Mission rejections: Why is there no appeal?
I realize that complaining on here is a long shot. I need someone to explain why there is no appeal process for mission rejections.
This is the email I recieved "Thanks for submitting Explore Tempe Parks 14 of 18. Unfortunately, we were not able to accept your Mission. Your Mission may have one or more of the following issues:
- Use of an image or text that isn't yours or that you don't have rights to use or that consists of a logo
- Use of official Niantic logos or event names (NL1331, Mission Day, etc.)
- Use of Image or Text that claims the Mission as "official", otherwise implies it has special designation, or is endorsed by Niantic (e.g., "The Official Ingress London Mission")
Fair enough since my mission banner is using images I found on a public domain (simple google search and save image). It's a photo from The Mandalorian. What bugs me though is the lack of consistency with any rule being enforced.
for example there are already approved mission banners using similar images taken from the same property
https://ingressmosaic.com/mosaic/56253 Oakley, CA
https://ingressmosaic.com/mosaic/56147 Antioch, CA
I'm not saying they shouldn't exist. I am just wondering how they were approved. What criteria did they meet that mine did not? So that I can understand how to get things approved.
Comments
Is your image copyrighted? Sometimes they can slip through but if its copyrighted it will usually get denied. Try submit it again otherwise
Never take previously approved things as a guarantee for future approvals. Niantic's whims are in a constant state of flux.
I have a similar problem.
We have with friends to approve 4 banners where the problem is still on the side of niantic.
Banners 18 | 24 | 48 | 90 missions, most approved without a single problem, but still have to permanently reject missions in each banner so that the mosaic cannot be completed.
The reason:
No logo is used in the picture, they are all drawings.
The question is:
why do they always find 1-2 missions in the mosaic, which they consistently reject even if the description is the same as for others who complied with the rules?
People create content for other players for free, so why does niantic have to spoil it like this?
But they will obviously approve something like that without a problem, because "the description is really great" ...
And even worse descriptions / pictures of approved missions can be found a lot.
I had a couple missions rejected in a banner for that same reason. I re-submitted and all have since gone through. Just send it again
My personal complaint about mission submissions is, we're ALWAYS left floundering when trying to discover why any given mission was rejected. For example, when submitting a 6-mission banner, 4 are approved with no issue, and two are rejected. There's NOTHING especially different between the accepted or the rejected ones.
On one singleton mission, eventually I figured out that there seems to be a duplicate in the portal network, one which is NOT immediately obvious when using the mission creator tool.
On another pair (two out of a 6-banner), eventually I figured out that somebody thought that the portals used in the mission were being used by too many other missions in the series -- even though I explicitly designed it so that none ever needed to be hacked more than four times. Apparently three times good, four times bad. (So now, sorry, you have to take an extra pair of weird detours just to get a pretty mural pic.)
I never did figure out why one mission in one other series got rejected ... beyond MAYBE the reviewer didn't like my Haiku. It seems to be that / some characters can't be used / such as a slash mark. Because they flag the no-HTML rejection? (But the stupid reason I never figured out why, silly me tried to figure out what was going up in my mobile web browser, and ... without clicking any such buttons myself, somehow deleted one of the bad missions altogether. Out of frustration I just killed the rest and never bothered trying to recreate it.)
It's not like support for missions is different than support for any other aspect of the game. Which is especially frustrating because we're trying to help create things to do, in the game, so why make it more difficult than it really should be?
I'm sure it's best for Niantic to keep everything vague so they can't be held accountable for anything. I'm sure support has dealt with agents, getting into arguments, trying to convince them of some random mission they did 3 years ago that makes their mission something that should be approved, etc. I dunno, frustrating for sure. I doubt I'll do another mission or set of missions after struggling to do the first banner I did.
Beside Portal submissions the creation of missions/banners is the big opportunity for agents to contribute to Ingress. They are creating popular ingame content for free. Constantly rejecting missions without naming an exact reason is angering and disencouriging all those who create large parts of the ingame content!
I don‘t know how long I will be motivated. I am currently working on a banner; the first half has been approved, the other missions have been rejected multiple times now, even though I provided unique descriptions for all missions and the picture is part of a 100+ year old painting, which is in public domain.
Banner rejections are really frustrating if your image is non copyright and has no letters etc and for no reason, and like u do a banner 6 pieces 5 gets accepted but last one gets denied. i had that happen a few times over years never really understood why. It makes ppl less motivated to submit banners for others to enjoy if things dont change.
And again, this is a prime example of why banners should have the option to be linked/bound together. If 1 is down, all should be down. If 23 of 24 have been approved, they'll hold until that 24th one is live.
Banners are super popular for good reason, missions could really use some updates in-game, as well as the creator page and definitely some clarity provided when rejections occur.