Hello Community,
I don't know if the approach which I will lay down in the next few sentences has already been discussed here. However, it isn't currently in the system and I would highly recommend that Google agrees with my idea as it targets a real problem which I also faced and that required manual intervention by Google employees.
Local Guides, Google Maps, both do have problems with spammers / fake accounts which simply try to collect as many Local Guide points as possible. The current state is, that someone could simply rate all sorts of businesses around the world to gain many points in a very short time span. This is also the type of action which is honoured most by the system. If such a suspicious person is stupid it would rate businesses with <5 stars and the owners start to complain and the person gets removed (maybe). If they do not complain, probably nothing will happen, depending on the amount of exploitation the person did. If the spam filters do not react because it isn't an automated script or the "automatic filter rules" don't detect the malicious action. Nothing will happen and the fake reviews are actively damaging businesses. If the user is clever he would exploit the system with 5 star ratings so no business owner would complain because it's great for them receiving nice reviews. However even this is bad, not for the business owners but for the consumers, because the rating system gets also distorted to the other end of the scale.
This is the current state and there would be a really easy way to restrict / prevent these actions without harming or cutting the current system very much. So based on the problem I would suggest to implement thresholds for point earning actions, especially for reviews that Local Guides can write on a time span base. I'm thinking of a daily limit. I don't have a real number in my mind which would fit perfectly but it should be connected with the current Local Guide level of the person giving the review. Maybe this limit can be raised with each level the user gains. But it should start very low so that the person trying to exploit the system is limited by time. A limit should be oriented on the current points per level necessary to rank up. So that a person could not "infinitely" level up and gain a higher limit (this would again result in the same / a similar situation). Normal users typically won't gain thousand of points a day. Nor is it expected that a user would review more than let's say 10 or 20 places a day. I would also take images added per day here into account, it shouldn't be as rigid but should also be oriented on the amount of points gained per day by these action. There might be exceptions from this rule. But this can be neutralized by raising the limit on a LG user level base.
Maybe this is a naive approach however if these thresholds are reasonable tuned it would improve the current state. And YES this is a real problem and NO the filters don't do enough to prevent such situations. Therefore I will link what happened to me and what happened to other users and this is just the peak and shows a small neckline:
my case
other cases 1
other cases 2
other cases 3
general situation
You may find many more of them in the Google My Business or Local Guides Connect forums but the cases I linked should just be an example of the current problem. I took also examples of the German Business forums because I had them by hand. Please feel free to attach more of these cases to this thread. So that we can get a better overview what's really going on!
@Ivi_Ge
@thepicho
@ErmesT
2022
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