My Pokéstop was Unfairly Rejected!!!!

Lechu1730-PGOLechu1730-PGO Posts: 537 ✭✭✭✭

Et tu Lechu?

Those with some time in this forum might be surprised to see such a discussion title next to my name in the forum board. After all, titles like this are usually associated to newcomers, many times in their first post ever, not to someone with hundreds of comments to his name.

So if you're angry because your nomination was rejected, let me show you how it feels when it has become a regular part of your Wayfarer experience, how to understand the rejection and what to do about it.

Half of my heart is in Havanna

They say the rejections they hurt you the most are the ones of wayspots that have some emotional connection to you. So let me talk about the emottional connection first.

The Demetrio Eliades Building, better known as Havanna Building after the billboard of a renowned alfajores manufacturer Havanna that has always shined on its top, is a residential building on the beach front of the seaside city of Mar del Plata and an icon of the city skyline.

The emotional appeal? I spent all my summers as a kid there and a lot of summers afterwards as well, as my family owned a flat in the building. There's no single year in my life that I hadn't gone there at least a day. It's the site of some of my fondest memories.

So imagine my surprise when I check in Ingress Intel in March prior to a trip to the coast and saw it wasn't a wayspot. I had to nominate it. So I did. As you can imagine, it didn't go well. (Weird word choices because the email and the Wayfarer page were translated with Google Translate prior to screen capture).

Here's Johnny! (*)

PRIVATE RESIDENCE???!!?!?11??!!1|1 I QUOTED THE AMA!!!!11!!1!!! URL???!!!!??!11??!11 URLS ARE VALID IN THE ADDITIONAL INFORMATION1!!!11!!!11!!! MY NOMINATION IS VALID AND IT WAS UNFAIRLY REJECTED!!111!!! BAD REVIEWERS MUST BE PUNISHED!!!!111!!!! WAYFARER DOESNT WORK!!!!11! I WANT NIANTIC TO REVIEW THIS DECISSION!1111!!!! ELEBENTY!!!!

The cold hard facts

Argentina is a big country, but unlikely as it seems to someone who knows it as a major agricultural producer, 70% of it is arid or directly desertic so most of the poulation is concentrated in the fertile plains of the pampas. 30% of us live in Buenos Aires or its metro area, which is my reviewing area in Wayfarer. That's means that any upgraded nomination of mine is going to be evaluated mostly by the same people that review the same nominations I review on Wayfarer.

Why is that important? Because I have an agreeement rate upwards of 60%. That means I can say, with a high degree of confidence, that other reviewers in Argentina evaluate wayspots more or less like me. If the majority of reviewers agree with me when reviewing but I thought this would be a good nomination and it was rejected, what failed?

So lets go back to the rejection reasons. We can dismiss PRP and URL. There's always going to be a minority of misguided or inexperienced reviewers. If your nomination can't survive them, it wasn't a good nomination to begin with. The real reason, as it happens in most of this kind of rejections, is the first one given: "The proposal does not meet the acceptance criteria", also known to the reviewers as "Other rejection reasons". The nomination is seen by the reviewers as generic and uninteresting.

Is this true? When discussing this nomination with a local reviewer before it went to vote she said. "I'd reject it. A building just because it's old isn't elegible. Otherwise we should accept most buildings in the city." (Yes, I see Europeans rolling their eyes to a building from1969 being called old. Should I remind you that Mar del Plata, which I consider near Buenos Aires, is actually 400 Km away and there's nothing but cows and 8 very small cities in between?)

There are nominations that are slam dunks. Everyone knows they should be approved so they're approved. But in this case its clear the nomination needed some selling. Did I do it right?

Nomination Improvement

When I go back to the nomination, the first thing I know wasn't good is the pictures. Unfortunately I only had a few minutes in the city and I was in a hurry. I took the best pictures I could given the situation because I didn't want to miss the opportunity, just in case there wasn't another one. I intended to come back later in the weekend with more time a do a better nomination but unfortunately I couldn't. Covid restrictions mean that I probably won't be able to go there again until the next (southern hemisphere) summer.

Pictures are very important because they set the mood in which the reviewer will evaluate your nomination. A bad picture will predispose them more to find the flaws in your nomination rather than to see its good points. For difficult nominations like this one, every little thing counts. There's also the issue of how prominent you make certain claims. Should I have mentioned in the description that it's #5 in Trip advisor list of architectural landmarks of the city? Maybe it would have helped.

In the end, it pays off to try to see a rejected nomination as disappasionately as possible and try to understand what reviewers might have seen in it. It's obviously interesting to you. Is it for the rest of the reviewers? Were the pictures good? Was there anything to add or take away that would have helped to get approved? Then try again. And again, if needed. But also know when to let go.

In the end it isn't Niantic who decides what becomes a wayspot. Your fellow wayfarers who do, for their own idiosyncratic reasons. Try to understand what those reasons might be and you'll have a much better chance to get your nomination approved.

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