Emily ruined community voting

I completely agree with you that those LFL’s in the strip between the road and the sidewalk that some people are getting accepted should not be accepted. I am waiting on another lawsuit to get Niantic to change their stance on these. Do you have other examples?

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Head-Bang-Wall with no response apart from my head is sore now.

Sidewalks, ownership by the road, on the road etc are as much as enigma to me as public footpaths are too some of y’all unfortunately.

I don’t think there is going to be another lawsuit unless something super egregious happens. The Hysteria around Pokemon go is not going to go back to 2016 levels. That was the bigger problem was that there was just way too many people and people were doing really dumb things.

There is a section of the city that I live in that uses those roadway verges in between the sidewalk and the street. I kind of have used that area as experiment where things will be accepted and go into the game and I will ask for removals. I have figured out a few rules of what Niantic is looking for.

  1. If the object is on the side of the sidewalk with the house it will be likely be removed.

  2. if the object is on the verge between the sidewalk and street AND facing the sidewalk it will likely stay.

  3. if the object is on the verge between the sidewalk and street but facing the Street it will likely get removed.

  4. if there is a fence and the object is clearly on the side of the fence with public access it will likely stay.

My conclusion with all my experiments is that Niantic likes a clear barrier / separation between the PRP and the public access. If they have any reservation they will error on the side of caution and remove.

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I’m confused why you’d reject an edit which is making the title of the Wayspot unique?

Do you have examples?

Rijksmuseum the wanna change in amsterdam.


Far off location.


What make it unique if you add ad every statue the city name?

Seems boring a city where every waypoint start whit the city name, location is also more for description in mine opinion if it is not a trainstation or something whit the name of the city. Like Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, but to name the painting also amsterdam.

I skip those nominations.
I dont skip all editing some are perfectly fine, and fun to do.

If I’m not wrong they do that for Ingress reasons because the keys, maybe I’m wrong. That doesn’t mean I like them, they usually do not add anything of valor to the wayspot.

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I don’t watch this anymore so I missed your question. What do you mean other examples? I did pass this PokeStop in July it gave me warm fond thought of reviewing and nominating (not)

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A better niantic team that follow there own guidlines critiria would be helpfull, instead of random opinions.

It dont have for nothing horns on his head!

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I meant other examples of wayspots in front of homes besides the little free libraries. This one is awful, not even a sign.

I haven’t seen anything new in front of homes in game except little free libraries in a while. I know of one that is still left at a house from the old days. A house in that same neighborhood has a gym and PokeStop for murals on a wall that is in their actual yard. It has a large property and their walls are full of murals. The gym is not showing in Campfire though so maybe it’s finally gone I will have to look sometime. The gym has been there since 2016 though.

When the game came out we had a great gym that we called the Frog Gym. Someone had an iron fence that had frogs in it. I can remember spending a lot of time parked outside or standing on the corner since it took so long to take gyms down in those days. About the time the lawsuit made the news it was gone.

My issue with Emily is she has massive trouble with labeling similar wayspots as duplicates. This happens way less with community voting.


(Note you can actually see the other pergola in the background of each pic)

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I’m seeing them being approved between the sidewalk and the private property. It is clearly on private property. Want your own pokestop? Put a little free library in your yard. I think you’d have a good chance at approval if you did. I see tons of them when looking at the duplicate pokestops map.

I agree, who cares about upgrades now. But I have a solution.

Emily is approving a bunch of my nominations that, in my opinion, are actually less desirable points of interest (soccer nets) than the ones she is rejecting. Some of her rejections are understandable and I try to improve based on the rejection criteria. This is a great feature to those new to nominating. Some of the rejections are in between a good and bad nomination and really need a better understanding of context, for example:

Bench (A) in a major city, downtown, is likely a bench with no significance, mass produced and plentifully placed every 3 feet. This should not be a point of interest.

Bench (B) on a walking trail, used as a point to tie the wayspot to, acting as a trail marker in an isolated area (I’ll meet you a the bench at the north end of the trail), on a trail, in a forest, or at a greenspace park is a good nomination and can serve many purposes (unlike a soccer net), a meeting point, a resting spot, a place to socialize and so on. This should be up to the community to vote on, but doesn’t make it there because Emily rejects it.

And then there are the nominations I am 100% certain make the perfect wayspot, she rejects it, I keep tweaking it and she keep rejecting it. Now my only option is to appeal.

But we only get 2 appeals every 20 days. I am at a point where I only nominate points of interest for which I am positive will make an excellent waypoint, or meaningless but guaranteed to be approved by Emily soccer nets.

The solutions, get rid of upgrades and hand out appeals based on the number of reviews you complete. Or let the individual decide what they want to use it for, an upgrade or an appeal. This method, encourages reviews, and we still all benefit from Emily filtering out a lot of the garbage nominations. This way, the only nominations making it to community voting are nominations that Emily was uncertain about, or the nomination was appealed by someone who has earned the right to appeal.

