Thank you all for the amazing progress you all have made during the Global Edits Challenge. We love to see the community coming together to reach a common goal. As of today, you all have cleared Tier 2 by contributing over 100,000 new edits to about 90,000 Wayspots.
Unfortunately, we are not able to share an exact number at this time as we’ve identified a significant amount of edit spamming and abuse. At this time, we ask those in our community participating in this behavior for the purpose of clearing tiers, to stop spamming, submitting abusive edits, and violating our policies.
As always, we will continue our anti-abuse efforts to ensure all Wayfarer Policies, TOS, and Player Guidelines are being followed. Be aware that our efforts to combat abuse did not pause for the challenge.
To some capitolization of each word in the title of a PoI could be spam. Some might think it’s a minor edit.
Being around since the beginning when Ingress automatically did that to every word in the title I find it hard to look at titles with lower case letters. So I hope that’s not it.
My thought and hope, they are going after somone who makes the same edit to a single PoI 10 times. Or adds the same picture multiple times.
I would imagine spamming must involve repeating similar operations multiple times, or acting upon one feature repeatedly.
For example, multiple changes to the title on a single Wayspot, each submitted after the previous one is approved.
This activity would have to exceed a certain threshold, however, either degrading and re-improving the same title, or glitching and fixing a bunch of titles, otherwise repairing an occasional honest mistake could end with a ban.
Making the exact same edit to hundreds of churches across the nation making everyone of the titles exactly the same. Also a description that is grammatically bad and exactly the same to each of those churches.
Many have said they are just going to add extra characters to titles/descriptions that are not needed, such as a period at the end of a title. Really, it’s just adding or removing a character for the sake of submitting.
It could also be moving a Wayspot just to get the location edits in, but they don’t even need to be moved. I actually did submit a location edit, but when I looked at it in Contribution Management, it wasn’t that much of a move, so I withdrew it.
Of course people could spam photo submissions by using the same image over and over again, like trying to upload a meme to multiple Wayspots.
And no, correcting grammar, such as capitalizing, is not spam. I have had 2 titles with grammar issues that I submitted, and ML approved both of them. One actually didn’t have 1 word capitalized as well as a period at the end.
I avoided location edits for this exact reason of abuse flags - I feel like this is thr easy way to get a ban
I have been trying to edit every title amd description, making some longer or shorter, tidying up capitals etc
There will be one or 2 with minor changes but thats because I’ve clicked into it to see what I can do and forgot if I changed anything and hit submit anyway. I hope that isn’t considered spam.
I think picture spam is harder to judge - different zoom levels on the same view - is that spam or options? These images don’t necessarily change a waypoint unless enough people agree it’s the best, so I usually think of pictures as providing people with options to upvote.
First of all, not surprised at all. Everyone knew this would happen. If most of your edits are approved, I would say you are good. If you do edits that are correct, you are good. If you do edits that are incorrect or decrease the information value, you are spamming.
This assumption is quite exaggerated for my area. I am disappointed that some would assume this is sinister motivation. I have so many edits made in my area mostly over bad title capitalization and lengthily descriptions at the time trying to convince others to accept the nomination. Now, that has pass, it’s not necessary to have too many words in the description that should have been in their supporting description in the first place and gone.
We aim to improve grammar and be more concise. I have not seen any weird edits go online, so far.
There was no supporting information until September 2019. Crowd-sourced reviewing (OPR) opened September 2017. The crowd was brutal - rejecting everything. The only way to plead your case was in the description. We begged Niantic for two years to add supporting information fields.
FF to today: I just found this in a nomination description I made in 2018, and submitted an edit to remove it: “As the OPR Help tab says: Public parks are great, high-quality places for Portals; they are common all around the world and encourage players to walk, exercise and enjoy public spaces.”
Back to the original post: it’s interesting that 9 out of 10 edits are for unique wayspots.
And where are we, with the Community Award for ML Approvals?
I found that strange, as Im usually adding at least 2 edits per spot, maybe 3 or 4 depending on different images and if I can update both title and description
