Well, I am around 700 below you. So if we should expect more than 700 people with a 30-day-ban I think we could say: It is not possible that we all reviewed the same trap. Of course I am not sure if the mail-number from Niantic is relevant.
i didnt review anything last month. 15k+ reviews done, always green/excellent rating in my profil. i dont understand this 30 days ban and also the threat to suspend my pokemon go account without knowing what we did wrong.
Well, I've got an answer on my mail... and what should I say: 🤐
Aaron wrote: As per our policy, we will not be able to provide any specific information related to this warning. We have thoroughly reviewed your reviews and found that you have been violating our policies by incorrectly reviewing and voting in favour of incorrect or inappropriate titles/descriptions for existing Wayspots that do not meet our criteria. As a result, we have notified you about it after our investigation. Please review the Candidate Criteria before submitting any contributions/new submissions.
--------------------------------------------
Thank you, now I fully understand my violation. 🙈
Hey, I've done around 10.000 reviews and was always in perfect green rating... but yes... you thoroughly reviewed my reviews and found out that I have voted for incorrect or inappropriate titles. I am sure you can speak and write perfect in German to understand my bad reviews in German. (sorry - beeing sarcastic)
I have send an e-mail with a request to send me all data they have stored on my wayfarer account. Maybe this will help to find out what caused the ban.
I got also a ban on my account. (I am from Austria btw, so also near Germany) What should I say, like you guys I also got a perfect rating and over 60% aggreement percentage.
A friend of mine, who also got the ban thinks it is because he submitted a location edit on an existing portal and also submitted an edit for the text, where he wrote something like "please take the right location because...". I also did that with my account where i got banned. It is the way to tell a reviewer why you suggest a location edit and which location is the suggested one :D because the system doesn't give us the opportunity to tell the reviewing people i thought it is a great way to say why i suggest the new location for an existing portal.
I think it is a really bad joke, that Niantic treats reviewer like that. We do this for free and never got anything in return for it in the games we love to play and now they hit us with a stupid ban where no one even has a clue what he/she is banned for. How do they think we change our behaviour when no one has an idea what they did wrong?
But tbh I am happy I am not alone with this problem and it affects a lot of people. Maybe we won't get ignored now?
I don‘t think that this suspension has anything to do with your edits. I did 3 edits in my whole Wayfarer-career, two were accepted and one is still pending.
Niantic treats their reviewers like garbage, there are 24 hours over since the first ban-wave and we received not a single useful information or feedback. And we are speaking of a „billion dollar company“.
And the funny thing is, last week Niantic „accidentally“ released hundreds of bad wayspots automatically in the world. We saw such things like a brothel released according to this forum.
And then, this „Aaron from Niantic“ really answered on my mail, that they checked all my title-reviews and descriptions (on German, right?) and I should learn about their criteria and rules. HAHA. You must love their customer-service, right?
My question: How many Niantic-employees were banned for there brothel-release last week? Or did I miss this part in their nomination-criteria?
Almost 24 hours around and unfortunately we still have no correct answer from an operator.☹️🤐
Unfortunately, it is very sad on the part of Niantic. I just have to say that, unfortunately. Not a single statement, the email from an automated bot, let's say a standard response from the system to someone write that. It's a shame, but their politics seem to be good.
I still say it: with 14 thousand reviews and almost 65% excellent reviews, getting a ban over 30 days is simply a sad judgment without having received a proper statement. I don't even want to know what happened after the ban, whether the submissions are still there and what happened to the unprocessed reviews (that is about 3500 reviews).🤔👆️
Should you for an edit: Please choose the right location or get a ban on other things then you should write that.
If HTML things are forbidden in the additional description, then we should be informed. Somehow I have to make people understand what the stop is all about.
If there are other things that don't work, I just ask the operators here in the forum to get in touch. It just won't be that difficult to get in touch here in the forum.
If it is a bug, then you should honestly admit it and try to compensate for it. I don't mean in-game of a game but in wayfarer voting. (In 30 days you simply lose the projects you want to create for your city, village, field or whatever.)
The support here simply ignores the players who want to know what's going on. This is not how support works. Support should be there to answer and deal with it. I find standard answers a cheek to reviewers. 😐️🙃
We do not know why we got those bans. How can we react to this. The mail threatens to ban my Pokemon go account. I can not guarantee to stop the action which causes the ban because I do not know what I did wrong. Until I know I will not do a review again.
