After the roaring success of my last topic about appealing a painted power box ( I'd like a second opinion on this appeal ), I appealed two more of them and both of them were rejected because of “third-party photos” because I used their images in that last topic to show examples of other painted power boxes that are part of the same series of artworks. Obviously these are not third-party photos. I took these myself over a year and a half ago when I made the original wayspot submissions.
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Oh no!!
So posting a picture of a rejected submission here counts as abuse for third party photos?! That’s actually terrible 
Can the staff look into this, because surely its normal to post pictures of our submissions and ask for advice, and this should be encouraged, not punished!
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Surely not since Aaron said it is not a third party if you post here.
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So I wonder if they did not post it elsewhere, how this happened?
Remember reading something about them improving the automated review with new technologies or something.
Wouldn’t be surprised if they start to use (read: experiment with) eMiLy in the appeals decisions now. And she can finally do reverse image lookup on the internet and internal database but not omitting certain addresses. That’s one possible explanation.
The other is the usual.
This is not accurate. The said images are available on third party sites.
This is speculation and incorrect. All appeals are reviewed by human reviewers.
oh…sadly yeah. I think even if you are the original submitter on both Wayfarer and a third party site, that would still count as third party photo rejection unfortunaly.
Curious, didn’t see those Reddit posts - good spot. Reminds me in part of this post - do wonder if it is better to submit the photo in the framing of the nomination screenshot so it can be traced back. That or just delete the post when help or question was answered. Unfortunately, doesn’t help others who have similar questions as the OP.
I still don’t see how posting your own images on the Wayfarer Subreddit and the forum - ie engaging with the wayfarer community is the same thing as stealing someone else’s images. Surely context matters.
Wayfarer cannot tell that you posted the images onto reddit. All that can be seen is that the photos used in a wayspot submission exist on a third-party site.
The standard advice if you want to post on a third-party site is to take two photos - one to post for advice and one to use for the actual submission.
Thanks for the clarification.
To avoid further speculation - when you say human reviewers, which is a bit vague, are you saying by members of the Niantic dev team / Scopely employees themselves? Or is the appeals outsourced to an external third-party? Can you elaborate further?
And in relation, a question that didn’t make it’s way into the AMA (due to technical issues), do you have any overall stats to share on the number of appeals, and reports, decisions overturned? And what steps, if any, were taken to address any obvious patterns or problems? Retraining, change of personnel, signposting, criteria refresh and stuff like that. Transparency without any specifics would be good and helps with understanding.
They could simply exempt pictures posted on the Wayfarer subreddit from being flagged in this manner. It is common sense that the majority of posts there about people’s submissions will be people posting their own images for advice. Any stolen images should show up elsewhere - or the submission will be fake and rejected for that reason.
These are internal business specifics. I doubt that we would get answers. And they would be well within their right to not share this information.
It’s not that simple. We have seen examples of people taking images from the forum to submit as Wayspots.
The question can still be answered without specifics as mentioned. Ultimately, can make a difference to someone resubmitting or appealing - saving their time and the impact to others. Managing user expectations.
And, again without specifics, who knows maybe Scopely are now more transparent. It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day…
The only other result is a Reddit post on the Wayfarer subreddit by me (look at the username) which was made AFTER I originally submitted those wayspots. Come on, Aaron. They’re my images.
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Good luck✌️
Then it’d be a fake nomination, and should be rejected anyway, right? The issue isnt so much the stealing the picture by that point is it, its submitting something fake you found on the Internet in a different town or country!
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regardless if they are your images or not. The wayspot images cannot be found anywhere (except the forums) even if you posted the pictures after you requested the nomination.
IMO, the right decision was made here by rejecting the nomination.
So, how does Niantic know that these images belong to you? There is no way to ascertain that.