I wouldn’t call getting valuable feedback “no good”. Hopefully some of it is applied in your future endeavors.
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You are not alone being frustrated by nomination rejections, but unfortunately in a community as large and varied as this you will encounter many opinions, some wrong, some right, it is the luck of the draw unfortunately.
I have recently moved to an area in close proximity to lake and it has not been nominated for any pokestops, so I went to work and submitted about 12 in total at various areas that all meet the criteria Memorial benches, murals, sculptures, Wildlife information boards etc, yet most were rejected with a variety of reasons including abuse and criteria violations, once appealed they were almost immediately approved.
I am afraid to say there is a wide variety of opinions but just keep trying is all we can do…and don’t get me started on the great Postbox debate lol
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Just a quick clarification, the only three eligibility criteria are that a place needs to be a great place to exercise, a great place to explore, or a great place to socialize with others. It’s highly unusual that any one nomination will meet all of those criteria. I suspect you meant that you believe that your nominations met at least one of the eligibility criteria. Also note that memorial benches rarely are eligible. I’ll look to see if I can find the clarification but it’s been discussed at length elsewhere.
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Yes, without getting to much in to detail on each submission, I was just giving general details of some of the submissions I have put forward that I believe match criteria, be it one or more, does it matter? each person will have a different opinion. The fact remains some feel a general frustration when eligible posts are being rejected, only to appeal them and have them deemed acceptable is clear some people may not be voting correctly for whatever reason.
And yes fully aware memorial benches (with plaques) and mailboxes are a divided topic.
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That’s good, it’s just often people will say their nominations meet “all criteria” but that just leads to confusion because that’s not what they really mean.
More often people take a general term out of context and read too much into it.
1st, the criteria weren’t always socialize, explore, exercise. Lots of POI were added before those criteria and never removed. Lots of trees with memorial rocks were good pois in 2016-2017
2nd, socialize isn’t the only criteria. Explore is far more likely the one for anything in a GY. Whether artistic or historical.
3rd, benches tend to be be closer calls than you give them credit when they are on a trail or park. I’ve done a fair bit of socialize on a park bench as a parent with other parents. As a meeting place for my kids to come back to me.
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Very true. That’s the challenge with written discussions, particularly with people you don’t know well. One can only interpret what is actually written and often not what the person meant to say.
I Am adult as well, but not a long time player yet. Still find it difficult to understand the rejection sometimes. Specially when you see other pokestop even “worse”. Would be a great improvement to have an explanation on why some pokestops gets rejected, as written by Shirogatana.
PS. I even have some stops that have been accepted but still not see them after weeks and months???
Ciao and have fun
Beppisen
Welcome to the forum! Even though the nomination screen says you are submitting Pokestops, you are actually submitting Wayspots to the Lightship database. The ones that will be used in Pokemon Go are the ones that are alone in an L17 S2 cell. A good article explaining S2 cells is this one:
https://pokemongohub.net/post/article/comprehensive-guide-s2-cells-pokemon-go/
If you have any question about why a specific nomination may have been rejected, you can post it in Nomination Support and we can try to help figure it out with you.
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Hello @beppisen64 and welcome, both to the forum and to Wayfarer!
There are a few things here.
If you have nominations that have been rejected very fast (within 24h), with something like “Wayfarer criteria” as the reason and with “our team decided…” in the email, that means it was an automated review by a machine learning algorithm, which has been resolving some nominations lately. Sometimes the algorithm gets confused by something uncommon, a lot of the time it is right and the community can help you improve or otherwise give advice. Please don’t hesitate to start a new topic with your examples if you’d like advice and support on the things you have submitted so far. In addition, reviewing yourself helps understand common mistakes or things that are otherwise unclear to human or non-human reviewers, so I also highly recommend that.
For a long time the absolute majority of nominations showed rejection reasons (some of them justified, some of them less so, but it was a reflection of community perception). But community voting takes months, in some places it was not uncommon at all for it to take years. This is a tradeoff - if you want more specific reasons, you have to wait for the community. But it turned out people wanted their pokéstops fast 
On the second point, I was going to refer you to one of @cyndiepooh 's posts but I see it’s already been addressed 
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This will drive you crazy and is a bad bad way to look at it.