On the side note: All things indicate that this is problem of either translation or oversensitive filter which causes those bans. Only German speaking eviwers or reviewers who regulary get German nominations have reported these bans. Many experienced reviewers are affected. I haves reviewed over 20000 nominations and always have had the best possible rating with over 70% agreement rate. I think I would notice inappropriate descriptions or titles.
I filled a bug report maybe those who are affected by these bans can upvote the thread if it appears.
Maybe a "funny" case of how to get this E-Mail too.
First of all I´m not affected right now, but I just got a submission which might cause the problem to recieve this kind of Mail.
"Vögeln", the german plural of "bird" (Vogel) is on the blacklist for no good reason. Right now it you can´t submit oder edit a text to contain this word but if its a older submission, this might work and maybe submissions like this cause it that the judges on these kind of submissions get a E-Mail warning.
PS: I know that "vögeln" is also a slang word for sex, but the straigt number of cases this is abused in submission might be one in a few hundreds compared to the cases when this would be rigth...
I´m sure in way over 1000 cases when someone submits a wildlife infoboard e.g. about the birds of this forest wich might also be official titelt/labeled "Den Vögeln auf der Spur" - "On the birds trail" (<- might sounds strange in english but absolutely common in german) they can´t submit this with the official titel, because of the strong text filter just to block this one in a thousand cases. Thats a inappropiate overblocking in my view.
i missunderstand one thing here: if they can multiban people (by script i believe) for some text accepted somewhen long ago, as some people, getting this, says they did not review for a time. why they did not ban that text in the submitting stage? it seems to me, that one inattentive filter admin or programmer just failed to do his work well, the then the boss identified it, and said to do something with it. and they solved the problem by placing their responsibility on reviewers. and i will believe in this thesis until they explain the point.
as for me - i'm newbie so far, and i was certain, that the banned words list - is the list of already banned words, they will not appear mb only local obvious jargon easy understandable for native speakers. and i do not need to find it, and learn by heart it. (and if you have the link - please share it for me)
on the other side - they say they will not uncover it, in this situation i would not too. if they do this - they get massive flame of interpretations and arguments. so, sounds like there will be a honeyspot of honeyspots for text edits, and if you do not have strong degree in linguistics - you just can lose your game account. review in fear.
more you do more you get. i get 4day bans, but i'm just 1st month behind the wheel, and you are much more longer, so, take your reward 😉
i am from Vienna, Austria and i got the same weird email on Monday (21:48 my time). So i wrote to the support and got the same generic email again. Then i recommended to the support that they should to stop talking like a Bot and start thinking. To this i got a response with my „final warning“ 👀... my other question regarding what i did wrong to get this Ban in Wayfarer got completely ignored...
I did a lot of reviews from january to march, but in the last few weeks hardly any of them. I really dont know why (most likely some translation bs), but it makes me really angry.
I cant wait for our makeup event in Ingress and Pogo 😍
In the meanwhile I heard from 4 more user of Austria that they also received the suspension. Three from Vienna (like you) and one from Salzburg. So the estimated number of suspended wayfarers since Monday is already far higher as I thought.
So there is a pattern => Mostly german speaking players might fall into an abusive "trap". Maybe Niantic deleted 2-3 stops from one wayfarer (if correct or not, we don't know - perhaps not, because I am looking very sharp on good titles/description) and we have voted good on them or give it a pass. Maybe it was also a wayspot in an other language (like Hungary/Czech). Or maybe it is only a big bug like the other 10.000 things around here.
But here is really what I am asking myself => How should we know it if nobody tell us what the mistake was and Niantic tells us month for month that we are excellent wayfarers with the best possible rating? I did thousands of reviews since January.... other players around here wrote that they didn't voted since 2 months. So it might be something what happend in march or february. But giving out a 30-day-ban (we can't even sign in and manage open nominations) and insulting players to ban their playing accounts is a hard first sanction. Their are so many guys who nominate literally trash or didn't even know that something like criteria exist... and they get away with a warning or a 7-day-ban. But here in this case there is only one solution for the concerned user: As far as long nobody knows what they did wrong, nobody will ever come back to Wayfarer again after the 30 days-ban. Too much risk to lose the (playing-)account permanent if the next bug (or call it a feature) is suspending you.
