Lately, there has been a trend of maliciously reporting or rejecting Way-spot nominations—claiming they contain profanity or are otherwise inappropriate—even when they are valid. Is Scopely taking any action regarding this? Users are receiving “strikes” due to these intentional, bad-faith reports. It is concerning that fewer users are submitting interesting local locations for exploration, and it is unfortunate that no new system has been implemented to address this issue.
Hello @lama1211
If a wayspot is reported and removed there will have been evidence presented to the team.
Anyone can request the reinstatement of a wayspot by presenting evidence in Wayspot Appeals
If someone is found to have supplied false evidence they can be subject to sanctions.
If there is malicious collusion to reject nominations then again sanctions can be applied.
If anyone wishes to contest a sanction they can appeal, and this forum does see people here appealing.
If you have evidence of a systematic problem please do report it and the team will investigate
this describes ways
Hey @lama1211 ,
Users are encouraged to report Wayspots that they feel violate our guidelines. These reports are then reviewed by our team. Please note that reports from other players or our automated process do not lead to any enforcement.
If you believe any Wayspot submission has been flagged as abusive in error, you can appeal the enforcement, and we will review it again.
We do have a system in place to identify and act on malicious rejections and reports.
Reports from other players do not lead to enforcements (or strikes).
That’s not accurate.
Thank you for your reply. I raised an issue regarding the malicious removal of Waystop candidates—specifically those submitted for community review—based on reasons like profanity, rather than issues with already established Waystops. While the responsible team investigates reports before taking action, they must handle reports in numerous languages from around the world. I suspect that someone might be exploiting vulnerabilities inherent in the translation process for malicious purposes.
Do you want to share an example of what was rejected so we can work out what happened and why?
I once had a submission rejected because it was flagged as containing profanity. I had submitted a cornerstone commemorating the building’s construction, but it was turned down because the system classified it as offensive language. The stone bore the Hanja characters for “Jeong-cho” (meaning “laying the foundation stone”); while these characters are used to mark the completion date or other details of a building, the system inexplicably flagged them as a profanity—even though a quick Google search would have clarified their actual meaning.
There have been discussions about similar cases on other online communities as well. The general consensus among people was that, while they too had faced disciplinary action for such absurd reasons, it was best to simply give up.
The text about profanity is actually a wider meaning, and is related to potential wayfarer abuse, which could be many things including submitting something ineligible, using an AI generated photo, misrepresenting what the PoI is, pinning the location wrongly, or using a photo from the Internet rather than your own.
Could any of those reasons make more sense?
I initially interpreted the rejection as being due solely to the use of profanity. Since “profanity” was cited as the reason—even though other factors might have been involved—it seemed like a situation prone to misunderstanding; this impression was reinforced when I sought opinions in other online communities and found that the majority shared my view.
Well if you didn’t use any profanity, its worth considering the whole rejection reason.
There is a LOT of misinformation in online communities about Wayfarer bans / warnings.
What seems to happen is that a player will receive a ban for doing something clearly against the rules, such as repeated pin misplacement, or stealing StreetView images, and then they will get annoyed they were caught and start spreading a revised version on every platform they can. It even happens here, despite them usually getting quickly shut-down by staff.
In short, don’t believe what you see online about bans. Errors do happen of course, but they are not very common.
When you talk about profanity, you are talking about the “Abuse” rejection narrative, which can be flagged for a nomination for any of the following reasons (roughly in order of how often they occur):
* The photo is not yours (e.g., taken from streetview, found on another website)
* The wayspot location pin is misplaced
* The wayspot is deliberately misrepresented (e..g., on school property but pretending it isn’t)
* The nomination is believed to be fake
* Another nomination was flagged and all of yours have been flagged as a consequence
* The text itself is abusive
* The nomination is controversial and likely to be offensive (e.g., a mural of terrorists)
* (there may be others)
You should try to work out which of these was the actual reason for the abuse flag