Impressions of Wayfarer after a 2 1/2 year absence

[indeterminacy]

Thanks again to everyone who responded to my post a couple of weeks ago, and for the positive vibes. It really made me want to get back into Wayfaring. I scanned the Wayfarer map around where I live and noticed that the nearby cemetery (Friedhof Bergedorf) has some huge gaps with no Wayspots at all. There are around 15 Pokestops and gyms and everyone playing Pokemon Go around here has probably spun all the stops and gotten all the gyms to gold years ago and never gone back. As far as I know nothing has been added to the map there since 2017.

I met one of my raid buddies and we took a Saturday afternoon to scout the cemetery together to see what we could find. We took note of the exceptions for cemeteries:

• Gravestones belonging to historical figures or significant community figures
• Crosses, churches, chapels, shrines, war or veterans memorials, religious sculptures that are not part of the grave

I’ll summarize the results below, but first my overall impressions of Wayfarer now (as opposed to then).

• Turnaround time is a dream: our nominations took 2-3 days to go into voting and were decided in about the same amount of time. Total time per nomination <= 1 week.
• The voting results seem less arbitrary, but for nuanced nominations reviewers (also the Niantic appeals team) appear to err on the side of caution.
• Wayfaring is much more fun like this, and also nice to meet a friend and do some scouting together.

Altogether I found 9 POIs to nominate. I took the option to upload later, as the app sometimes got stuck trying to upload while on the go. After the nominations were received I put them all on hold and worked on the titles, descriptions and supporting information. That took several hours the day after. When I finally had them ready, I selected the easier nominations first, the ones I thought would be accepted. This was more to gauge how to handle the more difficult ones in case they were rejected. I also thought it not impossible that I’d get a Wayfarer warning.

These are the nominations that were accepted (as a reviewer I would have given a thumbs up as well):

These two were rejected as sensitive location:

The historical cross arrangement is part of a memorial section of the cemetery featuring casualties (civilian and military) of WWII bombings. It seemed to me that this could meet the criteria but I wasn’t sure.

The ornamental gravestone is one of two such gravestones lining the walkway to one of the chapels. They are not actual graves but decorations, which should have been obvious from the supporting photo.

I wasn’t very confident about these two statues, even though a number of similar stops already exist nearby. My friend had had his similar nominations auto-rejected (one was a standalone cross which is absolutely one of the exceptions). But I didn’t want to die on this hill, or trigger a warning, so I withdrew them:

This is the one I think should have been accepted. It was rejected once, rejected again on appeal, and my subsequent re-submission was auto-rejected by AI (sensitive location). Admittedly, it doesn’t look like much, but this represents an interesting ecological project in Hamburg and seems to me should be exactly the kind of POI the Wayfarer system would want. Also, it’s on the edge of the cemetery and would be reachable by the bordering neighborhood. It’s a facility to collect and store rainwater, saving millions of liters of tap water a year.

Supporting photos:

The project is documented at this Website: Friedhof Bergedorf - RISA Hamburg

What approach should I take to sell this nomination? Any help will be much appreciated!

[seaprincesshnb]

It sounds like you were submitting through PGO. Have you tried the new web submit? I think you will like it. Though, it doesn’t solve cellular network issues. You can start a Draft and then submit that from a more stable area as long as you’re still within 10 km of the submission location. Like, maybe you and your friend go to eat not too far away and connect to their wi-fi to submit your Drafts. You can still put those on hold in Contributions and do more work on them later if you want. The main advantage of web submit is that you get a better view of all the wayspots on the map (to avoid duplicates) and you can submit 5 supporting photos.

[niktero]

Oooh. I like the RISA too. The web submit might be your friend here because you can add multiple supporting photos to help show the significance. The picture of the paving tile looks a lot like the little fish thing on every stormwater drain in the US that is used to remind people that this water goes to the stream and is not filtered. This program looks very unique to that cemetery. Maybe use the main photo of the building or the water pump in the building. Then the RISA mark and other photos for significance. I nominated a historic building this way recently. The building looked much cooler than the sign so I used the sign as supporting for proof of historical significance. Add all the web links in the supporting info and talk about how this is a unique trial of the idea.

