I woke up this morning to an email saying my account is under a 30 day ban. The waypoint I attempted to submit is a real location in my town. It’s an old gristmill building with two distinct advertising murals - one on the front, and one on the side. I had previously submitted the one on the side of the building, and it got accepted. I tried to submit the one on the front of the building, and the community denied it. When I appealed it, my appeal got denied as a duplicate submission, even though the murals are not duplicates. Niantic’s own rules say you can resubmit if you think it was denied in error. I tried to submit it again with a different, clearer image, and I got a 30 day ban for the submission.
I am asking Niantic to reverse my ban, and to seriously reconsider how this system works. I understand a system in place to prevent abuse, but to ban your ENTIRE account - Pokémon Go and any other linked account - is a bridge too far. The wayfarer subreddit is awash with people complaining about the exact same thing. This overly harsh penalty system removes the incentive to submit content to wayfarer entirely. My player account, a day one level 50 player, is now at risk of never being able to play ever again. Whether my ban gets overturned or not, I will no longer be submitting any material to Wayfarer ever again.
it’s likely a staff member will comment on this or send a DM.
Regarding the wayfarer subreddit. On forums other than this one, which is fairly well behaved, there is a lot of “not entirely telling the truth” posts. People will say anything and claim anything, but fail to own up when they deliberately tried to abuse the system and got punished for it. I’m not saying you did or didn’t do that here but the junk in the subreddit is just that.
People do come on these forums, and complain about being banned or request a reversal. Sometimes, the ban gets overturned when Niantic revisit the issue. Often, it turns out that they didn’t tell the entire truth in their initial posting and the ban was entirely justified.
if you want any community feedback on the issue, it would help to provide the location of the gristmill.
The building is currently an apartment complex but the original advertisement murals still adorn the building on the front and sides. StreetView demonstrates this
I can’t comment on the ban as I don’t know the full details. I see you have a DM, so hopefully that helps.
Thanks for the location. I can see the advert on the side and the ghost sign on the front. I can also see why the community review decision was duplicate, but it looks OK to have tried submitting both sides as separate objects because people might have different views on that.
I see that this building is at the edge of 2 other S2 cells. If you misplaced the marker at the wrong place, it may have appeared that you would do so on purpose, this could be considered manipulating the gameboard, and this could indeed result in a ban.