@NianticCasey-ING@NianticGiffard could you please give us a feedback here? It would be motivating to hear official news from a real living person and not a from a bot. I don't think we are asking too much if you think about the time effort we put in the system.
Hi everyone! It looks like a lot of users' accounts were affected by this, I am currently checking this with our team. One of us moderators will comment on this thread as soon as we gather enough concrete information to share. Until then, I would appreciate your patience and understanding.
Then again, it is just another one of those Niantic "I've got a great idea guys" to follow on from the highly sucessful 4Square Brothel upload?
"Guys, how about this? If we give lots of players a temporary submission ban for a month for some random reason, it will take some of the pressure off the submissions queue and we won't have to admit the submissions list is full. We can test it in Germany and Austria. How about it?"
I'm glad you're finally looking into this. I'm not one of the affected people, but I have been following this thread out of curiosity.
I do actually have a suggestion, which I expect will fall on deaf ears, but I'll still make it anyway.
In one of the replies to this thread, someone posted a response from Aaron that said that it was Niantic policy not to give users specific data on why they've been suspended. I know this is a policy that is in effect across your games as well. In the case of it applying to the games, it makes sense not to tell cheaters exactly what you detected, as it gives them information that could potentially be used to circumvent the anti-cheating measures in the future. That's fine and completely understandable. When it comes to Wayfarer reviewers though, this doesn't make sense as a policy.
The way I see it, the system issued a suspension on these accounts because it detected behaviour that Niantic disapproves of (even if this does turn out to be something like a false positive, or a language issue). However, without the affected reviewers knowing what this behaviour was, they can't really do anything to change their ways (if they have actually done something wrong in the first place), and because they don't know what they did wrong, they're likely to make the same mistake again as you won't tell them what it actually is.
Surely, if the system that flagged this as an issue is there to stop Wayfarer abuse, it actually makes sense to say exactly what kind of abuse was committed when incidents like this happen (rather than just a vague suggestion to review the title and description criteria), so that the community gets a clearer view of what is and is not tolerated, and thus the unwanted behaviour gets stopped as people will know it leads to suspension.
Again, I'm not asking for a change to the policy when it comes to people cheating in games, but Wayfarer abuse is a different way of breaking the Ts & Cs, and I believe this case shows that it makes more sense for it to be handled differently in future.
Little update, i just received another mail from the support:
“
Per our database, we can confirm that you have violated our policies while previously reviewing incorrect or inappropriate titles/descriptions for existing Wayspots that do not meet our criteria. As a result, we have notified you about it after our investigation.
Please ensure that further violations are not continued while reviewing Wayspot edits which may lead to the suspension of your Pokémon GO account.
”
I still have no clue what is going on. Hopefully @NianticGiffard will shed some light on this 👀
Comments
Well, I am around 700 below you. So if we should expect more than 700 people with a 30-day-ban I think we could say: It is not possible that we all reviewed the same trap. Of course I am not sure if the mail-number from Niantic is relevant.
Von: Mayson <[email protected]nticlabs.com>
über mail.helpshift.com
Antwort an: Niantic Support <[email protected]lpshift.com>
An: MF51Koni
Datum: 03.05.2021, 21:43
Betreff:Re: [13234849] Message from Niantic
Gesendet von:mail.helpshift.com
Signiert von:mail.helpshift.com
--------------------------------
i didnt review anything last month. 15k+ reviews done, always green/excellent rating in my profil. i dont understand this 30 days ban and also the threat to suspend my pokemon go account without knowing what we did wrong.
Region: Wiesbaden / Hesse
@NianticCasey-ING Statement?
Well, I've got an answer on my mail... and what should I say: 🤐
Aaron wrote: As per our policy, we will not be able to provide any specific information related to this warning. We have thoroughly reviewed your reviews and found that you have been violating our policies by incorrectly reviewing and voting in favour of incorrect or inappropriate titles/descriptions for existing Wayspots that do not meet our criteria. As a result, we have notified you about it after our investigation. Please review the Candidate Criteria before submitting any contributions/new submissions.