[indeterminacy]

I personally don’t mind submitting via PGO, since what I enjoy most about wayfaring is going out and exploring. The “upload later” is fine for avoiding network issues - I’d say 1 out of 5 times it gets stuck in uploading and I have to cancel and redo the nomination. But the Web submit sounds like it would be helpful for the difficult cases and I will surely try it sometime soon. Thanks for sharing.

[indeterminacy]

I had a look at the new feature in Wayfarer - it seems really powerful. But a challenge to find the exact location if creating the nomination from home. Is it possible to enter the coordinates directly (taking from one of my previous nominations)?

[seaprincesshnb]

Describe the challenge for me. I don’t understand how web submit is more difficult to find something from home than PGO submission. To me, it’s easier because you can see all the other wayspots within Wayfarer. With a PGO distance submission, the other wayspots don’t show up on the map.

[indeterminacy]

It seems like you can only place the pin by clicking the specific location. The RISA thing for example is not easy to find, even with satellite imagery. I suppose I could note the coordinates and keep tapping until I get the exact coordinates, which I call a challenge. How would you do it? Would be easier if I could just enter the GPS location by hand but I didn’t see how to do it. Or am I missing some feature by accessing via a mobile device?

[seaprincesshnb]

OK, I get that. But I guess I wasn’t sure how that was different from submitting through PGO - you have to locate it in PGO, too. (I’m not challenging you, I’m trying to understand if there’s some guidance we can give Niantic on how to improve the experience.)

[indeterminacy]

In PGO it’s easier with the marker because of it is initialized at the GPS location you’re at, then being there you can know whether it needs to be moved relative to other landmarks. The Web submit feature could be easier if you could enter the coordinates by hand, as an alternative to locating on the map (to avoid giving a wrong location). I just read a post in the forum about someone who got banned for being 25m off in a submission and for this particular POI it’s a problem to pin point it exactly without actually standing there. Obviously if the POI is on a particular street corner, it would be hard not to find it. But I don’t think you could locate trail markers where there is tree cover, or nature signs in a field, etc. (maybe I didn’t understand something about web submit - if so, please correct me

[niktero]

Oh. Yes trying to find something small to pin when it is many miles from your current area is hard. I use some of the wayfarer discord tools to mark locations exactly while I am there and then do the submission from home. You can also just open the wayfarer page instead of the pogo page when you are at the location to set the pin and make a draft. You can make a draft for anywhere but you still need to get back within 10km when you are ready to submit it.

[indeterminacy]

Good point. Thanks

[seaprincesshnb]

Yes - we have been talking apples and oranges here.

Submitting at home can be done within PGO or with Web Submit.

Submitting on site can be done within PGO or with Web Submit.

The issues you face submitting from a distance are the same whether you submit within PGO or with Web Submit. It seems like you might not have known that you could submit from a distance within PGO? That distance is 10km - which is the same for web submit and Drafts within web submit.

When you use web submit, you can turn on Satellite view to get a more precise view of the area. You can hit that little round circle to locate where you are standing. This helps when you are on site.

When I’m submitting from a distance, I often will have taken a screenshot of myself on Google maps as the little red dot with the Satellite view and the map/street view so I know where I was. This works really well if I’m standing directly next to the thing I’m nominating. Then in order to locate that spot, I typically use the street view on the submission map to find the general area and then change to satellite view once I’ve zoned in on the specific area. Then I compare the map I see on the submission screen to the screenshot I took while I was standing at the location and pick the right spot.

That might sound complicated, but I typically don’t go very far from where I was standing - usually just back to my car so I can look at my phone in better light.

