2 local rest and refueling areas were submitted and selected and now pokestops, I visited the exact same rest and refueling station/area in a city south of me and submitted everything the same as someone else did the other 2, except I used my own words and photos. It was declined as a pokestop and declined the appeal as well. What makes the 2 exact same submission by someone else get picked and mine not?
Welcome to the forum!
It would help to see screenshots of your nomination from your contributions page to help explain why yours was rejected, and advise if it is possible to improve it for a new submission.
It is not always possible to directly compare nominations to existing game locations. The others could have something about them that you aren’t aware of, or they could have been accepted in error. It is hard to say. All you can do is evaluate your own submission and make a case that it meet criteria, regardless of what has been previously accepted or not.
Here is a link you can bookmark about the criteria. Read all four sections. You must convince that any nomination meets at least one of a great place to exercise, explore, or be social, without meeting any of the rejection requirements.
Welcome.
The direct answer to the question in your post’s title can get complicated.
Scopely Explore uses an ML bot to decide the “easiest” submissions.
Wayfarer staff reviews a small portion of nominations in house.
The general process has nominations reviewed by “the community”. These are other Wayfarer users in your general area. These are real people who play Scopely games and submit nominations themselves. They are randomly served nominations to review. Without going into the technical details, “general area” is rather broadly defined and varies based on where the submission is located.
At the moment the AI doesn’t approve nominations. But it can, and often will reject nominations , especially if it can’t identify anything in the pictures that might make it a good wayspot
Welcome. Can you share complete detail on your nomination(foto, title, description, information, loc, etc)? Is it rejected by AI or community?
A rejection is a decision.
True, but I do think it is important to realize that there is no auto accept.
It was a wawa rest stop and refueling area. 3 others I visited had the same alprived and are now gyms, I found a wawa that didn’t have a stop yet and submitted it using the exactly same wording and photos from the wawa I was at and it was declined and so was the appeal
You should never use what is already on the map as an indication of what is acceptable.
The other could have been accepted under older criteria.
Each nomination is reviewed by a random selection of Reviewers (if it wasn’t Rejected by the AI) and lots of nominations fall in to a grey area.
Other wayspots may have something different which pushes it towards Accept others not such much.
If you post screen shots of your nomination and maybe even the Rejection reason we can advise whether it’s worth re-submitting maybe with some improvements.
Good Luck
Reviewer sometimes accept ineligible wayspot. So you cant use them as basis for acceptance. If you disagree with rejection, you can appeal and get scopely staff to review.
The simple answer is ‘humans make errors’.
Reviewers accept things that shouldn’t be accepted. Those things become pokestops. Players see them and copy them, and are then surprised when other reviewers correctly reject them.
Stick to the criteria, not what someone else has managed to fluke.