It’s a specific biking trail mapped out by the Dutch traffic safety authority Veilig Verkeer Nederland to teach people about traffic safety. Virtually every large Dutch city has a trail like this because the Netherlands is a very bicycle-focused country. And are you really going to argue semantics about whether something is a “signboard” or trail marker? The criteria clarifications are literally full of pictures of tiny signs with arrows in them, which is precisely what these trail markers are. And “route” is literally a synonym for “trail”.
As well as the most commonly used Dutch translation for “trail”. We call hiking trails “wandelroutes” and biking trails “fietsroutes”.
And then why are these types of trail markers also still getting removed left and right?
Both of these markers are used to map out scenic biking trails around the city. I fail to see how these are in any way different from the examples in the clarification topic.
Official markers for important intersection points in the state-sponsored network of hiking trails. Dozens of these have been removed as well.
I ask you again, Aaron: make it make sense to me. Because all this looks like to me (and many others) right now is Niantic being extremely biased towards Wayfarers in the Netherlands.
I see that these were removed before the recent clarification as per the policies being followed at that time. You can choose to resubmit these and I recommend that you provide a link confirming that these are officially recognized routes.
We removed these under a policy that wasn’t actually aligned with the eligibility criteria, but instead of restoring them since our policy was bad, we’ll allow you to resubmit them.
No offense, Aaron, but that is honestly an appalling “solution”. I’m talking about hundreds of these trail markers that Niantic has removed, and that’s just in my city. So I have to:
resubmit the first 40 and hope my account doesn’t get banned AGAIN for “submitting a large amount of low-quality wayspots”.
Hope they get approved by local reviewers, which they most likely won’t be because reviewers aren’t exactly known for keeping up with changing criteria, nor do they follow them.
Resubmit the remainder one by one, day by day. That’ll take me at least a year. Not to mention that many of the removed trail markers were not submitted by me, so I can’t exactly download the photos from my contributions page for those. I’d have to go to every single one and take new photos. That’s a herculean effort.
So I hope you can understand, Aaron, that this would be an insane amount of work for me and that it would take an insanely long time to fix Niantic’s mistake and put back all the unjustly removed trail marker wayspots.
Luckily, I have a much easier method for all parties involved.
Using the Discord server I posted screenshots of, I can create a comprehensive list of every single removed trail marker wayspot in my area, with exact names and coordinates and all. I can then provide said list to the appeals team (or whoever at Niantic) so they can fix Niantic’s mistake and restore the wayspots. I can have the list finished by the end of the weekend if I have your word that the wayspots will actually be restored and I’m not putting in hours of work in vain.
Doing this would go a long way towards restoring my local community’s trust in Niantic which has been thoroughly destroyed.
They are also still getting removed, even though they are no longer ineligible due to the new criteria. This one was removed today. The new criteria clarifications went live more than two weeks ago. Why is this still happening?
What’s your source? Because I highly doubt that. That is an official intersection point marker of the province-wide hiking trail network. Those don’t just “get removed”. And there are plenty of local Ingress players who love maliciously reporting portals to get them removed, so I suspect that’s what’s happening here.
I will literally drive there tonight to see if the pole is actually gone. If it is actually somehow no longer there, it’s only because someone has vandalized it, and I will then be making a report on their maintenance page: Meldpunt knooppuntroutes in Brabant | VisitBrabant so they can repair it ASAP.
@NianticAaron personally i do understand that there might be a country where these things have gotten out of hand. there are cities in germany where abuse also happens (but noone cares to report the fake things).
In the long run these discussions here just unsettle reviewers. Adding to that, the persons that work off the appeal queue for Niantic are a bit like 50/50. One will, the other one wont accept an appeal. Its basicly like rolling the dice. Niantic could just use these qualified workers for other important tasks and just roll the dice on every appeal.
Niantic still has the wrong approach: You just completely miss that there are several official databases that collect the trails; here in Germany we do have www.wanderreitkarte.de that is very good, and as far as i can see it also covers the rest of Europe.
You should make it clear that people that submit a trailmarker have to include the data about the trail, if possible, maybe a link to an official site that has a map of the trail.
It isnt rocket science and if in doubt, you can easily find out if the route is there or just intentionally misplaced.
The sign with ‘Rondje Eindhoven left’ looks like a good trail marker. Shows the trail name with a direction to follow a fixed unique route.
The sign below with ‘97 left’ isn’t part of a unique or fixed route. These signs are used to create your own custom routes. These don’t have a unique name and/or logo which appears to be a requirement looking at the criteria clarification regarding trail markers.
The pole with multiple numbers feels the same as above one in my opinion. No unique named routes to follow. Just a bunch of numbers with an arrow but no unique routes to be found.
If those two yellow arrows that say “public footpath” on them in the clarification topic are good enough (which, judging by the thumbs up next to them, they are), then so are any of the ones I posted.
I couldn’t read the small text on that image as there was no zoom option available unlike the other supplied photos. Assumed they had a trail name on them instead of simply “public footpath”.
Now I was going to say that perhaps they only prefer walking related trail markers but that doesn’t seem to be 100% valid either regarding your earlier post.
Though in my area anything cycling related gets wiped easily. Walking related trail markers seem to stay.
When it is not a trail with a specific trail name you are going to have to make a strong case. It is the trail that is the “object” being submitted and this is done using the markers as anchor points along the trail where it changes direction for example so it is unique to that point. You need to demonstrate that the route will be an interesting place to go.