[indeterminacy]

Thank you @seaprincesshnb - I get it now. Some details for me which are good to know. But how to post the nominations is not really the issue for me. In future I’ll try web submit for difficult submissions that need multiple images. But what will really help me here is feedback about this set of nominations. Do you think the review decisions were correct? What would you have said for the nominations that got rejected? And accepted. Am I doing ok with my POI selections? Should I give up on the rejected items? Is RISA futile because it looks so generic? My concern is getting another warning or even a ban because of what I’m submitting.

[niktero]

Your nominations looked mostly fine to me. The cemetery was a bold choice to start with since so much of it is considered sensitive by the average reviewer. You can not get banned for making an ineligible submittion the first time. We all get rejections. Doing the same one multiple times after being rejected as ineligible is a different story but also rare. Bans generally happen for using stolen photos, faking a location, or submitting waypoints away from their actual object. The sculptures you withdrew seemed ok as long as they were not for a specific grave or something like all the dead babies. The first rejection looked like a gravestone among other gravestones. Usually the group exception is for a monument to all firefighters or all lost in a war and doesn’t really list names prominently.

Personally I would suggest doing some submitting outside the cemetery in a park or downtown where things aren’t as sensitive.

[indeterminacy]

Thanks @niktero it’s a helpful orientation. I wanted to try something tough, hence the cemetery. Have already submitted some usual city stops as well. Same turnaround time, and some nice successes. So far I’m batting just above .500 but maybe also because of taking more time with the supporting information and curating better. We even got a new gym in our neighborhood (unexpectedly). Though also hitting some AI rejections as well - don’t feel safe to continue with those. I also successfully nominated some POIs that I knew would not make it into the game. In one case, it got us a new power spot in PGO, and as we occasionally lost some stops in the past (due to POIs changing), it’s adding some redundancy to the map (if an old POI vanishes, a new one will hopefully appear). If this kind of usage of Wayfarer will not risk my account, Im fine to continue using it.

[niktero]

If you feel comfortable you can show us the pictures for the ML rejections and we can advise how to improve them or whether to give up. Often the ML rejections are just fixed with better photos.

[indeterminacy]

Here’s one of them - these kind of stops have been difficult to get approved. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Appeal results have been mixed in the past. We have a lot of stops like this in Hamburg, and a lot of people also hate them.

[kawin240]

Das würde ich lassen, Errichtet Plaketten werden sehr oft blind angenommen aber eigentlich sind sie ohne irgendeinen Kontext wie zum Beispiel tatsächlich wieder aufgebaute historische Häuser nicht zulässig. Das sieht jetzt nicht danach aus, als wäre das der Fall

[indeterminacy]

Thanks. Would be great if Niantic would add some guidance for this to the architecture page. The current state is that we can’t orient ourselves on older stops because rules were different then, and from what you say we can’t get a feeling from currently approved stops because they may have been mistakenly approved. These kind of plaques seem like a gray area - though I’ll agree, this one may be too new to stand out.

From the point of view of contributors wanting to improve an established neighborhood, all the easy Wayspots are already in the game. The only possibilities left are going to be more borderline.

[Xenopus]

It is unfortunately not possible to formally clarify every single specific type of sign - because in that case I am going to ask to clarify stone water fountains, bulletin boards… it never ends. To the extent that it’s possible, we should try to reason from first principles from the general to the specific, and it’s very feasible here. In this specific case, what you seem to imply is that the building (which is the actual object marked by the sign) is somehow interesting to visit because it was built in 2011. But then I would ask why you don’t just nominate the building itself and not the sign. And then we come to the logical conclusion that if the only interesting thing about the building is that it was built in 2011, then it’s probably not very eligible (explore/exercise/socialize). Even if this was a more distant date in the past, you still would have to illustrate what makes it worth exploring (“old doesn’t mean historic”).

So if it has other eligible things going for itself (architecture that would be worth exploring? Important events that happened here?), I would suggest rather focusing on these. Otherwise I would just let this go and I would definitely not rely on things already in the database - wayspots get accepted mistakenly, wayspots can be very old, etc - but rather try to reason from criteria.

I hope the attempt at interpretation helps a little for next nominations.