I’ve been playing for years, with over 10,000 reviews and 400+ successful nominations. Recently, however, I’ve become deeply frustrated by the surge of “clueless” rejections.
Today, three of my nominations—all valid, long-running local businesses like cafes and yoga studios—were rejected for absurd reasons such as “Private Residential Property,” “Farmland,” or “Permanent/Distinct.” I used Upgrades for these, and even though one was overturned via appeal, I now have to wait 15 days to appeal the others.
Here are my questions for the community:
Zero Penalty for Reviewers: If an appeal proves a rejection was wrong, why is there no penalty for the reviewers who made the bad call?
Unfair Risk Distribution: As a nominator, I lose my Upgrades and my time (waiting weeks for appeals). Meanwhile, reviewers who ignore guidelines and reject valid spots face zero consequences.
If this “mindless rejecting” continues, why should anyone put in the effort to improve the map? Niantic needs to implement stricter quality control for reviewers who consistently fail to follow the guidelines.
I disagree. Reviewers can get warnings/bans if they abuse the system, just like nominators.
But punishing for just making mistakes, or just disagreeing on eligibility is very wrong. All these people spend time on either nominating or reviewing, even if we disagree we should be glad that people are willing to do that. Punishments are totally uncalled for, and would alienate a lot of people.
And let’s not forget, there is already a system in place to monitor the reviewing behaviour, if people would make the wrong call all the time, the wayfarer profile would drop to below “good or great”.
And it’s not just people, also the AI often makes mistakes, so a better solution would be to reimburse upgrades after a successful appeal.
I feel for OP here, having felt the frustration of extremely poor decision making from the local or upgrade-wide community, even recently. Having to waste nomination submissions, appeals, and upgrades on what should have been easy approvals is very frustrating.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe I have heard that in the event that an appeal is accepted, ultimately the appealed decision has no bearing on removing an agreement from those who voted to reject the nomination, nor granting an agreement to those who voted in approval and failed to pass the nomination. If this information is correct, then this is a glaring issue that needs to be fixed at minimum, and goes back into OP’s argument. The accountability for poor reviewer decisions is gone once the initial decision is made, regardless of an appeal. This wastes the time of the submitter and hurts reviewers who were ultimately in alignment with Niantic’s final decision, while rewarding reviewers who were not in agreement with Niantic’s decision.
I am not saying that there needs to be outright punishment for those who do not align with the appeal. However, if this is not happening already, it may be worth some sort of invisible tracking by Niantic that affects reviewer rating to see how often someone is in conflict with appeals, as ultimately that is a very simple metric that defines how frequently someone is voting against Niantic decisions and approval criteria. If someone is repeatedly responsible tanking nominations that Niantic considers valid, their reviewer rating should reflect that.
I also fully agree that appeals need to do more to support the submitter. Obviously, having the nomination enter the system is nice, and just having the ability to appeal at all is fantastic. It would be nice if both any upgrade (if used) and appeal charges themselves be refunded upon a successful appeal. If the upgrade was basically wasted by bad global reviewers, it would be nice if you got it back. Likewise, the appeal cooldown is still rough, and it would be nice to get its charge back if you were right to appeal, and allow you to appeal more wrongful rejections faster (and basically make the cooldown more of a limit on people who are wrongfully appealing invalid nomination).
As you can see in the screenshot, I’ve had 46 nominations approved solely through Niantic appeals. These weren’t ‘borderline’ cases—they were valid cafes and private sports facilities that local reviewers rejected for no reason.
Even with the recent update to one appeal every 15 days, 46 credits represent nearly two years’ worth of resources. On top of that, I’ve wasted countless Upgrade credits resubmitting the same spots because I simply didn’t have enough appeal credits to fix every mistake.
This data proves one thing: Reviewers absolutely need direct feedback on their rejected decisions. If they aren’t held accountable for ignoring official guidelines, nominators will continue to waste years of their time. This is exactly why we—the local community—have lost faith and now wait for Global Challenges just to get a fair review. If you had to burn through two years of your life to get standard spots approved, you’d understand why ‘gratitude’ isn’t the solution here."
Thank you for understanding my frustration so clearly. You’re absolutely right—the current lack of accountability for poor decisions is the root of the problem. It’s not just about getting one approval; it’s about the years of wasted effort and resources. Improvements are definitely overdue."
Not to downgrade the importance of this issue, but 48 appeals can be made in a single year.
You get two reviews, each of which refreshes after 15 days, so each one can be used 24 times in a year. Obviously, to do this, you have to keep track of the appeals, so it’s a bit of extra work, but it is still takes only half as long to appeal 46 wayspot submission as you have indicated.
You are missing the point. Whether it takes one year or two, the core issue isn’t the math—it’s the fact that 46 valid nominations were wrongly rejected in the first place. I shouldn’t have to ‘keep track’ of a 15-day cooldown like a part-time job just to fix local reviewers’ mistakes. My 46 successful appeals are proof of a broken review culture, not a challenge to see how efficiently I can use the appeal system."
