Ban for influencing !?
@NianticCasey-ING , @NianticGiffard, @NianticAaron ,....
I woke up to this email today! And I would be very interested in how this decision came about. I am very understanding and I can also accept penalties BUT ONLY if I am presented with a case or evidence. I am not aware of any case in which I have tried to influence other reviewers. So if one already pronounces a ban, then only with a proof, otherwise this ban would be irrelevant and a cheek if it is only based on unchecked assumptions. A suspect is also not convicted on loose assumptions without first presenting evidence! So I ask for an answer .... or to lift the ban.
I also tried to contact support in-game, but this form, which I am supposed to fill out, cannot be sent because of an error!
Comments
Maybe it's also related to the discussion in this thread?
https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/18055/niantics-support-mess
Did you ever do any edits asking reviewers to choose certain locations? I believe that’s what it’s been for with this wave.
Also, Niantic haven’t stopped you from permanently doing anything. They won’t present any evidence or answer beyond the usual “May take action against reviewers/submitters including bans, etc.”
I do all of my edits here through the forum. In addition, it says in the mail that I would allegedly influence my nominations.
Hi everyone!
I had the exact same e-mail this morning as @BochumJules-PGO :
AlvynJune 02, 2021, 06:40 +0000Hello Agent,
We have confirmed that you had previously tried to influence other reviewers to vote on your nominations in a specific way. As a result of this violation, your Wayfarer account has been suspended for 30 days.
We recommend you review the Portal Criteria (https://niantic.helpshift.com/a/ingress/?p=web&s=portal-network) before submitting any more nominations or edits and avoid using any unrelated information/codewords in your submissions. Note that any further violations can lead to the permanent suspension of your Wayfarer and your Ingress account.
Best regards"
I have no clue where does that come from because I don't do influential edits nor nominations in any kind of way.
As a result of this lack of information I've decided to suspend my Wayfarer activity permanently, to my regret, until any clarification or any dismissal were to be done.
Thanks in advance for reading and for any answer on this matter.
@NianticCasey-ING , @NianticGiffard
A little story ... without a Wayfarer background ... or is it? Imagine the following situation ...: The doorbell rings, you open it and it's the police. "You have acted unlawfully and that is why your driver's license is now being withdrawn for 30 days!" You think about what you could have done wrong and come to no conclusion. "What have I done wrong?" "You have clearly misbehaved and that is why your driver's license will be withdrawn for 30 days!" "Can you tell me what I am clearly supposed to have done wrong?" "We cannot provide any information about this because it could reveal our internal processes. Now they do not hinder our work, otherwise we have to withdraw our driver's license forever!" The policeman grabs your driver's license and disappears without any further explanation ... You are left speechless and brood over what your mistake / crime was ... and come to no conclusion! You have always behaved flawlessly in traffic and drive very foresight. "Did I leave the traffic light too early the other day?" ... You don't know ... You call the responsible police station, but no one picks it up. After a while you ponder how something like this can even be possible in a democratic system. After the 30 days have expired, you decide never to drive again, because you do not want to be conspicuous in this system again and then be treated like a criminal again!
@BochumJules-PGO
Hi!
You certainly have a point. I really don't know what I'll do after 30 days... Quitting or trying little by little to come back to the wayfarer activity taking into account what happened. As usual, I guess I will do the more logical thing to do, when the time will arrive.
Thanks anyway for your reply, it gives food for thought, that's for sure!
Hello @BochumJules-PGO! I have reviewed your submissions and can confirm that you have tried to influence reviewers by asking them to select a particular location. This is a violation of our guidelines and this punishment is in accordance with our policies. Any further violation may lead to permanent termination of your Wayfarer and Ingress accounts.
On the forum you tried to move a POI from the correct location to the incorrect location.
You tried to influence the Niantic reviewer to move the POI to an incorrect location.
I checked nearly all of his Discussions, and I found only one, where this argument could be applied:
https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/16698/location-edit-appeals-das-spinnennetz-des-todes#latest
For playgrounds it makes simply sense, that the wayspot should not be in the middle of evrything. This case is fully comparable with sports fields, where the wayspot shall be at the outlines or the entrance and not in the middle. Afaik there is an example of this in the wayfarer initial test, with a baseball diamond.
