Suppose someone went on the Toyota user groups to complain that since the last service at the dealership, his 2017 Camry has trouble starting in the morning. The dealership responds by saying, it's normal, some cars may take a few attempts to start on cold winter mornings. But then others show up, all with the same complaint. Their car used to start on the first try each time, until the last service. Now it either takes several tries, or won't start at all. Something is broken.
Again the dealership responds, this time by saying that nothing is broken. The dealer's own Camry starts just fine each morning. And besides, how can you say it's broken? The lights still come on, the wipers work, even the radio works. Stop complaining, your cars aren't broken.
And that's where we are today. At some point, when more and more people complain or simply stop driving, we know Toyota will fess up, just like they did with the 2010 accelerator pedal recall, and admit that anyone who had his car serviced after October 1st got a firmware upgrade that contained a bug, and could we please have the car towed to the nearest dealership for a free fix. Alas, that's not happened here yet.
I'm not here calling for a "strike", and I am doing just fine without the need to edit (or drive...). I just wish we got some honest, technical answers here, instead of diplomatic whitewashing and arbitrary "Solved" stamps. If someone came here and said, "The Google team has identified the problem; it affects anyone who has done more than 1023 marker moves over the past 12 months. They expect to have the problem fixed by November 24", the issue would be closed. Alas, for whatever reason, we are kept in the dark.
When you are relying on an army of volunteer workers for your crowdsourced project, you can't treat them this way and expect their continued loyalty. Unlike a paid job, the rewards of crowdsourced work is seeing the results of your effort. When you don't get that, you eventually find something else to do.
I think I speak for many here when I say that we need some real answers from someone who knows what's happening at the GMaps team.
Re: people that are frustrated because the bots won´t approve their edits
I think that analogy is pretty sound. I've enjoyed being a Local Guide and I take great pride in the quality of what I submit. So suddenly having everything denied is frustrating and disappointing. I would like an explanation too. I don't even know where to look to get an idea of why this is happening. And it doesn't seem like anybody cares that much.
Which is fine. The local guides community is massive and as people have pointed out, these problems don't affect many of us, it seems. But then what? Do I just spend time submitting over and over in the vague hopes that something will change? Without some concrete way to fix what's gone wrong, there's not much point.
Re: people that are frustrated because the bots won´t approve their edits
@KathrynH I think, they changed it in a negativ way only for the little group of us, but will not change it in a positiv way for us. I think its something similar to mobbing.
@KathrynH I think, they changed it in a negativ way only for the little group of us, but will not change it in a positiv way for us. I think its something similar to mobbing.
We don't really know how many people this affects. Most people who edit GMaps aren't on LGC, and among those on LGC, many don't edit frequently enough to notice this. Among the few who are on LGC and edit frequently, I'm sure there are many people who have ran into this problem, but prefer to sit back and read our discussion rather than add their "me too!".
The fact that many of those who ran into this problem are Level 7 and above tells me that the more you edit, the more you are affected by this issue. So chances are it affects almost everyone, but infrequent editors may take a while to notice it, or may think this is normal.
From my experience, debugging problems that don't show up consistently is very difficult. But the first step to fixing anything is admitting there is a problem. The sooner that happens, the sooner this can be dealt with.
Re: people that are frustrated because the bots won´t approve their edits
How many "only a you" do you need ro believe there is a problem? @Flash
Moderators should be the interface between LGs and Google. If moderators ignore problems, tell guys they are to stupid and the fault is not with Google but with the algorithm, there will be no solution.
First step todo is, realize there is a problem which can not be solved by LGs. But we will fight for our goal, make mals better. We will fight against google and moderators if needed. I recommend to work together. Moderators, google, be a part of us!
I have been following this thread from almost day one, as it was started by Briggs and he is somebody I care about (although I do not personally know him), purely based on his valuable contributions to our community.
Since the beginning, it has been said, that if something was seriously wrong that one would expect it to affect a lot of people and the evidence is not there. Besides Local Guides Connect, there is a product forum and people can send feedback directly from the App. People with the right connections within the Google Maps eco-system have confirmed that they are not receiving unusual feedback, in other words, it is hurting a relatively small group.