Like I said some of those “Worse” stops were from before criteria changed. They wouldn’t be accepted in 2024+
Otherwise, wayfarer is an opinion game. Other than Niantic’s banned list like no schools or PRP everything is just opinion. Sure yours might be that stop is “Worse” than your rejected stop… but other people might view it opposite and that your rejected stop was actually worse.
Sometimes, it’s a bit of a luck of the draw. You can do EXACT same submission 3 times. First 2 fails. Third succeeds. Why? Because its a numbers game and luck of draw.
Take something iffy like a Neighborhood Sign. I’m going to make up round numbers to make a point. Let’s say its reviewed 100 times per submission and it takes 51 Yes Voters to pass.
On Try 1: You get a larger group of people who don’t think neighborhood signs are good places to explore/gather/exercise and you fail with 35 Yes 65 No
On Try2: You get a few more people like me, who think they do fit explore, and get 48 Yes and 52 No
On Try3: You get a lucky group of reviewers who like them and you get 55 Yes abd 45 No. Grats you succeeded.
But again think about math, in my made example. Total Voters were 138 yes 162 No. Most people wouldn’t have liked the spot, and thats one that other submitters are likely thinking “Hey my submission is better than that one”
But when the submission process is subjective and opinion based, you can get a lucky or unlucky subset of voters who think your submission fits or doesn’t fit criteria.
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And since the general idea of what @cowyn2016 said is true, the best advice is to take some time putting each and every nomination together. Take a focused and clear photo for the nomination. Follow that up with a wider angle of your nomination to show it in its environment. From there an accurate Title and Description. And last but not least is the supporting information. Here you should include your reasons how/why this specific nomination meets criteria (a great place to be social with others, explore, or exercise).
Welcome and have fun!
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Not sure about keep trying. All of my nominations since Dec 2023 got rejected and I had to appeal 3 times (1 in Dec’23 and 2 recently as I got bored/frustrated that it seems all my nominations got declined) which all were approved. So I share the same view with Shirogatana that this is frustrating and really discouraging further contributions.
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Yes… same here I’ve made sure to nominate safe, accurate, great photos, etc. example, a school or a church, But same thing I get rejected on the other hand I see a simple rock next to the street get accepted as a PokeStop… something is worng here.
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What kind? There are plenty of eligible schools out there, but ones only for kids are not.
While many of my nominations for chain gyms (which are great places to exercise and socialize) get accepted on the first try, some have had unfortunate levels of trouble. If I hadn’t tried again, they wouldn’t be in game today.
@Samie3003 @SamRuiz
Hello and welcome.
If you are happy about doing so it would be a good idea if you posted one of your nominations in full here. There are experienced wayfinders happy to use their knowledge to say why it might have been rejected and how it might be improved.
It’s great to see nominations improved and then accepted.
I think people have gotten really huffy about what qualifies as a good submission now. They will downvote art that they don’t find awe-inspiring and beautiful. They will downvote anything that whiffs of community art, like statues in a plaza or a water fountain. They downvote any kind of cafe or restaurant, period, end of story, even though the criteria specifically list those as great places to be social and hang out. Anything that looks to be outside gets shut down as “seasonal”.
I think the main remedy is for a lot of us to just be more generous with our own voting. If you find yourself on the fence at all or even close to the fence, maybe throw the community a bone and accept something.
Of course, every single rater has bias. Me? I hate any nomination that is in a dangerous location, i.e. it’s a patch of grass surrounded by roads. I also hate people submitting stuff to make their houses Pokestops. However, my biases are within the guidelines - the training used to specifically point out that places without safe pedestrian access are to be shut down, and Pokestops are not supposed to be on private property.
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I think it’s a safe bet that everyone thinks the exact same thing themselves. Yet, I might vehemently disagree with your POV and you mine.
Reviewers being too picky overall is probably no more true than submitters being unrealistic with their bad submissions, overall. I think most people try to do a good job on both sides.
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I feel like one thing that would help me with these nominations is if there was a text box for reviewers which you could add in more direct and specific feedback on a nomination with, which would then be readable by the person who made the nomination. It doesn’t have to be mandatory and the feedback should be anonymous, but getting to understand the mindset of voters reviewing my nominations (especially when I’m rejected) would really make the headache of figuring out what exactly I needed to improve for a nomination go away.