There are even more threads, where Niantic blamed themselves:
Except you are wrong.
One of the threads you quoted
actually contains another request to move the POI to an incorrect location just for ease of access.
Thats two, without checking any others, where the OP has specifically requested POI's to be moved to incorrect invalid locations
The location was in the middle of the street - r u srs?
🤣
Yes and they wanted it moved to a location NOT on the POI.
Was a move request needed, yes indeed it was.
Did they try to move the POI to the correct location, no they explicitly asked for it to be misplaced
@NianticGiffard
I think it's really great that I only get a standard answer instead of showing me examples so that these accusations can be proven. How often have you edited / corrected locations for me lately that I have verified with screenshots, photos & Streetview. And I'm supposed to influence players. How exactly am I supposed to do that? I get a ban here with no proof of what I did. I don't know that someone could be punished without proof. Something is simply enforced without, for example, being able to explain myself or that something can be clarified at all!
This is absolutely not okay!
Nope. The wayspot is the half-timbered-framework (=Fachwerk) and not the inscription, so the whole house. So the proposed location at the gable end of the house is still better accessible although not closer at the cover picture, that is taken at the long side.
But the accessibility of the gable end is for sure better, since this location is not in the way of bikes and pedestrians. The gable side is in a dead space for bikers and not in the middle of a bottleneck. So it's okay, what Niantic did there, but by far not ingenious. And OP did by far nothing wrong.
Is this some act of revenge? Have I rejected something from you? Or Is there nothing better they can do than make any claims? Do you know the places I want to have edited? If you can read, it's about my submissons and not im edits. And if I were to misrepresent something here, my edits, which I provide with enough evidence, would not be accepted. I don't think you're an admin here and have anything to say. And apparently you are not a stranger who causes problems here permanently, ie if you don't stop discrediting me, I'll start to get in touch with you. The location of the half-timbered house was corrected from the street to the sidewalk, but the location is still not safe ... a POI on a building can also be on the left or right of the building, it does not have to be at the front. In the curve has recently been driving the tram and I've chosen a safe location. One would be able to see if one looked closely. If you're just as much about reviewing as you accuse others of abuse, I hope you don't rate too much!
Also, a location should not be on a playground device, similar to "on" a soccer field. In addition, it is always irritating for parents who are not familiar with the games when "adults" walk around a playground with a smartphone in a photo position. I am happy if you don’t have to explain to anyone how to play PoGo because the parents thought they would take pictures of the children.
So stop telling I would influence You should prove your concern with photos, screenshots and an explanation and the admins will check this and then decide! So I can't influence anyone here.
Just like the mine monument. If you looked right, you would see that the submitter submitted the location more than wrong. I wanted to correct this. Other monuments are allowed and that was my only irritation. I don't play in the cemetery myself, i.e. I haven't lost anything with the distant wayspot and accordingly I don't care, so you don't need to bring me this edit as an example.
So if you think you have to accuse me of something, then take examples that prove it and not any unfounded justifications!
You are not the only wayfarer who hunts down other players and makes unfounded claims!
"Abuse in Altenheim (Neuried) — Wayfarer" https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/17844/abuse-in-altenheim-neuried#latest
Terrible analogy. With regards to the law, you have due process.
Niantic is a private company. They have their own policies.
And how do your own rules change, to do something that is too unfounded, and to decide something without clarifying the facts? If you act on your own initiative as you please, the whole system is useless.
There are no claims only facts
On both the edit requests you have specifically requested and marked on map locations where you want a POI moved to, neither of which are on the POI.
You location requests are not making the location more accurate if they are requesting a location off of the POI just for ease off access.
You broke the rules you got punished.
Also you seem to be under the misunderstanding that Niantic games are a democracy comparing them to process in law.
The closest analogy would be a dictatorship not a democracy. They have the right to do whatever they want, including ignore any demands for information you may make regarding your ban.
How toxic can someone be? The new positioning perhaps was not directly inside the POI, but at a much better position than before and arguably on the best reachable place for pedestrians (like OP explained in his thread). I double checked Intel and this wasnt a cell optimized shift either, so what is your point? You really think that someone, who makes such an effort to make the game a little bit safer and better deserves to be banned for 30 days?! I really dont think that Niantic chose this example as the reason for the ban and I dont know either, if the ban is justified or not (How could I?), but I cannot believe what you write there either. That is highly disrespectful and just wrong.
