I’ve been debating whether to submit the ones around here and I’ve just seen a submission for one to review.
They’re pretty generic. But they are post office adjuncts. And now that I live in a rural area I’ve learned that these are a bigger social center than the post office itself. This is where I’ve met most of the neighbors I’ve met. People stop and talk here daily even in cold weather.
I don’t see any current guidance. Has there been any guidance in the past?
My area is growing so fast that the postal service can’t keep up. Some neighborhoods of 3-4 bedroom houses do not have mailboxes at each house - they have a common area with a bank of mailboxes. Many apartments and condos do too.
I would consider these areas sensitive. People get legal summons in the mail, death certificates for loved ones, bank statements, medical claims, mailorder drugs, life insurance checks, etc. (Also, they’re a target for thieves, so a group hanging around could get police attention.) A family’s personal mail can be SO personal.
I just had this discussion on another completely unrelated forum. USPS carries none of these things anywhere I’ve lived in the last 20 years. It’s not considered reliable enough. Instead, private carriers are used like UPS and Fedex.
We have gang boxes not because the PO can’t keep up but because they don’t want to pay for individual house delivery anymore. They represent large portions of the area, “neighborhoods”, but we’re not allowed to identify them as such here so…
I have seen lots of these accepted and have had discussions where people have said they aren’t strictly ineligible so I don’t like to review them anymore.
For what it’s worth this is how I view them:
Mail boxes are federal property and mail theft is something the postal service takes seriously and because so much mail is concentrated in one place they make better targets for people who steal. So I would consider them sensitive as I wouldn’t want some random person showing up and hanging out near my mail box cause there’s probably someone in the community that would call the police to report a suspicious person.
I hear you… and… they are all over the place here and blatantly obvious. We DO have problems with people breaking into them on a fairly regular basis. Not that there’s anything valuable in them but because it takes the USPS months to repair or replace them.
They aren’t hidden. And the amount of attention called to them is already extremely high. If that’s your only concern, I’d argue that it’s not much of one.
That’s why I skip most of them now. Seems like there’s a general consensus that there are instances where they’re acceptable vs my opinion that they shouldn’t be waypoints. So I’ll just let other people decide how to handle it.
Of course, if you get any official weigh in from an ambassador I’ll happily read through their thoughts and see if I can review those better
As much as I truly appreciate clarifications by Niantic, I know they can’t and don’t want to clarify everything. So I often take things back to the basics of Eligibility. Is the nomination a great place to be social, exercise, or explore.
If I’m iffy on how to answer for eligibility, I ask myself if I would bring a friend from out of town to a specific nomination. If I don’t think that would be cool for them I’m much more likely to decline on the eligibility.
But again we are told to use our own best judgment.
I see no way that these meet any criteria. There is nothing there encouraging people to linger and be social. (The greenway trail marker and footbridge are in game =) )
Unfortunately, almost nothing that is currently eligible would pass that test for me. I’d only bring them if it was a portal. I wouldn’t bring them to someone else’s church. Or to a baseball diamond. Or a community library, (online libraries are SO much better!)
There are plenty of cool things to look at that I might point out as we drive by but none of them are currently eligible.
Since I know I’m biased on this in a way that isn’t beneficial I’ll stick with skips; if it’s a duplicate or a fake nomination or something the submitter is clearly doing wrong then I can manage those.
But I I’ll follow the conversation here and maybe someone will say something that changes my mind
Again it’s up to you. But my friends who don’t play Niantic games wouldn’t give me side eye if I showed them something at the local church, suggested we play some baseball, or go to the library for some community event.
I do think they would be concerned if I said we were going to go check out my local community mailbox.
Intersting. Mine would all go much further than a side eye for those things.
OTOH, if, as we were driving by, I said, “Hey, that’s Bob! Let me introduce you.” and stopped at the only place around here I ever talk to my neighbors, they’d give me a side eye, but they’d accept the introduction.
OTOOH, if someone they didn’t recognize were standing at the community mailboxes with their phones out, there would be a flurry of posts on Next Door app and possibly police called out.
Not that you’d take EVERY visitor - that you can conceive of a visitor who might like to see it. Maybe they’re visiting because the baseball team they’re on is attending a tournament at that field. Maybe your visitor is into history, or loves to see art. Maybe they want to attend a church on their visit. Maybe they love to see depictions of angels (many/most religions have angels).
I can’t conceive of a scenario where I’d take a non-gaming visitor to my town to see mailbox banks in different housing establishments.
Ok, we had the bathroom conversation the other day. Let me use the other side of that argument to explain how i think of mailboxes.
Assuming there’s no giant mural on the outside of the bathroom, i don’t think this is a great place to be social. Can i run into people in front of the bathroom? Yes, we all end up there multiple times per day. At work, i may end up having a conversation with someone who is heading for or coming out of the bathroom because i happened to see them.
However! I don’t hang out at the bathroom specifically to meet up and socialize with my coworkers.
A place where incidental social interaction can happen does not meet the definition of a great place to be social. That’s how i feel about mailbox groupings. I might run into neighbors and start chatting. But i don’t go to the mailboxes to be social. In fact, i probably avoid the mailbox when others are around because i don’t want to socialize there.