Over the past few months, I’ve encountered submissions for murals inside elementary schools or kindergartens, high school gymnasiums, and most absurdly, even a cafeteria inside an army barrack. For exampe, this is a picture of the mural inside a elementary school.
These applications are pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable. The majority are denied, a few of them still get approved somehow.
These submissions are a clear violation of the K-12 and Military Base criteria, and they are wasting reviewers’ time.
Should stricter suspension measures be taken against applicants who submit Wayspots in explicitly prohibited areas?
While I agree that stricter measures must be put into place, I disagree that the measures be suspension outright. An accurate and informative educational email should be in place before suspension.
Conversely if you were to reject strictly on the basis that it is located in a military base despite several articles giving some nuance, would it be grounds for your suspension?
There are plenty of places on military bases which are designed for social activities, often there are memorials, historic buildings and museums with limited public access. A wayspot doesn’t need to be accessible to the general public, but it cannot be on a school or single family residential property (SFPRP).
On schools, I do see these myself and sometimes they are good faith submissions where the submitter is probably not aware of the restriction, which is a a straight reject under the “Appropriate” category. Sometimes thought he wayspot is misrepresented because the submitter knows it isn’t eligible, if you feel this is happening then you can report it as abuse. If you do come across obvious fake nominations then I recommend keeping a note of them and checking back later on the Wayfarer Map to see if they have been accepted.
A bit of a rant - I’ve seen cases where there’s long-term abusive submissions of fake wayspots and I do think that the Wayfarer team are not firm enough as the problems re-emerge after a while and the abuse starts again. But we can help the Wayfarer team by pointing these out and the Wayfarer Map is a terrific help in tracking down abuse.
I think we need to consider the user experience on the nomination side before we jump to strict punishments. I can only speak for Pokemon Go in iOS since I don’t play the other games, but the user experience makes it easy to make mistakes.
To navigate to the Wayspot contribution page (which they label Pokestop Contribution, which explains why so many people think they are “adding a new Pokestop” rather than nominating a point of interest to the Wayspot database), you have to click Settings and then Upload. Then, you see a big button labeled New Pokestop with a small clarification underneath explaining how many nominations you have left… and underneath all of that, in very small text, is a link to the nomination guidelines, which open in the browser and not in the app.
Once you click the New Pokestop button, there is no other validation. It’s hard to see the map pins on mobile, which is why I’m particularly grateful for web submission. It’s also annoying to type in this UI; autocorrect generally doesn’t even work, so we get typos all over the place.
They could add simple validation before submission, such as:
• [ ] This is a great place to explore, socialize, or exercise.
• [ ] There is safe pedestrian access.
• [ ] This is not a K-12 school or a sensitive location (and then let the user expand to see what is considered a sensitive location)
and so on.
If they make it easy for people to make mistakes in their submissions, it doesn’t seem reasonable to issue strict punishments. Many people are both inexperienced nominators AND nominating on the go: typing while crossing streets, standing still while their dog barks for 10 minutes while they try to type a description, etc. Experienced nominators don’t make the same mistakes, but everyone starts as a novice.
The majority of the process needs to happen while people are on the go, in my opinion (identifying a POI, taking photos of it, taking photos of the surrounding area, etc.) but I think the rest of it could be done separately. For example, if the initial part just created a draft, and then users finished the drafts on desktop or on mobile web (i.e. not while walking across the street), that would be great.
The counterargument is accessibility. So many people do everything on mobile devices now, so making submissions web only would make it it less accessible unless mobile web is an option. I work in tech and I went years without having a personal laptop because it just wasn’t necessary. I only purchased my current laptop last month and the first thing I did was get back into Wayfarer.
Don’t even get me started on the categories, which some people understandably assume are a list of eligible things. “Elementary school” is something you can tag your nomination with.
It is!
I am absolutely fine, though, if submitting even one AI generated fake Wayspot led to an immediate permanent ban from Wayfarer and all games.
100% agree! If this resulted in a perma-ban, I’d be fine with that.
“Elementary school” is something you can tag your nomination with.
I like adding categories on the reviewer side, but I’m a big maps / geospatial nerd and I like categorizing things. I don’t like the fact that submissions under prohibited categories aren’t flagged. Maybe one day, the automated system can start identifying potentially ineligible POIs based on user-submitted categories
What would you say about keeping Wayfarer submissions only accessible via its website?
If mobile web UX is better than the in-app submission experience, I’d be on board with web only submissions. I haven’t tried the mobile web option but next time I nominate a POI, I will
Reposting this without the link to Reddit Thanks for the mention, I think more people submit through the website would be much better long term for the game. We could move away from “My Pokestop was rejected” and “Where is my Pokestop?” Because going through the website, you’d get a great understanding that you are submitting a WAYSPOT to the Niantic Wayfarer map!
If you want to see my Reddit post, you can go to Reddit and search my name.
Hopefully, this doesn’t get flagged
For me… and I’m often a bit of a problem child… I have a strong preference to submitting in app rather than through the wayfarer website.
Again, for me, a big reason to prefer the app is the “upload later” option that does not exist if submitting through the Wayfarer website. I submit a lot of trail markers in areas where cell service can be problematic when it comes to uploading nominations. Drafts feature is super cool but you still need to be within the submission radius to submit a draft.
Maybe the in-game submission portals should be replaced by a separate Niantic Wayfarer mobile app to unify the user experience of nominating Wayspots on mobile. Ideally it would still support the "Upload Later’ option as @jojenreed64 noted – which is the primary reason I like the in-app submission option as well.
Absolutely not! Terrible idea. Remember most people are not very familiar with the criteria, they will submit in good faith.
For example playgrounds, these are eligible, so you will see them everywhere. Most schools also have them, so I fully understand why people would submit them.
That is why we do the reviews, so we can reject them. Punishing would be wrong, and would in my opinion harm the wayfarer program.
I don’t mind strong punishments for fake waypots, but let’s be nice to people who submit in good faith.
and the first thing I did was get back into Wayfarer.