It's a shame that there is no "laugh" smiley. Logical that I choose a location when I request a processing! The only one who is unable to understand something is you. I adhere to the rules and they do not stipulate that a location has to be "on" a building, but rather "on" the building. In addition, submitter should make sure that the location is "safe for the players" at the same time, and that's what I did. Besides, I don't understand the discussion. The admin who answered the question decided differently and I only pointed out that he did not act well. The case is closed and I have not commented on the subject. The only one who opens a barrel here and tries to generate a problem where there isn't one is you. And again, the ban was for submissons and not for edits. The penalties for edits are for in-game edits where you use the description for an explanation and that's not the case with me, so don't tell you about facts where there aren't any.
Try to see the example from the user's perspective, not from Niantic's. Sure they are not doing anything illegal there, but that is not the point of the analogy. It is about a proper way of dealing with your customers and therefore, he definitely has a point. Not being told where you did something wrong - even after explicitly asking for that - is just intransparent. I can understand that you generally only get a standard mail without proofs, but when I explicitly ask for them, Niantic should not be like that.
My guess is that they are pretty unsure about this ban wave as well because of the uprising discussions and when I see people getting banned because they wanted to help reviewers in the location verification process and create an extra description for that, it just makes me angry. How else can you explain your location edit, when Niantic is just not able to provide the possibility of submitting an additional photo or text to a location edit?
So, banning the submitters, who clearly try to influence the reviewers to chose a more unprecise location (probably due to cell optimization reasons)? Yes!
But banning those, who use the additional description for an explanation leading to a better location? Hell no!
Read the rules yourself.
The November AMA states
How close to the actual object or location should the pin be dropped in the nomination?
On top of the object nominated, not near to it, on the actual object.
Better reachable for pedestrians is not the goal of a location edit, the accuracy of the POI location is the goal.
I assume there's a translation error with your comment as you said the same thing twice.
" I adhere to the rules and they do not stipulate that a location has to be "on" a building, but rather "on" the building"
As I have quoted above, they say that the location for a POI should be on the object, not near to it, which is what you have requested, at least twice.
Yes, you genius, that applies to wayspots such as signs, monuments & Co. that you directly introduce yourself to. That doesn't apply to buildings, or do you want to enter every building soon to play on a wayspot? Have fun correcting all wayspots worldwide.
I know the rules and I would have placed it directly at the front of the house. But there are still dozens of reasons, why this is definitely not punishable with a 30days ban?!
If you really think that THIS submission is worth a 30 days ban, you are completely lost.
There needs to be a Reason for Edit field for location edits. People submit edits for a more accessible yet still accurate location, and reviewers can't tell which is the "most accurate". People attempt to explain their reasoning via Description edit, and are flagged for abuse. I get plenty of small adjustments for indoor waypoints that look, to me, like two dots on a roof: as a reviewer, I'm never gonna be able to pick the best location with the information at hand. Maybe require a photosphere for all location edit requests?
I once submitted a trail marker via remote submission (horrible cell coverage!) and upon my return was upset to find that I had improperly located the pin. I submitted an edit to get the pin back on the official trail and not yards away in the wooded wetland, but it was denied: both locations are under tree cover, although if you zoom way way in you can see a fragment of the trail in my revised location. I had no way of communicating that fact, though. Fortunately, my waypoint is still reachable in its incorrect location, but one can never get to top dead center without wading through a protected wilderness.
Photosphere is complicated in front of differnt countries laws, for example Germany. But your ideas small brother could solve a lot: a supporting picture.
That is exactly the problem. In a lot of cases you just cannot chose the correct location because you have absolutely no clue, no information, no pictures, just nothing. I am not a fan of a mandatory sphere, since many smartphones (and probably a lot of people either) are not even able to create those. But providing TOS-compliant ways to explain your submission is the least thing for Niantic to do before they put through such a ban wave.
At the moment you simply have a need to communicate about a treat that you were not asked about. Since my ban still has nothing to do with edits that have been answered and processed here. But keep playing here, I continued to add wayspots for buildings the building not on the building like 90% of the others do.
And by your own admission are you condemned.
You've just said you intentionally are going to misplace submissions.
Its no wonder you got banned