Fair enough, but whether it’s one year or two, the weight of the problem remains the same. The real ‘size of the problem’ isn’t just the 15-day cooldown—it’s the cumulative stress and the massive amount of wasted potential. >
Every single one of those 46 credits should have been used for actual ‘borderline’ cases, not for standard cafes and gyms that were wrongly rejected. When a nominator has to spend a year or more acting as a ‘manual corrector’ for local reviewers’ mistakes, the system has failed. I’m glad we agree that it’s a significant issue that needs to be addressed."
I’m inclined to agree with you. At a minimum if an appeal overturns a rejection, the agreement should be taken away from those who wrongly rejected. An agreement should also be added to those who voted to accept.
I’m not entirely sure that there is a major problem with incorrectly rejected nominations. I do have 60 appeals accepted. However, that’s out of a total of more than 1600 nominations decided.
It is certainly annoying to see nominations rejected that one thinks should be approved. It’s also frustrating to have to take it to appeals (and I’m grateful that I can!)
Thinking… maybe you have a point? I was thinking 60 out of the total decided. Maybe the better metric is 60 out of the 225 rejections? (those 165 still “no” plus those overturned on appeal) … then reduce that by any nominations rejected more than once and those later approved on resubmission. (I have 18 appeal rejections, some of which are edits)
I feel your anger at bad reviewers. There is a huge problem with that. Education is severely lacking. Sometimes even for the appeals team, as we have seen from some posts here about bad appeal decisions. I am certain there are at least as many bad accepts as bad rejects, but we normally only see the bad rejections here. The appeals team is human.
The educational emails they do sometimes send out are more scary than educational in my opinion.
You are looking at this as a submitter. I agree, it is frustrating to be rejected for bad reasons. There have been cases where there have been reviewing rings discovered. When it is clearly abuse, Niantic does act.
As a reviewer, I want to be assured that using my best judgement does not get me punished. Since the appeals reviewers do not always get the decision right, I would not want to be held to the standard of having a strike against my account when I was right and they were wrong. And there are differences of opinion, where they could decide that it is acceptable and neither of us be clearly wrong in a gray area.
In cases where the reviewer has clearly made a mistake, it would be great if they could be sent a message, like, private property only means SFPRP. But I think it is more feasible to change the wording in the review flow than to try to whittle down to which reviews were clearly wrong and which were simply differences of opinion.
There was another point I wanted to make but it escapes me now.
Returning successful appeals immediately would help.
Changing the voting flags after an appeal, so that people who accepted the wayspot get an agreement and people who rejected it don’t get an agreement, would also be the morally correct thing to do. Currently, it’s the opposite of this.
If I look at my own submitted wayspots, I also see that approximately 10% were approved after an appeal. So that’s about the same percentage. So I do get the frustration.
But on the other side, I do understand why people can differ from opinion on eligibility. I have said it many times on this forum, but the rejection and acceptability requirements can be very confusing.
The most obvious is the “private property” criteria. You have to use the forum to see that is only intended for SFPR, and there are several other examples.
I’m just glad the appeal process actually works, and I don’t care when stops are added, I’m just glad that in the end they are accepted.
Finally, if I’m not mistaken, the rating profile is as far as I know, taken into account in the review process (more weight is used for reviewers with an excellent rating).
That has been confirmed by Niantic, either explicitly or by strong inference.
Reviewers with better ratings have a higher weighting than reviewers with a poor rating.
@ko4756 You can have a great rating even with 50% agreement. This alone indicates that you cannot penalise reviewers just for disagreeing with the result of a submission, regardless of how “obvious” that submission is.
I completely agree with you. Since English isn’t my first language, my earlier points might have sounded a bit too much like I was calling for ‘punishment’ for every minor mistake, which wasn’t my intent.
My main concern is that many reviewers, especially in my region, are stuck in old stereotypes or simply don’t know the updated criteria. Even when their rating drops, they have no idea why. They just wait it out and start reviewing again without learning anything because there’s no accountability or feedback.
As you suggested, education is the key. We need a system where Niantic-approved nominations or successful appeals are shown to reviewers as ‘learning cases.’ If we can eliminate the rejections that come from pure ignorance of the guidelines, the environment would improve significantly. It’s not about punishing ‘gray area’ opinions; it’s about fixing the 46 blatant mistakes that forced me to waste years of my time."
I appreciate everyone’s input. It was a valuable chance to reflect on the challenges faced by new reviewers and reconsider my own past mistakes as a beginner.
My goal was simply to advocate for a better system, and I hope no one took my previous comments too personally. Thank you for engaging in this meaningful discussion to make our community better.
If I understand correctly, that 50% statistic doesn’t really mean what most folks think it means. The statistic isn’t so much agreements as initial agreements, as agreement status is not updated after a successful appeal/removal/etc.
Learning that info (about initial agreement) sheds light on the skipping tons of entries behavior that we occasionally see referenced in these forums. For myself, I’m just reviewing steadily and accepting that I’ll have to review well over 2k entries to platinum my Wayfarer medal (my agreement rate is comfortably above 50% thankyouverymuch, but still…). Someone trying to game the system, though, and cherry pick likely agreements, would do a lot of skipping.
Well a lot of people expect slam dunk acceptance on many of their submission when they actually can still improve it. If i am sure, I usually resubmit and/or appeal until it got accepted. I am afraid if reviewer got punished more for disagreement, it will result in less people reviewing and longer acceptance time.