--------------------------------------------
Thank you, now I fully understand my violation. 🙈
Hey, I've done around 10.000 reviews and was always in perfect green rating... but yes... you thoroughly reviewed my reviews and found out that I have voted for incorrect or inappropriate titles. I am sure you can speak and write perfect in German to understand my bad reviews in German. (sorry - beeing sarcastic)
What a mess is going on here? 😐️
I got the same reply. I just mentioned the European Commission's privacy information act in my next reply. Let's see how they respond.
I bet it’s the faulty bad word filter. As example, the german word for birds (Vögel) is on this list cause it’s also used colloquial for the **** word
I have send an e-mail with a request to send me all data they have stored on my wayfarer account. Maybe this will help to find out what caused the ban.
i am from Hessen, Germany, too, and neither did i or my sons get the email.
@Zappi75-PGO you cannot submit anything that has "Vögel" in the text.
As we have alot of "Vogelpfad" (Birdtrail) i know that Vogel will pass.
I got also a ban on my account. (I am from Austria btw, so also near Germany) What should I say, like you guys I also got a perfect rating and over 60% aggreement percentage.
A friend of mine, who also got the ban thinks it is because he submitted a location edit on an existing portal and also submitted an edit for the text, where he wrote something like "please take the right location because...". I also did that with my account where i got banned. It is the way to tell a reviewer why you suggest a location edit and which location is the suggested one :D because the system doesn't give us the opportunity to tell the reviewing people i thought it is a great way to say why i suggest the new location for an existing portal.
I think it is a really bad joke, that Niantic treats reviewer like that. We do this for free and never got anything in return for it in the games we love to play and now they hit us with a stupid ban where no one even has a clue what he/she is banned for. How do they think we change our behaviour when no one has an idea what they did wrong?
But tbh I am happy I am not alone with this problem and it affects a lot of people. Maybe we won't get ignored now?
I don‘t think that this suspension has anything to do with your edits. I did 3 edits in my whole Wayfarer-career, two were accepted and one is still pending.
Niantic treats their reviewers like garbage, there are 24 hours over since the first ban-wave and we received not a single useful information or feedback. And we are speaking of a „billion dollar company“.
And the funny thing is, last week Niantic „accidentally“ released hundreds of bad wayspots automatically in the world. We saw such things like a brothel released according to this forum.
And then, this „Aaron from Niantic“ really answered on my mail, that they checked all my title-reviews and descriptions (on German, right?) and I should learn about their criteria and rules. HAHA. You must love their customer-service, right?
My question: How many Niantic-employees were banned for there brothel-release last week? Or did I miss this part in their nomination-criteria?
Just wanna know...
I know a person who got the ban who never did an edit. She only reported one invalid Wayspot.
Almost 24 hours around and unfortunately we still have no correct answer from an operator.☹️🤐
Unfortunately, it is very sad on the part of Niantic. I just have to say that, unfortunately. Not a single statement, the email from an automated bot, let's say a standard response from the system to someone write that. It's a shame, but their politics seem to be good.
I still say it: with 14 thousand reviews and almost 65% excellent reviews, getting a ban over 30 days is simply a sad judgment without having received a proper statement. I don't even want to know what happened after the ban, whether the submissions are still there and what happened to the unprocessed reviews (that is about 3500 reviews).🤔👆️
Should you for an edit: Please choose the right location or get a ban on other things then you should write that.
If HTML things are forbidden in the additional description, then we should be informed. Somehow I have to make people understand what the stop is all about.
If there are other things that don't work, I just ask the operators here in the forum to get in touch. It just won't be that difficult to get in touch here in the forum.
If it is a bug, then you should honestly admit it and try to compensate for it. I don't mean in-game of a game but in wayfarer voting. (In 30 days you simply lose the projects you want to create for your city, village, field or whatever.)
The support here simply ignores the players who want to know what's going on. This is not how support works. Support should be there to answer and deal with it. I find standard answers a cheek to reviewers. 😐️🙃
@NianticCasey-ING now please give me a statement.
The intransparancy is a huge problem.
We do not know why we got those bans. How can we react to this. The mail threatens to ban my Pokemon go account. I can not guarantee to stop the action which causes the ban because I do not know what I did wrong. Until I know I will not do a review again.