Secondly, in Briggs case, they have looked under the hood of his car and said that his engine is fine. The system is working as intended. Because this answer was not easy to swallow, a Googler and member of our Local Guides Team, with the job description Map Editing department, has given an explanation on this forum. Since then, this explanation (by Gus) has been repeated and clarified by other Connect Moderators.
trying to stick with your analogy, you were talking about a car manufacturer. So here I go...They sell billions of cars. They notice an increase in accidents which is hurting their reputation. After an investigation, they notice that all the people (read: spammers) that were involved in the accidents had all something in common. The had the same type of tires. In response to the matter at hand, all car owners with those tires were taken off the road. Directly, the car manufacturer noticed the dramatic drop in accidents, which is obviously good for the safety of their customers and people on the road and reputation of the company. They continued their investigation trying to understand the source of the accidents.
Looking in the future, soon the scientist shall discover that it was not simply the type of tire that is suspicious, but a certain serial number of wheel bearings. When that happens, the people that were taken off the road with the previously suspicious tires, but not having these now suspicious bearings are allowed to drive again.
From the millions of cars driving on the road, let´s say a thousand people were incorrectly affected by this inconvenience. Did they have fun, when their lives were disrupted?
Are you saying that the car manufacturer should not take people off the road when they found a suspicious cause to a serious threat?
To come back to reality, it has been formally explained to us that it is a difficult science to balance the algorithms to block spammers and allow the right people to make legit contributions. It has also been explained that as this is a kind of war between Google and the spammers, that Google is not going to share insights into their intelligence (as in spying, nothing to do with IQ) operations with their soldiers on the ground.
So there is no point in demanding a detailed further explanation. Google has told us how much they can safely do, without compromising their warfare against the baddies.
Re: people that are frustrated because the bots won´t approve their edits
@JeroenM You think it is better to have tons of wring information, then correct? It can not be much difficult to recognize if someone removed a city name / adress from the entry.
My job as local guide is to look at my area and hold the information right. Businesses now claim the business to use the name field for advertisement. There is no way to report or change.
If you can not see a significant increase of reports, the reason is, there is on most cases no proper way for a report. And if there is a way, i think more than 50% do not report.
We are Local Guides, se fight for a better GM and will never give up. Its our goal and we do everthing to fight for it. Dont try fo stop us!
If you do not want our work and blocks us further, tell us and we will give up our work.
trying to stick with your analogy, you were talking about a car manufacturer. So here I go...They sell billions of cars.
No, they do not. This seems to be a recurring theme here, with a mod on another thread claiming GMaps has "billions of lines of code".
A billion, or one thousand million, is a big number. Toyota makes more cars than any other carmaker. It produces 17 million cars a year. Over its entire history, it produced fewer than half a billion cars. Looking at all carmakers, there are just over one billion cars on the road today.
Same with the lines of code. Unless Google hired the entire population of India to write code for it, it is practically infeasible for it to have more than about 50 million lines of code for the GMaps function. Sure, it has billions of data items in its database, but that's not what was being discussed.
Anyway, ignoring your car production figures hyperbole, if the rest of what you say is true, then the problem is not yet solved. It may only affect a few thousand LGs alongside millions of spammers, but it is still doing so incorrectly, and programmers are still working to solve this. Marking this here as "Solved" achieves the opposite result from the desired one. People who are still affected by the issue (can we call it "problem", or is that forbidden?) will think they are encountering a new issue, when in fact it is the same others here have brought up.
I am all in favour of sitting back patiently and waiting for the algorithm to be fixed by the capable programmers at Google. However, seeing the issue dismissed offhandedly, and threads arbitrarily marked as "Solved" overriding the original poster's best judgement, leaves me with doubts as to whether those in charge of the code realize there's a problem, and what kind of timeline we are to expect for solving this.
Re: people that are frustrated because the bots won´t approve their edits
@OStr As we see, you, mods and i know there is a problem. Trying to see the problem on something intangible shows that they do not want to say something. Telling us, we are to stupid shows there own frustration. For me it looks like they will end LG -Project in near future. I heared that rumor from other LGs also. There is something true about most rumors.
2022
