I was wondering if I can get some assistence. About a month ago my reviews completely stopped posting publicly which I found out by chance recently. I am travelling so posting a lot of reviews so it is a lot of reviews that are not published. I see 956 reviews on my profile but only 763 public, so almost 200 reviews although not necessarily all from the last month. My photos seems to be posting just fine, even photos that I think were part of a review. I seem to recall I was playing around with my Bio at that time and there is another post with the same suspected cause here. Could it be a bug when after a Bio change a profile review publication is put on hold until someonw checks the new Bio and this due to some problem never happened?
Couple of weeks back when I found this out I posted the google form I found on this forum, but as I haven’t received an automatic confirmation or any follow-up I am not sure this is still operational (think it was for an issue from 2021).
The current situation is very demotivating as you can imagine and my review backlog is growing as without my reviews being published there is no point really to contribute anything. Is there any way someone can look at this with some decent urgency (although I understand we are just out of the holiday period)? With so much time that I’ve spent contributing to Google Maps, it would be nice to get some support (tbh would be even nicer to be alerted if reviews stop being published for any reason).
Are you refering to your Google Maps profile text? Let me know what kind of changes you made, and I would be pleased to test if an edit to my profile text will cause any problems. But I doubt it will.
It is more likely that you are violating some of all the guidelines even when not on purpose this can cause issues.
At some point I put a link to my instagram account to the profile. So this might have caused my account to be flagged for moderation which never occured. But it doesn’t have anything to do with the reviews, they don’t violate any rules. Then after reading here that links in reviews might cause individual reviews being unpublished I tried to remove it from my profile but new reviews are still not getting published.
It’s not that I have some reviews unpublished, since a month ago absolutely nothing comes through so it must be there is a flag on my profile. Probably others have the problem only don’t know about it because unless someone looks in incognito mode they wouldn’t know.
It would be beneficial if you would use the tagging tool when replying to someone here on Connect. Type @ followed by the username. Type slowly. Then we get an e-mail notification and you are more likely to get a prompt reply.
I have seen Maps users include websites, phone numbers, and email addresses in the profile text without any problems. They do not become clickable links, but they show as text. So I doubt that is the root of your problem.
Regardless of what exactly has triggered the issue it is clearly a problem with the account being able to post reviews and almost certainly also a bug. As you can see with reviews immediately following my last published one there is nothing wrong with them, they are not even bad reviews and are just standard reviews I have been posting for years.
Is there anything you can do on your side to check why this might be happening? I filled that form a couple of weeks ago but had no confirmation of the form being sent. Are you able to see if a buganizer ticket has been created to track my issue?
Don’t bother, I did and they emailed me saying everything is fine. It’s just a waste of time, I think they post this reply to make it seem like there is a solution.
@MashaPS Would you please be able to investigate what the issue can be and if my Google form was successfully sent and triggered a ticket to look into my problem? Many thanks
Earlier in 2022, the team announced this form for the Local Guides on Connect which is specifically dedicated to the missing contributions check.
While for the appeal form you will get an email from the team, we are not able to send any notifications when you fill in the missing contributions one. We will forward your request to the responsible teams to look into your account. If your contributions follow the policies, they will be reinstated.
@MashaPS Good news is that the ~200 reviews that were hidden now seems to be published, so thank you and the Maps team for that. Bad news is they are practically invisible. Their relevancy is set to some obscure value so they appear last in the relevancy order, after reviews which are years old by people with one review etc. Could this please be resolved? Is it just going to take time for them to be bumped to the front? I can’t say yet for new reviews as reviews for the last few days are not public yet, which could be normal or there is still a problem with my account. But for my last published review from a few days ago my review is literally at the very bottom out of hundreds of reviews.
Keep in mind that the order reviews are presented in differes from user to user. It depends on their search history, location, and selected language etc.
Also, please give the system some time to recalibrate after your reviews were made public again.
My account has nothing withstanding against it, I would like the problem to be solved at least for future reviews. There is 0 reason for the reviews to be held back until I start complaining.
@MashaPS Unfortunately my problem has not been resolved. The bulk of unpublished reviews went through about 10 days ago but since than again no review was published so obviously there is an issue with my profile posting any reviews which was not resolved. I’m a software engineer and a Xoogler actually so can picture how these systems work and that would imagine there is a either an explicit piece or set of my data which cause my reviews not being published or it is due to an AI decision that’s based on that data. Also the ~200 published reviews from couple of weeks ago still rank at the bottom or very low for their respective places, regardless of language or whichever parameter they are the last despite me having almost 1000 reviews and them being very recent reviews. No one can see them. So your re-publishing process also seems to have a problem.
I would greatly appreciate if someone could take a deeper look into why my account is not posting reviews and why are republished reviews deemed irrelevant by the algorithm. If I would have to submit a form after every X reviews just to get them published and when that finally happens they will be practically invisible anyway, I would be really done with reviewing, just steps before reaching level 10. After spending so much time contributing as you can imagine from my level.