Reveiw and photos are not posted

I recently visited Dublin and the first review I posted showed “not posted. This does not follow our policies.” All the reviews I added had the same problem. Later, my first review got a possibility to appeal, and it came to my favour. I added another review; a few got accepted while others did not. I don’t have a possibility to appeal the same. I shall share the screenshots of the same. General information I can see on google, but I am sure I am not violating anything. Can someone tell me why?

Also, in my profile, I can see 232 reviews, while only 214 are publically visible.

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Well done, @stanlywilson03 that you were able to find the numbers.

Keep in mind that the trigger might not be in the review text itself. Try deleting the attached photos and check if your review goes public. If so, try adding the photos back one by one and keep checking. This way you can figure out which photo was the culprit.

Furthermore, the spam filter looks at your overall performance and track record as a local guide. So completely unrelated violations can also cause reviews to be removed from public view.

Cheers

Morten

@MortenCopenhagen

I tried to remove the photos and edited the comments. I tired different possibilities. Still, they remain as “not posted”. Out of 4 reviews with not posted, I got one chance to appeal. The other 3 remains “not posted”

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What you describe is not normal but also not unusual.

I looked at your contributions. When you write reviews you take on a role of authority and write general information and comments that anyone can look up online. Google specifically request that we go not share general remarks. Instead we should describe our personal experience and how we liked it and why. Such info are much more valuable and authentic and helpful to Maps users.

Read about typical review guideline violations here. And please see my post called 4 Tips on writing better reviews. And try answering the 4 questions for each review. This is likely to enable you to make better reviews.

You are also violating some of the guidelines for photos. We should never upload redundant / similar photos. You do this a lot. Also, uploading fewer and only your best shots would be helpful.

Best of luck
Morten

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Hello @stanlywilson03 ,

Please be advised that I edited your post and relabeled it to How-tos as it will be more helpful to others there.

Hello @stanlywilson03 in case you were not successful yet, one more tip form my own experience:

Last fall, after realizing I had several hidden reviews and photos, I tried to clean all, which was successful except for on review, I never found until now. After being able to solve many by removing the photos, as Morten mentioned above, there was one review which was specially nasty. So, I used a pragmatic approach on the desktop:

  • Remove half of the text and save it in the text editor on my PC.
  • Wait a couple of seconds while pressing refresh (Ctrl-R) several times
  • If it is not accepted, repeat the above step with the half of the remaining text.
  • After several removals. it was accepted and I recovered the original text sentence by sentence, then word by word and see when it is refused again.
  • I finally discovered, simply removing a hyphen, i.e replacing the German “Kartoffel-Chips” with “Kartoffelchips” really did it!
  • Just to be sure, I cross checked by adding the hyphen again, it was refused again; removing it and the review is public until today!

Of course it takes a lot of time and sometimes it is more convenient just to delete the review, while I think ignoring and leaving it hidden, is not be a good idea, because the ratio of hidden and public posts might cause the filter to refuse more easily in the future - I believe.

Same for the photos: If one is hidden, I delete and post another one. Useless to try to analyze, why it was refused.