On the side note: All things indicate that this is problem of either translation or oversensitive filter which causes those bans. Only German speaking eviwers or reviewers who regulary get German nominations have reported these bans. Many experienced reviewers are affected. I haves reviewed over 20000 nominations and always have had the best possible rating with over 70% agreement rate. I think I would notice inappropriate descriptions or titles.
I filled a bug report maybe those who are affected by these bans can upvote the thread if it appears.
This tread has 1.5k views and not a single reaction from Niantic...
Fellow wayfarers, you know what this means and you decide by yourself how to react to this unacceptable behavior from Niantic!
Niantic could be on holiday today. Just wait a while until @NianticCasey-ING circles back with some insights (or sighs)
Maybe a "funny" case of how to get this E-Mail too.
First of all I´m not affected right now, but I just got a submission which might cause the problem to recieve this kind of Mail.
"Vögeln", the german plural of "bird" (Vogel) is on the blacklist for no good reason. Right now it you can´t submit oder edit a text to contain this word but if its a older submission, this might work and maybe submissions like this cause it that the judges on these kind of submissions get a E-Mail warning.
PS: I know that "vögeln" is also a slang word for sex, but the straigt number of cases this is abused in submission might be one in a few hundreds compared to the cases when this would be rigth...
I´m sure in way over 1000 cases when someone submits a wildlife infoboard e.g. about the birds of this forest wich might also be official titelt/labeled "Den Vögeln auf der Spur" - "On the birds trail" (<- might sounds strange in english but absolutely common in german) they can´t submit this with the official titel, because of the strong text filter just to block this one in a thousand cases. Thats a inappropiate overblocking in my view.
VM5Lym0
PPS: I one-stared the submission for its text beacause it location was obviosely faked anyway but I dont want to risk anything.
@Thyron1992-ING @Fullzoom-PGO @ChristianST1909-PGO @Zappi75-PGO @MF51Koni-PGO @Pok4Thor-PGO
I created a post in the bug report section. Maybe it will help if you could upvote that post.
https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/17045/ban-because-of-bad-word-filter
Looks like the mods removed its "bug/upvote" status lol
It's getting ridiculous...here is my upvote
👍️
Nice cover Up.. From operators..
No answer here but delete some discussions, cause it can be that is the truth or a Bug. 🧐🧐🧐.
i missunderstand one thing here: if they can multiban people (by script i believe) for some text accepted somewhen long ago, as some people, getting this, says they did not review for a time. why they did not ban that text in the submitting stage? it seems to me, that one inattentive filter admin or programmer just failed to do his work well, the then the boss identified it, and said to do something with it. and they solved the problem by placing their responsibility on reviewers. and i will believe in this thesis until they explain the point.
as for me - i'm newbie so far, and i was certain, that the banned words list - is the list of already banned words, they will not appear mb only local obvious jargon easy understandable for native speakers. and i do not need to find it, and learn by heart it. (and if you have the link - please share it for me)
on the other side - they say they will not uncover it, in this situation i would not too. if they do this - they get massive flame of interpretations and arguments. so, sounds like there will be a honeyspot of honeyspots for text edits, and if you do not have strong degree in linguistics - you just can lose your game account. review in fear.
more you do more you get. i get 4day bans, but i'm just 1st month behind the wheel, and you are much more longer, so, take your reward 😉
Hi :)
i am from Vienna, Austria and i got the same weird email on Monday (21:48 my time). So i wrote to the support and got the same generic email again. Then i recommended to the support that they should to stop talking like a Bot and start thinking. To this i got a response with my „final warning“ 👀... my other question regarding what i did wrong to get this Ban in Wayfarer got completely ignored...
I did a lot of reviews from january to march, but in the last few weeks hardly any of them. I really dont know why (most likely some translation bs), but it makes me really angry.
I cant wait for our makeup event in Ingress and Pogo 😍
Well, that escalated quickly 😅
In the meanwhile I heard from 4 more user of Austria that they also received the suspension. Three from Vienna (like you) and one from Salzburg. So the estimated number of suspended wayfarers since Monday is already far higher as I thought.
