This is ridiculous. From over a month I am constantly getting notices for reviews I posted in the past.
Explanation always is: "Content that violates our policy on fake engagement isn’t allowed. Fake engagement includes incentivized content, content intended to manipulate a place’s rating, and other content that doesn’t represent a genuine experience. "
I can understand if these were about hotels, restaurants, bars, etc. But they are about monuments, government buildings, post offices! Bridges! Lighthouses! Water towers!
Hello @erinin I can understand your situation. I request you to read the post by @ErmesT by clicking here to know about the reviews not getting published. Hope this will help you.
What incentive may I have to publish a review of a post office? Or a fountain? Or a parking lot!
Here is a short list of latest deletions:
Fontana Grande - Frankly speaking I was not impressed.
Porta Romana - Completely rebuild after WWII, it still looks old
Piazza del Plebiscito - Political and administrative center of Viterbo
Puente de Piedra - Nice views, but it is quite dangerous. Not because of buses and taxis, but scooters.
Parcheggio Saba Giovanni - Well organized parking close to the center of Assisi.
I fully agree with @erinin , and this is one of the points that I have already highlighted to the team. Most of my hidden reviews were reviews of parks, where there is no ownership nor a reason in “buying” or “selling” fake reviews.
I added this also in one of my replies in my mentioned post, and I think this is a part of the issue that must be fixed quickly, because flagging a Local Guide for this reason has no sense, but it can effect also all the reviews that we write on businesses.
Thank you @ErmesT Apparently I am not alone in this and it is not a isolated incident.
And this just in (for a review posted a couple of years ago):
Biglietteria Terminal Traghetti Grimaldi Lines Civitavecchia - “Staff at the office are polite and helpful, but the ones on the ship are beyond any belief. Dirty cabins, bored and rude stewards, bad food. And all of this in the low season! I can imagine how it is in July-August.”
I am done with Local Guides. “So long and thanks for all the fish”
Hm…WHAT FISH? I spent countless hours participating in a program without even thinking of any reward and at the end I got this…
Hi @erinin … sorry to read about your predicament. It has been an issue for a bit now and I don’t speak for the Google team, but I’m sure that they are trying their best to sort it all out. Do try to stay with the program despite all the frustrations with the current review issue. I believe that eventually they will get fixed so all your reviews will continue to help everyone.
I’m probably lucky that I don’t receive the “fake engagement” emails because it’s not available yet for my account so, in my case, ignorance is bliss. Oh, I can certainly check to find out the number of my reviews that have been made private but I choose not to do so. I know that my reviews are genuine and once Google has sorted out their spam detection filter, I’ll submit a form to get my account checked.
And yes, I appreciate that a lot of time and effort goes into writing a review but I’m encouraging folks like yourself to just stick with it for now. If you still find it frustrating, perhaps take a pause on writing reviews but still contribute photos/videos. We shouldn’t concede to the spammers! Anyway, all the best whatever you decide to do.
Were those samples the actual body of the review? If so that may be the issue, the reviews team may not think they are substantial enough. The other sample you gave (the years old one) seems like it should have went through though so idk. I don’t review very often. When I do they’re usually pretty thorough or long, and I think I’ve only so far had one declined.
That said idk what they look for when they parse them, and it’s possible they hold local guide reviews to a higher standard than non-guide reviews, especially as you level up (since there’s some sort of respect and priority givent to LG reviews).
All reviews marked as ‘not posted’ are at least an year old, there were a few that are from 2018-2019. That is, they are removing my old posts (all my reviews are with pictures) and I doubt it that this is done by a real person. This started about a month ago and imho this a badly written script/AI that is judging me/my posts.
As I said, I can understand that a script can mark a review for a bar/hotel/restaurant as "content intended to manipulate a place’s rating’, but most of them are not for business listings, historic places, monuments, etc.
More examples:
Cattedrale di San Lorenzo -Duomo di Viterbo, or Cattedrale di San Lorenzo is one of the most impressive buildings of Viterbo.
Monument als Castellers - Someone counted the castellers - 218
Palacio de la Aljafería - Muslim palace, royal residence, inquisition prison, catholic monarch’s palace, military barracks… In restoration since 1947. Practically it was rebuild completely.
You deserve a like for mentioning one of my favourite books. Thank you for that.
What is surprising me is the new behaviour of the AI, that seems to be actively scanning old reviews, and not only checking the reviews when posted. @MortenCopenhagen , have you seen any other post about that? I can personally confirm that this happened just today to my wife too.
Well, this seems to be a change in the way the AI is acting, even if I can’t say if it is good or not. But we should keep it into consideration.
I couldn’t agree more about knowing how many hidden reviews we have, @AdrianLunsong , and I will tell you anything about yours, but I agree with you, this is not the time to leave.
However, @erinin , what @MaxwellsDeamon said is right, and some of the reviews where you describe a place are not exactly what a review should be: your experience of the place. Everyone can write a description. I’m not saying you haven’t been there, but simply how the text you shared appears.
I am sure Morten can give you some great ideas about how to improve your wording
It sounds like you think a team of humans check our reviews. This is normally not the case. The spam filter approving or hiding our reviews is an automated system.
I think the spam filter always has been scanning both new and older reviews repeatedly. This is not something new.
What could be new is the behavior where all new reviews get hidden immediately for reasons that are not related to the new reviews themselves. This is what some call being blacklisted. This is not completely new, but the fact that all otherwise good reviews get hidden could be only a few month old.
Yes, I know exactly what you mean. After being blocked for a review of a garden in France everything I posted was immediately blocked, including a simple rating (five star) that I added to remember to write a review later. Flagging an account, blacklisting, we can use several words for that, but the result is the same, so I find interesting that in some case only some review is blocked, while in my case everything was blocked. This seems to be, if we can use this word, a kind of improvement
I think it would be helpful if we define and start using the same term. Blacklisted would work for me.
I also wanted to add that allold reviews don’t get taken down in an instance. It can take a few days. This could be due to the fact that sync of all the servers can the a few days.
Well, in my case all the review were taken down immediately when posted. To be precise, when I was posting the review it became grey, with the message “under review” at the top, and after a few seconds the message “Your review isn’t posted” and at the same time I received an email with the same information
