Hi everyone, I am writing to report an issue with my badge progress tracking. I am currently a Level 8 Local Guide (rapidly approaching Level 9). Recently, I have been actively mapping and adding important public water fountains here in Sicily, which is incredibly vital right now as temperatures are approaching 40°C.
While my metrics for adding new places and photos are updating perfectly, my counter for the “Add the first review to 50 places” milestone under the Expert Trailblazer badge is doing the exact opposite of what it should. Instead of going up when I add a first review of the place added, the counter is actively decreasing.
I did take some screenshots. As you can see from the attached screenshots taken from my profile:
In the first screenshot, the counter stands at 15/50.
In the second screenshot, taken after adding more locations, reviews, and photos (which clearly shows my other counts went up to 29 photos and 26 places)
Hi @Walbas, welcome to the Connect community! That is a really weird bug but it actually happens sometimes. Usually when a badge counter decreases like that, it means some of your older reviews were either hidden by the automated spam filters or the places you reviewed got merged or deleted from the map. I would suggest checking your Maps profile from an incognito window to see if all your past reviews are still public. If everything is visible and it is definitely a system glitch, let us know here and we can tag a Google Moderator to check your account. Keep up the great work adding those water fountains, that is super helpful in this heat!
@Walbas
I also noticed and faced the same issue a few days ago. My Add the first review to 50 places progress was 27, but later it unexpectedly dropped to 17. Now it’s showing 25 again. It seems the counter is recalculating or there’s a bug affecting the badge progress. Hopefully the team can investigate and fix it soon.
All of the counters appear to be working reasonably well, and I can clearly see the correlation between changes in the counters and my activity. The only exception is the “Add the first review to 50 places” counter. Its behavior is quite unexpected, with frequent drops and jumps that don’t seem to match my activity. I’ve been noticing this behavior for a long time, so it doesn’t appear to be a temporary issue. It looks like either a bug or a flaw in the way this counter is designed.
It’s definitely a real bug because my “Add the first review to 10 places” counter is going down when I add reviews to places that didn’t have any - mostly new places I’ve added myself - and 11 of my reviews are definitely publicly visible.
I’m due the Expert Trailblazer Badge because the other two counts are correct at 10 and over, but obviously this bug prevents the badge from being awarded.
It’s really demoralising. I hope it gets fixed because I love bringing new and unknown places to life by visiting and reviewing them.
Hi @JackEnglishFarang, I can totally understand how frustrating and demoralising that must be! Putting in all that hard work to discover and review new places, only to see the counter go down instead of up, is definitely a really weird bug.
Unfortunately, these badge counter glitches are pretty common on Google Maps. The system sometimes gets stuck and takes a while to sync properly. A lot of times, these counters suddenly fix themselves and jump to the correct number when the system does a batch update.
Please don’t let this glitch discourage you! The actual value you are adding by bringing unknown places to life is incredibly helpful for anyone traveling in Thailand. Keep up the amazing work you are doing, and hopefully, the system sorts out that Expert Trailblazer badge for you very soon!
Hi Ayaanali, that’s very kind of you, thank you. I hope you’re right.
I will keep adding reviews as I travel around Thailand. I have finally caught up with myself now, so my workrate in here - which has been enormous since I started two months ago - will slow down a bit. But there are still so many places to discover and add to the guide system, which is a truly brilliant thing.
All the very best to you.
Jack.
