Reviews are not public

Google Maps tips & tricks
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H Everyone!

My Local Guides account was suspended for about 20 months. Now I am back to Local Guides Programme. Thanks Team for reinstating my account!!

I have recently added and written two reviews but they are not visible to anyone except me. I can see my recent and past uploaded photos and number of views. My earned points are shown on my profile where i can see all my points but the same on LG programme by clicking Google Map profile, I can see only zero reviews. Please let me know is it because of policy or because of mu account which was suspended.

If reviews are not in the public domain, do not see any point in contributing? Please guide.

ProfArunCM

@MortenCopenhagen

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Welcome back to Connect, @ProfArunCM

I visited your profile on Google Maps and saw that your LG level is not mentioned. Only your number of contributions is mentioned under your username. That indicates that your profile on Google Maps has not yet been reinstated. In fact when we get suspended we lose access to Connect and the mention of our level is removed from our Google Maps profile.

Also, I can confirm that none of your reviews are public. I do see you have 91.695 photos that are public. What a lot. Also, your number of points is incomprehensible huge :hearts: :muscle: :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I suggest you reach out to the Local Guides Team and ask for them to take a look. Maybe tagging @AngieYC here for you can do the trick. I think it would be good if you could also let them know when you were informed about your un-suspension and if any reasons were mentioned.

I completely understand your lack of motivation for writing reviews as long as they stay private. Recently we have experienced other cases where all reviews were made private by accident or by some kind of sanction.

If your un-suspension happened very recently it could also just be a delay or you may need to sign up as a local guide from within the google maps app to get it restarted. I remember that being the case for me and it was not very straight forward to do.

Fingers crossed

Morten

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Hello @ProfArunCM

Happy to note that your LG account is now reinstated and welcome back to Connect.

Also, I can see your LG level also in your Maps profile.

It was a shock to see a Connect live attendee facing moratorium.

Nevertheless, you are not alone to detect all reviews becoming private. If you scan the Howtos section you will find many such complaints.

I find that’s a novel way of putting constraints on the LG account and that has started along with the rollout of the “follow” feature for all.

I suspect the following maybe some of the reasons for the AI to mark all reviews as private.

But I am sure being a senior mentor, these may not be the reasons.

Nevertheless, the objectionable practices are:

Self liking of reviews

Gamification of likes through friends or buddies. If these buddies become a follower and start liking every review, the feature will become useless.

Usually, a naive user never becomes aware of the AI marking any review as private. However, such gamers come to know that instantly.

Stuffing of reviews with repetitive words to cross the stipulation of 200 characters.

Plagiarism

Repeating the same set of words across multiple reviews

Repeated complaints from businesses.

Use of slang or abusive language.

Posting a review without physically visiting a place. The AI can very well determine that based on the GPS data in the timeline.

Repeating the same rating (particularly one star) throughout.

Possibly the AI is also evaluating rating vs words used in reviews. A frequent contradiction in that would not be a good sign.

Anyway, these are only guesses. The moderators are yet to revert on the previous reporting.

Meanwhile, have you tried editing any of the previous reviews? Usually, reviews become public again on removal of objectionable words. I edited three such reviews in June 2019 and these continue to remain public till date.

BTW in the photos contribution also, 5276 numbers are now private that’s a big amount. However, considering quantum, it would be impossible to locate those. Nevertheless, that may lead to similar trouble in future.

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Hi @ProfArunCM ,

Thank you for reaching out to us. We will have a look at this.

I wanted to remind you that reviews that do not adhere to Maps User Contributed Content Policy will be made private and are only visible to you.

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Thanks, looking forward.

Previous reviews were public but not now. Even two of the recent reviews are not public. Eagerly waiting for response.

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Thank you very much fir quick and detailed response. @AngieYC is requested to please look into the issue.

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Thank you very much for quick and detailed response. I m sure Google Local Guides team would find the solution.

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Other people reported the same issue @ProfArunCM , so maybe it is just a glitch.

BTW, I have been quite surprised to find some contribution in Google Maps, and I would like to ask you to remove the photos of the attendees of Connect Live from Google Maps, included the ones posted on “unknown location”.

Do you have the permission of all the photographed people to be added on Google Maps, during the event, or at breakfast?

For sure you didn’t asked me, BTW, and for sure a photo with me is not improving the level of the place

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Thanks for quick response. I assure you that mistakes committed in the past will not be repeated. I appreciate very much your concern about privacy and would do the needful with regard to pictures of 2018 Connect at SFO.

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Recognizing a mistake is the first step in any improvement, so I hope to see this part fixed as soon as possible, @ProfArunCM

Most of the rules in the Local Guides program are inspired by helping others through our contributions in Google Maps.

This means providing useful contributions to those who use Maps, and respectful of people and their privacy. When we upload a photo, our question to ourselves must be “is this photo useful?” and not “how many points do I get?”. Photos of other people are almost always useless, and often violate the right to privacy.
The redundant photos are always useless, because they do not bring any benefit (more information) to Google Maps users, but simply point to those who upload them. Points that can be easily lost, because uploading redundant photos is a violation of the program’s rules too.

So I am happy to read that “mistakes committed in the past will not be repeated”, and I wants to thank you for this.

Fixing the mistakes is usually the first step to take

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