accounts for Niantic to review if there is a way to provide it.
Comments
That should have been an immediate ban from the forum, banned from the games for this and the systematic abuse.
I want to say thank you for removing the post. However a "warning" doesn't seem to fit with that level of abuse. Not only was the post mocking very situations, the original comment pre-edit included very offensive slur. The user also admitted that they would continue to abuse the system. Had this been a work type setting something like that would deem someone to be fired immediately. Letting someone off with a simple warning shows this kind of behavior is okay as long as its not too many times. But apparently once is fine though just to make sure everyone heard their threats and slurs.
@NianticCasey-ING please chime in as well.
There is a difference between different statuses of warnings:
A uses who threatened me in November (also pro-fake)
And the dude from this discussion:
Like we can see, our "friend" only got a tier-one warning.
Banned users do look like this:
I don't know what harder, threatening or abusing. Niantic (or vanilla forums) will have their actions based on happenings.
@NianticCasey-ING
I'm sure you can still view what this comment said prior to edit. It's pretty clear that those involved here knew they were abusing the system, intend to continue abusing the system, and will in fact start to abuse the system in new ways (targeted rejections) to "punish" the person who reported this.
if you want us to keep believing this whole thing works, there must be immediate and decisive action taken against these folks. Please issue immediate and permanent bans to all of them from wayfarer in its entirety. They clearly should never again be able to nominate or review.
thank you.
@NianticAaron @NianticAndres @NianticAtlas @NianticBrian-ING @NianticCasey-ING @NianticEG @NianticGiffard @NianticGray @NianticKK @NianticKN-ING @NianticMac-ING
Please read this and the rest of the thread in its entirety.
I can see most of you are unhappy after the user was issued a warning. Having said that, I will have this discussed with my team to take stricter action against this user. Your understanding is appreciated in this case.
I hope that includes more strict actions against the player's in game account(s) and those linked with the abuse that has been reported here.
Action against their player accounts is likely the only way to stop this type of abuse.
I don't know how much Niantic acknowledges this, but level 38 accounts are a dime a dozen. Even banning an account does very little to stop a community with dozens of reviewers, or even a person with several accounts at their disposal. Heck it might not even be the main account they play with. Issuing warnings or strikes against accounts does basically nothing to stop abuse. I urge you to make an example of St Cloud and show abusers everywhere that there are actual repercussions for vandalizing your database.
Not just deleting fake wayspots. Not giving them warnings. Not giving them cooldowns from reviewing. Ban their wayfarer and Pokemon/Ingress accounts.
Geo-block. Just a thought.
The only possibility Niantic has to stop abuse efficiently is to (temporaily) ban every Account where bigger types of abuse were discovered. I needed to report the exact same Fakes three times in a city until they stopped. (3 warnings = (wf) ban) Now, it has been quiet there. With a new rule (and the posibility to see the creation date of the POIs), Niantic could hang harder punishments for newly faked POIs.
One posibility would be a WF ban when there is abuse detected. So you got no second chance.
Wouldnt work since this is a collective punishment for all players, not just the abusers.
Day in and day out I see reports of all the abuse in here. And so many times theres updates of continuing abuse AFTER Niantic "dealt" with it. Its obvious that Niantic doesn't punish the abuse at all, or in any way to strike fear into the abusers. In fact I wish @AisforAndis-ING would share all the negative DM's messages, etc he is currently going through because of this report.... all because the team is incapable of preventing the abuse in the first place, or even doing something about it when we fill out those useless "abuse reports" that clearly do nothing.
The problem seems to be an abusive group of players, probably with multiple accounts, creating fake portals and having enough influence in terms of the number of account reviewing abilities to overide the legitimate players in a small area. Niantic are looking at the portals at the moment. If they can get rid of all the fakes then they can leave the legit portals behind. Once they do this, a geo-block on the area, as well as banning all of the multiple accounts associated with the fake portals, will leave legit players with enough portals or Stops to play, but prevent the cheats from just repeating the excercise again.
Users who report abuse are already vilified - a geo-block of this kind would only make things worse. No one would want to report abuse again, and those who do will be hated by their communities for the collective punishments.
No, I think Niantic have all the tools they need to distribute specific and effective punishments only to abusive users. Abuse reports certainly provide them with a lot of material to work with, it's not like they have to deduce who the abusers are from nothing.
Niantic taking another look at this issue brings me a glimmer of hope but the past has me disheartened. I thought without a doubt, the abuser's comment confirming they would encourage their community to target high quality nominations from the original poster would cement their ban.
As this issue has clearly reached its boiling point, people who have intermingled in both local communities will be removed from such, which puts an entire community at risk. Who's to say this abusive group won't start rejecting quality nominations from the entire area, hoping they might be the reason one of @AisforAndis-ING’s gets denied? This will result in first time submitters having their eligible submissions denied and not trying again, therefore missing out on this (mostly) wonderful community.
Niantic, please take real action against these accounts.
Nominations submitted by accounts with a history of spamming inappropriate nominations
If we believe you are spamming nominations inappropriately, you will receive a warning and may lose nomination privileges for repeat offenses.
I'm sorry but I fail to see how what's been reported here plus the atrocious comment targeting the person who reported doesn't rise to the level of "losing nomination privileges"
Do "repeat offenses" have to be separate reports? There are hundreds of intentionally faked nominations in this city. They repeated the offense hundreds of times. Seriously, stop messing around and ban these people Niantic. Those of us trying to play fair have lost our patience.
I agree. Not to mention the numerous new abuse portals that were created in the two week span of time since this was first reported.
Meanwhile Los Angeles has a 15+ month natural turn around LMAO.
By removing a lot of wayspots they get even higher priority as their cell is less populated. Niantic's algorithms are beautiful.
A well targeted geo-block could make nominations from the area to remain in queue forever unless upgraded. That'll preserve some ability to nominate for the players who live there while diluting the influence of the local cabal of reviewers on what gets approved (or denied).
And yet this wouldn’t stop them. As someone who voted on the Tortise Education Board sign, I can tell you it was upgraded and still went live in a falsified location.
Stern admonitions are clearly not working...
Lol. If Niantic can’t handle a single troll on their message boards, how can we expect them to handle any sort of abuse in any form?
@NianticGiffard I think its safe to say that your warning was not effective. Can we please get an actual solution applied to all the abusers involved in this?
Cc @NianticCasey-ING
@NianticCasey-ING are you guys hiring? Clearly you need new/better mods to handle the trolls and abuse.
+1. Anything Niantic did is not very effective.
And I think this guy here already derailing the thread so, would you please just straight ban this guy and lock this thread for another comments? @NianticGiffard
Niantic, they are openly taunting you on your own resource.
How this person was still able to comment on this thread is beyond me. Surely you will not allow someone who is clearly promoting self harm to members of your community to remain an active part?
@NianticAaron @NianticAndres @NianticAtlas @NianticBrian-ING @NianticCasey-ING @NianticEG @NianticGiffard @NianticGray @NianticKK @NianticKN-ING @NianticMac-ING
Can we get this handled now plz?
I hope Niantic is taking notice of the "SC" name scheme in these account names. There are definitely other accounts within the abuse ring with the same similarity in their name which are all likely the same person. They definitely don't all have the SC though. I'm happy to provide a list of suspect accounts for Niantic to review if there is a way to provide it.