A boutique hotel closed several years ago and re-opened under new management with a new name. I submitted two edits: a new photo showing the sign with the new name, and a title update with the correct title. The photo update is still in queue:
My title change got rejected, so I submitted an appeal explaining that the title is wrong and that I’d submitted a photo with the correct title. My appeal also got rejected, and I was told, “We reviewed your contribution and determined that it is not related to the object this Wayspot represents and as a result, we have rejected your submission. Please note that trying to repurpose a Wayspot is a violation of our policies.” This is a screenshot of the appeal:
Is there any risk to my account for this? I haven’t violated any policies: the title change I proposed is relevant to the Wayspot and correct. That last sentence has me nervous. Experiences like this make me incredibly reluctant to interact with Wayfarer at all.
You should probably be fine if this is the first time you’ve tried to do this and been told not to. The issue is that Ginkgo House is a separate business to Harding House. You yourself have said the management is different, so the wayfarer team will see them as two separate entities. They might both be similar types of business, and they may both be at the same address, but as they are still different businesses, the wayfarer team would consider what you tried to do as repurposing, which is against the rules as they have said.
The correct course of action when a business has changed is to report the wayspot for the old business as no longer existing, and then once it’s been removed, you can submit the new business as a new wayspot, and this way the new business can be assessed against the wayfarer criteria to see if it meets the eligibility criteria itself, rather than effectively piggybacking off the eligibility of a previous nomination.
Thank you for the reply, @hankwolfman! Your explanation helps.
Is this concept of repurposing, or the correct actions to take when businesses have changed, explained anywhere in more depth? I didn’t see anything in the Help section on the Wayfarer website, but it’s possible I missed something.
I also feel like there’s a bit of a gray area around what constitutes a separate business or not. If a restaurant is sold to a new owner but everything else stays the same, would that be considered two separate entities? And what if that restaurant under new management later changes their name? The new hotel has very similar branding to the old hotel, and they’re the exact same type of business. Their website even says “hotel est. 1867”.
Thank you so much, @cyndiepooh! If there isn’t a clear explanation in the rules of how to handle cases like this, perhaps the Wayfarer team could update the rules and/or FAQ to explain this more clearly. It was pretty alarming seeing that note of violating Wayfarer’s policies! It seems like lots of people are confused by what to do in cases like this, and it doesn’t seem fair to expect people to visit the forums to learn all of the unclear or unstated rules that aren’t in the actual list.
It makes complete sense to try to update the game board to what is actually there from a Pokemon Go player perspective. From a Wayfarer point of view, it makes sense that a different point of interest needs to be vetted again.
I’m a Pokémon GO Community Ambassador, so I want people to feel comfortable using Wayfarer to make our play area better and more accurate! It’s tough for me to recommend Wayfarer, though, when the process seems so intimidating and risky. Many of my players have said they won’t use Wayfarer because they’ve heard of people getting banned for making good-faith submissions and edits. It was quite alarming for me to see a mention of policy violations when it wasn’t obvious that I was doing something incorrectly.
People on social forums often take about the bans they have received and forget to mention the intentional abuse they committed that caused those bans.
I’m sure many of the posts I see online are from people who actually have knowingly abused the system, but I also know from speaking with my community members that many of them get warnings about abusing the system when they don’t know what they’ve done wrong, and then they get spooked into never using Wayfarer again.
That’s kinda where I’m at now, to be honest. Unless I’ve missed something in the rules/FAQ/Help Center, this seems like a case of needing to read the forums to understand the intricacies of how to handle different situations in Wayfarer. I haven’t used Wayfarer in quite some time, but at GO Fest, I was given Timed Research that included submitting an edit as a task. I made a good faith effort to correct a title of a location that has been wrong for years, and when I did so, I was told that my request violated a policy that wasn’t obvious to me, and seems not obvious to other people. Especially since I’m a Pokémon GO Community Ambassador and my community relies on me, I’m not inclined to use Wayfarer if doing so risks my account getting banned.
That is understandable. As @cyndiepooh pointed out, the purely-educational emails don’t come across as purely-educational, so it is extremely easy to get one and get spooked. This is entirely on Niantic to solve.
I had a similar case a couple months ago - a church in my area closed and reopened with a different name and congregation. I asked here before doing anything and was advised to remove and renominate as new.
