Documenting the Failures of the Automated Google Bot

[aka_Rὁn]

This is my second attempt to raise this "new" issue and the first attempt was effectively suppressed by being moved into an old thread in the General Discussion topic and one which already had 77 pages and was LOCKED.

That perhaps will be the fate of my attempt to create a new discussion thread.

We shall see.

As each of the postings by contributors (including at least one who is at LEVEL 10) has been met with "it's all your own fault" responses from moderators we need to do a lot more to document the details of our postings online so that someone in authority will finally sit up and take notice and attempt to fix this broken system.

I have begun an album of photos on my Google Profile (which are luckily beyond the reach of the moderators) which I will add to as the number of "NOT APPLIED" responses to the creation of new places increases.

If others did something similar then it would be much harder for the problems to be continually swept under the carpet.

Any ideas as to the best ways to raise the profiles of these issues  would be most welcome.

Something has to change because the existing system - and its implementation - is not fit for purpose.

More human intervention is required by paid employees of Google Maps.

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[aka_Rὁn]

@bcanote

If you explore other similar topics in this forum you will begin to see that there are problems with the automated system which are being sidelined continually and the assumption is that the contributors are somehow at fault for providing incorrect - or insufficient - details.

The Google Maps Bot is insufficient for dealing with so many of these issues and there is no attempt by the developers to provide any detailed error messages to give some indication of why their system is NOT working.

We need to find a way to entire into direct discussions with the decision-makers and the designers.

Perhaps the Google Maps Bot should be released as an Open Source Project so that seasoned developers can spot all the inconsistencies and logic errors more easily.



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[Flash]

@aka_Rὁn, I moved your last post in error as that thread showed to me to still be taking comments.  As you've probably noticed from Googler postings there are changes being actively made to the forum at this moment that are causing the occasional issue.

I'll thus leave this thread in place, but I will be moving your attempts to post the same message in existing threads to this thread.  If you wish to have a discussion you should keep it in one spot.

I'll also note that while you are speaking about better documenting issues; you have yet to provide details so that you can be helped and all the threads you are interjecting into are ones were people also do not provide details.  No one has said it is all the users' faults.  Many issues are solved in this forum.  Many users are helped to understand the rules and then they are successful with their edits.  But if you refuse to provide details you won't be helped anymore than someone that will not provide details to the mechanic beyond "Car broken".  And if you don't have an interest in learning and following the rules of the map you likely also will have issues.

I do hope we can help you, but simply trying to flood the forum with posts with no information is unproductive.

[aka_Rὁn]

I wish that the automated system would generate an e-mail notification which provides some indication of the data that it regarded as incorrect or unverifiable.

User-friendly error messages are a hallmark of a professional and well-designed system.

It would not be "rocket science" to provide more details as to the reasons why an edit is "NOT APPLIED" since the "logic" of the program would be able to cite it fairly easily.

Perhaps it is time for the Google Maps Bot to be rewritten so that it can issue error messages (or simply error codes) that can be an aid to further investigation of particular incidents as well as to help identify bugs and discrepancies in the existing system.

I have seen a lot of very useful suggestions appearing in a number of separate comment threads and none of these are received well by the Local Connect Moderators, nor are they noted for further discussion  regarding system improvements.

That tells us all a great deal about the way that this forum is being micro-managed and raises a lot of questions at the selfsame time.

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