The ML model has not been accepting nominations since the end of November. It is rejecting. Let’s wait to see if they bring it back online to accept before we get rid of upgrades.

See: Have you had a Machine Learning bot nomination approval recently? - #3 by NianticAaron

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No, I haven’t had any ML approvals recently, and I now see why, but I also haven’t nominated any soccer nets lately so I didn’t notice.

I still think that adding the option to choose between an upgrade or an appeal is a win/win for everyone and would make people feel better about ML’s rejections of valid wayspots. I totally understand having a limit on free appeals but if you have to review 100 nominations to get an extra appeal I doubt you will begin appealing junk nominations that you know will also be rejected by the community, and even if you did, it’s not really a burden to the system because it still forced you to do 100 reviews.

A soccer net on its own is not what people should be nominating. The soccer net is typically the visual representation of the larger SOCCER FIELD (football pitch). The whole field absolutely meets wayfarer criteria as a great place to exercise and be social. Playing sports is a huge oart of learning and demonstrating social skills. If you don’t understand that, you’ve probably never played with someone who challenges every call or plays too rough or gets mad and yells over simple gameplay. Trust me, it’s no fun playing with someone who lacks thoae social skills

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I feel I have to contribute to this discussion although I have no experience from when the ML still didn’t exist, as I just became a contributor this november.

In my experience, the machine learning is only trained in a ridiculously small sample of the north-american ideal of a wayspot. It doesn’t take into account regional differences, cultural relevancy or community importance because it’s simply unable to. It is like it sees the world as a giant San Francisco bay area and anything that isn’t like a Golden Gate Bridge isn’t eligible.

Talking from experience, when I started back in november, 100% of the ±15 submissions I made were rejected by the ML alone. They were very varied, mind you: From perfectly reasonable rooftop terraces to regular grafitti that would be, back in the slow Ingress days, approved in batches. Not only they were all rejected with the generic “wayfarer criteria” reason, but the ones I decided to appeal were rejected by Niantic themselves claiming the grafitti was too generic and non-artistic, even though you see plenty of even worse, borderline offensive and racist ones out there.

Fast forward to december and I finally was able to submit some of them because it seems that the ML is down since december 1st, and that means no submission is ever getting caught in it. Of course this means my nominations will land on voting queue and will take a lot longer to get a response (as discussed in this topic), but it also means I’ll get a chance to make appeals on user-defined reasons instead of machine-learning one, which feels much easier to succeed, because it is as if Niantic has to side with their ML and justify how it is incapable of failure no matter the circunstances.

Not ironically this is exactly how I finally managed to make my rooftop terrace submission get accepted. I may have attempted at least 10 different times, with different pictures, angles and keywords, and the ML always rejected in under 24 hours. Now in december, I attempted one more time, and this time it landed on the voting queue, where it was reject as “private property” and easily appealed from there into a successful submission. For this day I still have no idea what the ML did not like on this submission, and I feel that having to study it in order to make it pass ML standards is almost as an attempt to cheat the system.

I feel players looking for contributing to games they enjoy shouldn’t have to fight this much over technical stuff. One thing is having rules for nominations, another thing is having an inconsistent submission experience where you’re always left wondering what you did wrong, and when you finally succeed, it feels like it was because something went wrong along the way.

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ty for this feedback from a new explorers perspective!

fyi: ML is back on for rejections with reports from at least Dec 4, so maybe adjustments have been made that allowed yours into the queue.

Just because worse ones exist is not a reason for ML not to reject graffiti, and many posts in the Wayspot Appeals category show that Niantic is removing graffiti that should not have been approved when reporting. Please report any offensive or racist Wayspots for removal. That is intolerable.

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Times change, Theres way too much graffiti out there that should never have been approved and Niantic actively removes.
https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/t/unique-art/12459/2

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The US and footpaths. That is a clusterflock those of us outside of the US don’t want.

Re the core thread. Emily has been good to me thus far. BUT it has and has had its ups and downs. Moments if you will.

And since the ratings debacle I am reviewing far less.

Interestingly I have one nomination in community viewing. And it is now at a gentle 40 days. This is novel since Emily became a thing.

I wonder if there are less reviewers anyhow as you know you don’t have to review to help get your nomination in. Then the reviewers who are still here are doing so far less due to the rating issue AND the fact there is far too much dross to review.

So any nomination that makes it to people review will now take longer. It is only a theory. I will wait a day or so then make a new nomination for the same spot with rewording and so and see what happens. Emily may grab it and publish and my other nom becomes a “hoooomaaan” duplicate when finally enough humans exists to review it.

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