I have recently gotten back from a vacation in Alberta and British Columbia, and have been finalizing my dozens of new nominations to send to queue and review. One of my submissions in the town of Invermere, BC was (presumably randomly) pulled into Niantic review. I just got the review decision back and am pretty concerned.
The subject in question was of a pretzel sculpture/sign on top of a locally owned bakery in the town of Invermere. I took a “less is more” approach to the nomination description, and felt that this would be a good nomination due to being a cute and iconic piece of signage in the small town.
The reasons that Niantic returned for rejection are very concerning. They reported that the image or text were abusive and that the image was from a third party. I strongly disagree with the first rejection of abuse, and I think most people would struggle to identify how any part of the nomination is abusive towards anyone. The second reason on the image being from a third party is blatantly false, and I can easily prove that from the metadata on my submission image.
At this point, I am concerned if Niantic will consider any (in my opinion, wrongful) disciplinary action if they thought this nomination was so heinous that they considered it abusive, especially with GO Fest right around the corner. So far, there has been no punishment, so hopefully it stays that way. I still have over 100 nominations to process, and am concerned about trying to prepare them for voting if something like this will happen and could compromise my account.
If this was a community rejection, I would have considered appealing. I’m not even sure if this is worth attempting to appeal, given how harshly this was rejected. I’d appreciate any insight. Is anyone else getting concerning rejections like this from Niantic?
Below are images of the nomination card to show all text and images, rejection email (to verify that it was indeed handled and rejected by Niantic), and metadata on the nomination photo that I used to validate that this was in fact my own photo.
Did you ever upload the foto somewhere else? That line of rejection can happen if you share the foto elsewhere before your nomination got approved since niantic can distinguish between it and stolen foto. The 1st rejection and 2nd rejection reason implied that someone think you use 3rd party foto. Using 3rd party foto is considered abusive
In addition to the photo issue (which you could remedy by retaking it from slightly different angle, and it would naturally have different lighting so be clearly uinique. ), I think your description is not phrased in the best, most neutrally descriptive way. It sounds a little dismissive and potentially disparaging - that is at least what that first rejection reason suggests, and I do tend to agree that the tone is off, saying ‘a massive pretezel stuck on top’.
Would be better to describe it more neutrally, eg. ‘Iconic pretzel sculpture on top of the Invermere Bakery.’
I always add details about the business too, if I can too, especially the date it was established.
I did not share it anywhere publicly, only a backup upload to my private Google Photos.
Here is the photo. I did not see a similar result in both a reverse Google image search nor on the Google Maps listing for the business, further supporting the fact that this was indeed my photo.
I dont know what happened here. But as long you dont get any warning, you are safe. In the other hand, you can wait for staff if they want to explain what happened here.
Unfortunately, unless Champion rank Wayfarerers ever get completely unbound submission distance, there is no way I’m doing a resubmit any time in the foreseeable future. The submission was while I was on vacation in British Columbia, nearly 4,000km from home. I am sadly no longer on vacation and do not know when I will be back. It’s either appeal or bust. Even if we do get uncapped submission distance (which I hope we do), that was my best photo of the pretzel and I did not take much in the way of backups. I certainly did not expect to be wrongfully accused of stealing the photo that I used for submission. If I was wrongfully accused once, what is stopping the Niantic reviewer or anyone else from wrongfully accusing me again?
I fully agree that your example is neutral. However, I also argue that mine is too and that there are plenty of other ways to neutrally describe the scene with different word choice. I strongly disagree that my word choices is in any way disparaging, especially to the point of categorizing it as abuse. If you compare the sculpture to a pretzel you would eat, it is “massive”. “Stuck” is the past tense of “stick”. If you “stick” a sculpture on a metal post/stick on top of a bakery, it becomes “stuck”.
I am not convinced that neither my text nor photos (since it is not definitive which was triggering) is harassing, ridiculing, nor abusing any group or individual, which is the core of the issue for the first rejection reason. It was a succinct description of the sculpture. I would think that if Niantic felt it was too short, then they should have used one of the low quality/inaccurate text reasons and not escalate to the more serious abuse flag. Again, I think it is pretty concerning that they went the way they did.
If you saw this nomination as-is in the wild, would you flag it for abuse against others? Not, “would you reject it for any reason”, but would you reject it because it abuses anyone like Niantic did?
I’ve previously been told by others in this community that a “less is more” approach is better, and I do believe that was the way to go here. Whether or not it was the right approach, the subject of this nomination was the iconic pretzel sculpture, not the bakery itself. Writing about the bakery would be unnecessary excess and I believe better saved for a separate nomination for the bakery.
I would love a staff explanation on this to either explain what I did wrong for moving forward or affirm that I am right. Is there any way to realistically get a staff member to comment on this? It’s by no means urgent, especially since there fortunately still does not appear to have been any disciplinary action.
It seems you havent appeal this one yet. Since you cant resubmit it anytime soon, appeal is the only way for now. You have 2 appeals ,each with 15days cooldown. Is it possible to share the coordinate on thank you email?
I just got an email that the nomination was accepted by Niantic, so it looks like someone was watching this thread and agreed that the nomination was wrongfully rejected.
Correct, and I appreciate the check. I was aware of that when submitting, and submitted because I figured it was a cool object to nominate, even if it won’t hit the PoGo game board for the foreseeable future. That’s also part of the beauty of the massive submission pool that Champion-rank Wayfarers get, as I could easily afford to submit this without having to consider passing on it for a nomination that would hit the PoGo game board. It could still appear in a different game that uses the game board, or maybe PoGo will continue to get new types of map objects that use currently-hidden waypoints.
I do hope that Niantic is able to identify what went wrong with this review to reduce the chance of it happening again in the future. It certainly rattled me, and definitely could have turned off a newer Wayfarer who may not have known to speak up here.
