I’m not an ambassador, but I do want to say something in relation to this situation in the hopes that the wayfarer team themselves see it and that some positive changes can result from it.
Assuming that @11Mau11 has provided satisfactory evidence that this photo is theirs to use, I would suggest overturning the ban on this occasion. My reasoning behind this is as follows:
There was a similar situation to this on the previous wayfarer forum (sadly I can’t provide a link as I don’t have the time to go digging through the archives for a needle in a rather large haystack) where a ban for using a photo uploaded elsewhere was overturned when evidence was provided that they did in fact take the photo themselves. At the time, it was clarified that this was not something that would normally be done, and that it was a goodwill gesture for the affected person. That’s fair enough.
However, as stated, that was on the old forum. The clarification to not upload photos elsewhere before using them in a submission was not officially ported over to the current forum from what I can see, and that information has, as far as I can tell, also not been added to the criteria pages or the submission flow (the help page is still broken, so no one can currently refer to that to see if it’s missing from there, but I don’t recall seeing it when it was last working). It does say not to use third party photos, but if you upload your photo elsewhere, it’s still your photo and not a third party photo. Reviewers don’t have a way to verify that information due to wayfarer intending for it to be anonymous, of course, but it is still technically not third party if you own the photo.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen someone fall foul of this, and I’m sure it won’t be the last time either. My suggestion to the team would be that if the evidence provided in this specific case is good enough to prove that they were not third party photos and that they were just uploaded elsewhere, then the ban should be overturned as another goodwill gesture, but more importantly that the guidelines should be changed to clearly state that you should not upload photos anywhere else if you intend to submit them in wayfarer. This should also ideally be included in the text during the upload process (in Pokémon Go this does mention not to use third party photos, but it doesn’t mention this specific scenario, and the wayfarer website doesn’t mention anything at all during the upload process, though you do at least have access to the guidelines on the website).
We as regular community members obviously know this to be the case, but if it’s not specified for people who don’t know the ins and outs like we do, it’s just going to continue happening no matter how much we try to spread the word ourselves, and it’ll naturally cause frustration for people who get banned when they think they’re using acceptable photos because they took them themselves. At least if it’s explicitly included in the guidelines that you can’t do this, then going forward that can be used both to teach newer users before they make that mistake, but also to potentially avoid disagreements over whether something should’ve caused a ban or not. If it’s clearly written that it’s against the rules, then it won’t be ambiguous.
That’s just my view on this though. Naturally if there’s not enough evidence that the photos were not technically third party, disregard the bits relating to potentially overturning the punishment, but the points still stand about making this more clear in the guidelines.
