Ingress FS banner frustrations
People around here love to have a new banner to do every First Saturday. And really, I like to design those: try to make sure they cover enough portals so visitors can get uniques, that they are easily walkable, that they include the registration portal and end around the restock portal, that the images are aesthetically pleasing... I do put some though in it, and I've made a few.
So it is frustrating when you submit a banner that you have built like you have built others before (that were approved without issue) and then you get one mission approved, and others returned. It wouldn't be that bad if rejections actually came with a clear explanation. But no, that would be way too efficient.
For the same series, with the same mission text, mission images cut from the same image you get different rejection emails, each coming with several unrelated potential causes for rejection, none of which appearing to apply to what you submitted. You can't reply to that email for further explanation because if you do a bot basically tells you that you're SOL, nobody will answer, go read the guidelines (well, guess what? Those missions fit the published guidelines, but maybe not the untold guidelines because they're, you know, untold).
So there's a help slack where organizers do their best to help other organizers.. You'd hope that will help you get a clear answer. But not really.
So you resubmit, and you get another rejection, with various unrelated potential reasons for rejection but with the added lovely paragraph: "Please do not resubmit this Mission without fixing these issues. Being a Mission author is a privilege for trusted agents who abide by the Mission Criteria. Further transgressions may result in your Mission authoring permissions being suspended."
Because really, spending some of my time to make a FS event more fun for others is a privilege. Wasting my time because it's impossible to get a clear explanation of the issue is a privilege, That is probably some of the lousiest way to treat volunteers I've seen. Not an achievement to be proud of.
Now if that wasn't enough to discourage people, at the same time the mission authoring site is having existential issues, leading to the message below popping up at least once each time a mission is working on.
Ingress Mission Creator Tool body { background-color: #000; color: #fff; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; height: 100%; text-align: center; width: 100%; } #container { position: absolute; top: 100px; width: 100%; } #container p { font-weight: bold; margin-top: 20px; }
Something is wrong. Please try again later.
So, in short, I can't really say that I'm impressed by your process.

Comments
So much THIS! The lack of clarity and the inconsistencies of reviewers is appalling and unacceptable. It causes so much more additional work for those of us in the community and Niantic is already more than benefitting from our free labor. This has been going on since the beginning, has never improved, and everytime we get a response to our complaints it's along the lines of 'the descriptions are clear/the email rejections are clear' - when OBVIOUSLY they are most certainly NOT! Hundreds of us complaining over and over again for years about the same thing proves that Niantic has been tone deaf in this area, and we aren't stupid. You can't simply argue back that something isn't a certain way... That doesn't make it so. Niantic is the petulant child declaring that the sky is green when it most certainly is blue.
Yes yes yes. We've been told vaguely and unofficially that improvements to the mission approval process are coming, but no hint as to what and when except *maybe* some kind of official recognition of banners.
Support, have eight months not accept one mission. Although it meets all the criteria and is no different from the missions already accepted.
The error you have been getting is related to a Tampermonkey script called IMATTC. If you have submissions that are not approved and waiting for approval you are getting this error if you want to "Preview the portals" on categories.
Niantic hates banners.
The advice I've heard in three different xfac mission communities is that the first thing to do after a mission is rejected is to resubmit it because there is an excellent chance it will be approved.
This is wrong on so many levels I can't begin to enumerate them.
I had to do exactly this for our IFS banner this month. All but one portal approved. All with same text and part of a skyline, no letters or anything else that commonly trips them up. I resent it exactly the same and it got approved a day later. Why? Who knows!
And notice nobody from Niantic has posted a response.
What makes you say that?
Banner its good
its been heard from different sources over the years.. i think krug mentioned it sometime.... banners was not something niantic came up with when they designed missions, it was the players... for them its a burden to reivew all banner i imagine...