It’s been referred to as a “black hole” by great community members such as tehstone and others. I’m not willing to delve into the nuance of it, but we proved that it was taking between 18-24 months to get natural resolutions with dozens of local reviewers and several others with their bonus locations there. At one point just before the spring’s Global Wayfarer Challenge someone even shared a picture of a 25mo resolution. You can call that whatever you want to call it, but the only way to reach resolutions in Boston was to get Upgrades and the system was completely broken.
This has been brought on the forums years before I joined, and discussed at length by others on your Discord so the accusation that we’ve somehow attempted to swindle folks after I put my own effort and money towards solving this doesn’t sit right with me.
I’ve been in contact with a number of folks who set their bonus locations to Boston and didn’t make a dent. If others did and didn’t @ myself or other active Wayfarers in Boston I’m not sure what we could have done if we didn’t see a human difference.
Some ML nominations are a breeze. It does a great job accepting additional photos on POIs and makes life easier. It also fails to understand nuance, historical significance, context, and more. It accepts a lot of extremely low-quality POIs and rejects others that have been on the Massachusetts Registry of Historic Places on public property with a great level of documentation. It’s accepted staircases, but not functional halls. It’s been great at approving playgrounds, but it’s rejected churches. It’s accepted chain restaurants and rejected local restaurants. It’s accepted things with the wrong name and rejected edits to correct.
Of course you and I understand that the individuals’ submissions may vary in quality and just because someone said “I submitted that POI and they rejected it!” could still mean “I submitted the POI with an upside down photo, put the description in the title and misspelled everything,” so I’m on the fence as to whether or not ML has been more than 50% positive.
What I want is for when I open the Wayfarer queue, I get nominations from my regional area and my bonus area. Then I get some from the Upgrade queue. Then I get 10% or less from random parts of the country. I don’t want to review the misspelled ramblings of someone in Mississippi, and I don’t want them reviewing about how public art somehow doesn’t qualify because they don’t have it where they’re from.