Mass report of massive fake nominations, Schwarzenberg thread 2.1

General Discussion
102

According to my expierience it‘s in 80% of the cases, that things dissappear.
So I have 2 hypotheses:
A) a bug is involved.
B) human staff is involved. And sometimes they skip that part.

My guess is B, because it happens at places, when it‘s confusing or the objects are kind of same quality. So the staff members might skip that decision.

Further I‘d like to mention, that Schwarzenberg is a beautiful town. I like it. In RL I‘m occassionally there.
So I have an interest in the wayspot quality there, and I‘m glad, that not everything cell related is recalculated automatically.

Let me explain, what I mean with an extreme example:

In the thread, if you followed it carefully, you might have seen, that the town has a medieval castle on a steep hill.
The castle is the wayspot of the highest quality of the town imho. And around the Castle are lots of wooden sculptures.
The fakers there used the wooden stuff for lots of fakes. Some of the sculpture wayspots there could still be fake.
Also there are lots of duplicate pictures at these wayspots now.
So if an algorithm would reevaluate the cells there, it could happen, that the castle wayspot, which is a gym, could have less likes and pictures compared to the wood carvings …. and disappear.

Same for the church.
Or the blue locomotive, that is surrounded by a lot of less important objects.

So I would prefer, that this selection is done by humans and NOT automatically.
Staff members should be forces to choose the better objects, and should also sometimes be allowed to circumvent the cell rules.
(Of course 7 active spots in 1 cell is way too much)

Small medieval town cores (like the one in Schwarzenberg) are often f***ed up by the cells, because the density of wayspot candidates of the highest quality is far higher than the cells allow.
Looking at Schwarzenberg the town hall (imho the 3rd most important object after castle and church) doesnt even have an inactive wayspot …
I guess it didnt even enter the database during the time when the old Ingress 20m rules were active for all games. And afterwards no one tried to submit it.

Fully automatic algorithms would produce a lot of chaos …..
This kind of quality management should be fully done by humans.

103

The selection of which wayspots become the active one in a cell cannot be done manually.

Normally, it is simply first-come first-served. I assume that when a pokestop is removed, the oldest remaining wayspot in that cell becomes the new wayspot. Even it that isn’t the algorithm there will be an algorithm to select the pokestop automatically.

The solution to this for wayfarers is to submit the most important things first, the ones you want to appear. If this was done, then once the fakes are removed you should find the things you want become pokestops.

There is little evidence that likes have any effect on what will become a pokestop or gym. They do have an effect on which will become the main photo for a pokestop/gym.

104

You describe, what might be intended.
But you don’t consider borderline cases … and you use premises, that cant sustain.

Do people submit the objective important things 1st?
No. Only a minority does this. Most people submit stuff first, that leads to most personal profit … home wayspots for example.

Further you expect, that everything happens somehow logical…
Fakes and the corrections disturb this extremely.

Schwarzenberg has the example. town hall could be considered the #3 spot. Still not in the games, although the town has 3 digit amount of wayspots, and at least 200 removed fakes now and also a high amount of additional fakes, that were moved to the correct location.

Another example from another town:
50.928704,11.584525
A skyscraper, main sight of a city with >100k inhabitants.
Before Corona (so with 40m PoGo interaction radius) someone moved the wayspot, a gym. If you are inside the building below, the GPS drifts have been really bad. During raids there people expierienced bugs because of that. So someone moved it out of the centre of the building, so that it’s accessible from outside… and the gym was downgraded to be a stop.
Hypothetical algorithms could have led to total disappearance of the main sight.
… and that’s not the only case in that town. Thel 3 main sights of that town all were affected by the algorithms at some point in time …
Since I lived there for few years … I learned to hate automatic changes, because you can’t control all wayfinders. Missing main sights lead to useless submission, desperate attempts to bring them back, etc.pp. …
And that annoys me in PoGo, especially because there are different quality levels of wayspots (gyms >> stops)
So the only way to an adequate representation, where wayspot quality roughly correlates to wayspot level ingame can only be currated by active communities and at least a bit human influence on wayfarers side, so that random influences don’t heavily disturb the unstable equilibrium of the wayspot states.

So I don’t know, how the backend works, but somehow the automatic(?) disappearances are in most cases things, that I don’t shed a tear over losing them as wayspots. And things I’d like to see ingame, although they might violate cell rules, very often stay.
I don’t know why it’s that way, but the easiest explanation is a human influence …
(maybe a well trained AI, but I don’t think so)

And somehow I trust those mechanisms at the moment. Whatever happens in the backend, it’s somehow careful, so that I’m pleased with the results. Dealing with accidentally created clusters afterwards is a minor problem to me than rigorous algorithms, that could remove important wayspots from the games.
If it would work like you described, I would never touch location edits, maybe I would reject or skip all proposed location edits while reviewing, and I would not search for real locations of fakes like I did in that thread here … because I know how nasty it is to lose main sights as ingame wayspots … and I would not want to take part in a process, that could lead to such results.

105

Human selection would also cause disagreements. What about the guy that hated been dragged around old draughty castles as a school kid but loved making stuff in wood work…

I personally believe a 100% random process is the fairest.

106

don’t open Pandoras Box of subjective opinions xD

My subjective hot take:
Playgrounds shouldnt be wayspots. But nethertheless I can live with the rulings about that xD

107

People have different opinions (like we have for this suggestion). I think having human decision will only cause argument where random has the get out of “Don’t blame us, it’s random”.

But not the ruling regards wayspot / gym selections :slight_smile:

108

There is no official statement about Gym selection mechanics. That’s all community work and Nia was always silent about this topic.

And having an opinion does not cancel logical conclusions. So if one is aware of having an opinion, that diverges from the opinion of the most others, one should be able to follow the other logic, so that one can guess what could be objective or at least crowd pleasing.

Btw.: randomness in gym creation would only change the methods of fakers.
(at least those, who are aware of the mechanics)
As long as there are two different kinds of wayspots, there is abuse potential.

109

There are more than two uses for wayspots in pogo, showcase pokestops, powerspots, potentially the new day/night stops (those will be add-ons for existing stops but might change their value)? And I also bet different people value different things in different locations. Some might prefer a pokestop close to home so they can drop lures, or a gym so they can do raids without ever leaving the house. I’ve seen people on here advocate for showcases and gyms to rotate seasonally because they value exploration above all. I know people who want more powerspots so they nominate eligible things in occupied cells (I have done so myself). Many different cases