Admittedly, I’ve only recently started with Wayfarer, and just heard about automated reviews. Is this one of those? And is there a quality standard that I should’ve met? Hopefully i’m not making an incredibly obvious error.
Title: Hiawatha Public Library Raised Gardens
Location: Hiawatha Public Library
Description: A series of four raised beds that grow potatoes, lettuce, radishes, squash, onions and more!
Supporting Information:* The garden is freely accessible to the public, with safe access via a rock path and parking lot. Its public nature allows for socialization with the rest of the community.
I think this is fine. Here’s a couple of pointers:
- The ML system probably just didn’t understand what it was looking at. How does it know that this is a community garden and not regular landscaping? Sometimes it’s hard to demonstrate that, especially with the planters located right up next to the building. If you send it to Appeal, the Appeal reviewers should be able to see that it is an eligible nomination.
- To be on the safe side, if the library has a web link that discusses the community garden planters, you should include that in your Appeal.
- I don’t know this location, but unless this is a brand new library, this submission probably won’t meet the inclusion rules to show up in PGO. PGO has spacing rules so that the game board doesn’t get too crowded. It could show up as a Power Spot. Those also have spacing rules, but they are a little more generous than either stops or gyms.
This is the first time I’ve had a nomination get rejected for “not adhering to criteria” (I’ve accidentally submitted a couple of duplicates when I was really new), so I’m not sure if this will lead to a ban or suspension.
That is just the standard wording when the “automated process” has rejected something. Niantic has told us they use a Machine Learning model for this process, and we have learned that it usually acts at around 20-24 hours after submission. That is why a change was made to not allow upgrades to be applied to submissions before 24 hours had passed, so that they would not be wasted if the automated process rejected the nomination.
We don’t know a lot about what the machine learning process checks, because that would make it more likely to be abused. But one of the first things I try is a new photo with a focus that makes it even clearer what I am submitting. I usually try a new submission before I appeal, because we have more submissions than appeals. We get 2 appeals, each on a 15 day counter before we can use them again.
What seaprincesshb is saying about the inclusion rules is illustrated here where anything in these shaded in cells will not be eligible to be used as a pokestop.
For more about these S2 cells, see
https://pokemongohub.net/post/article/comprehensive-guide-s2-cells-pokemon-go/
No, there’s no need to be fearful of a ban or warning. Those things come from people dping bad things with their submissions like:
- using someone else’s photos
- creating fake items to submit
- intentionally placing the location away from the item to gain an ingame advantage
The people on the internet who claim they got banned “for no reason” have almost always turned out to be concealing what they did wrong. We uncover the truth quite easily around here. They are simple fearmongers.