So there is a pattern => Mostly german speaking players might fall into an abusive "trap". Maybe Niantic deleted 2-3 stops from one wayfarer (if correct or not, we don't know - perhaps not, because I am looking very sharp on good titles/description) and we have voted good on them or give it a pass. Maybe it was also a wayspot in an other language (like Hungary/Czech). Or maybe it is only a big bug like the other 10.000 things around here.
But here is really what I am asking myself => How should we know it if nobody tell us what the mistake was and Niantic tells us month for month that we are excellent wayfarers with the best possible rating? I did thousands of reviews since January.... other players around here wrote that they didn't voted since 2 months. So it might be something what happend in march or february. But giving out a 30-day-ban (we can't even sign in and manage open nominations) and insulting players to ban their playing accounts is a hard first sanction. Their are so many guys who nominate literally trash or didn't even know that something like criteria exist... and they get away with a warning or a 7-day-ban. But here in this case there is only one solution for the concerned user: As far as long nobody knows what they did wrong, nobody will ever come back to Wayfarer again after the 30 days-ban. Too much risk to lose the (playing-)account permanent if the next bug (or call it a feature) is suspending you.
@NianticCasey-ING @NianticGiffard could you please give us a feedback here? It would be motivating to hear official news from a real living person and not a from a bot. I don't think we are asking too much if you think about the time effort we put in the system.
Same here 10 more ppl come and say they have bans for 10,30 days..
Feedback would be good..
Support is sleeping?😴
Hi everyone! It looks like a lot of users' accounts were affected by this, I am currently checking this with our team. One of us moderators will comment on this thread as soon as we gather enough concrete information to share. Until then, I would appreciate your patience and understanding.
Having said that, I have edited the discussion type now. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
Good to see that you guys check into the issue thanks. My account also got banned for 30 days due to this.
Thanks for reaching out.
Then again, it is just another one of those Niantic "I've got a great idea guys" to follow on from the highly sucessful 4Square Brothel upload?
"Guys, how about this? If we give lots of players a temporary submission ban for a month for some random reason, it will take some of the pressure off the submissions queue and we won't have to admit the submissions list is full. We can test it in Germany and Austria. How about it?"
I'm glad you're finally looking into this. I'm not one of the affected people, but I have been following this thread out of curiosity.
I do actually have a suggestion, which I expect will fall on deaf ears, but I'll still make it anyway.
In one of the replies to this thread, someone posted a response from Aaron that said that it was Niantic policy not to give users specific data on why they've been suspended. I know this is a policy that is in effect across your games as well. In the case of it applying to the games, it makes sense not to tell cheaters exactly what you detected, as it gives them information that could potentially be used to circumvent the anti-cheating measures in the future. That's fine and completely understandable. When it comes to Wayfarer reviewers though, this doesn't make sense as a policy.
The way I see it, the system issued a suspension on these accounts because it detected behaviour that Niantic disapproves of (even if this does turn out to be something like a false positive, or a language issue). However, without the affected reviewers knowing what this behaviour was, they can't really do anything to change their ways (if they have actually done something wrong in the first place), and because they don't know what they did wrong, they're likely to make the same mistake again as you won't tell them what it actually is.
Surely, if the system that flagged this as an issue is there to stop Wayfarer abuse, it actually makes sense to say exactly what kind of abuse was committed when incidents like this happen (rather than just a vague suggestion to review the title and description criteria), so that the community gets a clearer view of what is and is not tolerated, and thus the unwanted behaviour gets stopped as people will know it leads to suspension.
Again, I'm not asking for a change to the policy when it comes to people cheating in games, but Wayfarer abuse is a different way of breaking the Ts & Cs, and I believe this case shows that it makes more sense for it to be handled differently in future.
Little update, i just received another mail from the support:
“
Per our database, we can confirm that you have violated our policies while previously reviewing incorrect or inappropriate titles/descriptions for existing Wayspots that do not meet our criteria. As a result, we have notified you about it after our investigation.
Please ensure that further violations are not continued while reviewing Wayspot edits which may lead to the suspension of your Pokémon GO account.
”
I still have no clue what is going on. Hopefully @NianticGiffard will shed some light on this 👀
Niantic needs to tell people what they have done wrong in Wayfarer.
WE do tell Niantic what they have done wrong.
Maybe we should not?