I would like to raise a concern regarding how verified abuse and board manipulation are handled on the Wayfarer platform.
Currently, when explorers report system manipulation (such as mass-uploading duplicate photos to artificially boost a Wayspot’s priority), Niantic Support acts to remove the abusive photos. However, the advantage gained through verified abuse often remains permanently active in the network, even after the invalid photo count is removed.
This creates an unintended loop where abusive behavior is penalized on paper, but the illegitimate outcome is still preserved, depriving legitimate Wayspots of fair representation.
Proposed Improvement:
When a photo abuse report is verified and enforced by Support:
Reset or recalculate the status of the affected Wayspot to reflect its current, legitimate data.
Allow fair re-evaluation for surrounding legitimate Wayspots within the same local area.
Addressing abusive content while preserving the outcome still rewards bad behavior. Ensuring that abuse enforcement completely resets affected outcomes will protect the integrity of the Wayfarer database.
I understand your analysis. However, I must add that this conclusion is based on multiple inaccurate assumptions. While I’m unable to discuss the internal working mechanism, I can assure you that we take all the necessary actions to mitigate and discourage abuse.
We enforce punishments proportional to the magnitude of the abuse. This includes permanent termination of accounts.
Thank you for the clarification and for taking the time to review my post. I appreciate the team’s efforts in maintaining platform integrity and hope to see continued improvements in transparency regarding abuse handling.
Have to say that I personally agree with this but it seems like this is not the decision of the Wayfarer team but the respective game teams. I have previously also explained how I think it’s long overdue for the Wayfarer team to have control over such things, as when a Pokemon GO gym gets unrightfully removed and then reinstated, it still loses its gym status. It just heavily endorses abuse and even if the abusers get punished, they effectively still won and that win cannot be taken from them.
Sure! Basically, after I successfully reported a non-existent Gym, local players exploited the lack of privacy protection on the public appeal forum—where post details and links are fully visible—to track my report. They intentionally manipulated photos and likes on another Pokéstop to turn it into a new Gym before official action was taken.
Although my secondary report against those cheaters was also approved, the system design is completely unfair: the Gym cannot revert back to a normal Stop, and those abusers suffered no real penalty while keeping the Gym they manipulated.
Thanks for sharing this! You hit the nail on the head. It’s so frustrating that abusers still win because the system can’t revert the changes. Plus, having to post on a public forum without privacy protection basically broadcasts our moves to them in real time. Wayfarer and the game teams definitely need better coordination and a system update.
You can no longer ‘force’ a gym to be selected by manipulating the number of photo likes. That particular method was blocked about 3-ish years ago, and we are told that the process is now random.
I’ve certainly seen brand new stops with no likes become a gym immediately, so that appears to be at least largely accurate.
I have seen this happen myself. I am not a big numbers nominator so my data is limited and now out of date but I definitely had instances where…
There was a Pokestop with votes.
It was not used for Showcase.
A 2nd Pokestop was added.
The newest Pokestop became the Gym.
IMO: There is definitely a “Random” element.
I know “Scopely” and previously “Niantic” are very protective of giving out information on procedure but I do not see how an official comment stating “New procedures prevent any possibility of influencing Gym promotion” could cause any damage.
If they are still using Photo Votes then the question is Why.
If they are using something else such as “Interactions” then a comment stating “Photo Votes are no longer used in deciding Gym Promotions”.
If there are people that at least believe the Photo Votes procedure and attempt it, whether it works or not it is still affecting the map data.
Thanks for the insight! While official sources claim it’s random now, my actual case in this L14 cell shows a different pattern:
First Gym: The original Gym was created when the L14 cell reached the 20-Pokéstop threshold, and it naturally went to the Stop with the highest organic photo likes at that time.
Second Gym:After that fake Gym was removed, players added photos and likes to another specific Stop. That exact Stop with the updated highest count then became the replacement Gym.
Seeing this happen twice under the same conditions in this cell suggests that photo and like counts may still influence Gym promotion in practice. Just sharing what I observed from this experience!
My experience has been the same as that of Slimboy.
But as has been said, we aren’t supposed to ‘research’ this, and as that’s a pretty nebulous term, I’ll leave the discussion there before I get detention.
