I’ve been having some trouble with a Pokéstop submission, and I wanted to share my experience to see if you guys could offer any insight or advice.
So, I submitted a Pokéstop nomination in an empty cell on the Pokémon Go map and the community rejected it. Recently I decided to use my monthly appeal, expecting Niantic to review the case.
However, just four days later, I received a response stating that “the community has decided not to accept”, citing it was a duplicate stop. This left me confused for a couple of reasons:
Why would the community be reviewing an appeal instead of Niantic?
I was under the impression that appeals were handled internally.
How could it be considered a duplicate stop when it doesn’t exist in either Pokémon Go or Ingress?
A friend of mine who plays Ingress confirmed that there’s no portal like this one, and the other portals nearby are more than 20 meters away.
I feel like there may be some inconsistencies in the review process that need to be addressed. I’d appreciate any thoughts or suggestions from both the community and the Niantic Wayfarer team.
The wording in the emails is sometimes incorrect. It’s a bug that is known about and is on the list to fix.
Both Ingress and Pokémon Go have proximity rules that prevent certain wayspots from showing up in each respective game. It is possible that there’s a wayspot that doesn’t show up in either game but is still in the database at that location. If you want to share a screenshot of the nomination and the coordinates of it, we can help you out.
As @NianticAaron said, there is a wayspot already at that location.
If you play Pokémon Go and physically go to that location (you need to be physically there, it doesn’t work from a distance), when you press the button to make a new submission, you’ll first see the map where you can place the pin. This nomination should show as an orange icon on that map if you have the toggle in the bottom left turned on, and you should be able to tap on that orange icon to see that it represents this wayspot.
There are two reasons I can think of why this wouldn’t show up. The fact that it’s in neither Pokémon Go nor Ingress makes me think it’s the first one of the two possibilities:
the wayspot was originally submitted through the wayfarer app, which isn’t intended to be used for submissions by people who play Niantic games. Wayspots submitted through the wayfarer app will typically not be able to show up in any game, even if they’d otherwise meet the proximity requirements to do so.
this was previously submitted through Ingress or Pokémon Go, but the business owner complained about people gathering and had it blocked from both Pokémon Go and Ingress.
I will also note that the description for this wayspot is third party text that appears to be taken from this page
So, the situation is like this: we live in an area that’s kind of on the outskirts, and there aren’t many landmarks around here. We’re surrounded by an industrial area, so we’ve been trying to focus on international headquarters, cool business campuses, awesome hidden-gem restaurants, and sports fields to get some Pokéstops in our community.
One of our players took an amazing picture of this building, and we thought it would be perfect to use for our submissions. Of course, we’ve been improving the description each time, and we’re not flooding Wayfarer with the same nomination – we take turns, wait a month or two, and try to come up with better descriptions.
One of our community members tried using the Wayfarer app after coming across a topic on this forum that suggested it could help avoid AI rejections and send nominations directly to a human reviewer. This was around the beginning of the year, and his submissions were on hold until a month ago. Then, they all got rejected without a clear reason, only suggesting to improve the description or appeal on the Wayfarer webpage.
I’m really confused about how my appeal was flagged as a duplicate, especially since his nominations through the Wayfarer app were never approved in the first place. It’s been a month since his submissions were rejected, so I don’t understand why there would still be traces in the database to consider my appeal a duplicate. But next time I’m in the area, I’ll check the Pokémon Go nomination menu to see if it shows up as an orange pinpoint like Ingress portals usually do.
