Trusted Reporter Program Resumes
NianticOfficial
Niantic › admin
Agents,
As you may know, we recently suspended the Trusted Reporter program. The Trusted Reporter program was created to provide a few Agents the ability to have their support tickets fast-tracked and escalated to the top of the support queue for priority review.
The purpose of the program is to leverage the Agents’ organic understanding of Ingress to help improve the player experience with regards to inappropriate gameplay. The intention is to mitigate the actions of bad actors that may result in unnecessary hardships for normal Agents to revert. A good example of a situation to report would be a Spoofer that neutralized a mountain top Portal in a remote area. A Spoofer neutralizing a Portal in a dense urban area that can be recaptured with very little effort should be reported to NIA OPS yourself via http://support.ingress.com and not flagged to a Trusted Reporter.
Thank you for your patience as we took time to work through a new process to ensure a robust and effective system. We are now ready to resume the Trusted Reporter program after working with our new Trusted Reporters and our Vanguards to refine the process. The adjustments to the program enable us to build upon and strengthen what we learned previously.
If you want to highlight suspected spoofing activity to the Trusted Reporters, follow these steps.
-Do not submit actions to Trusted Reporters that are over seven (7) days old.
-Enlightened: @IngressEnlTRBot
-Resistance: @IngressResTRBot
-Using Telegram, send a “/start” message to your faction specific Trusted Reporter bot account. Submitting a report to the opposite factions bot may get you banned from using the bot:
-Complete the four action items listed by the bot.
-Within 48 hours a Trusted Reporter will review the activity you flagged and inform you via the bot that they will or will not escalate the activity to NIA OPS to review.
A Trusted Reporter escalating an issue by submitting a ticket to NIA OPS is not a guarantee that action will be taken against an account or that a Portal reset will occur. Trusted Reporters do not adjudicate actions, determine or make recommendations to NIA OPS about what actions should be taken on an account, do not have a method to communicate directly with NIA OPS, and cannot review any tickets other than their own.
Spamming the bot or continually submitting requests of a personal nature that are easy to mitigate through normal gameplay and that do not cause an unnecessary burden to normal Agents may result in you being unable to submit requests to Trusted Reporters.
At this time we are only accepting reports of accounts suspected of spoofing. For all other support related issues please submit a ticket via the normal process at http://support.ingress.com.
As a reminder Vanguards have been firewalled off from the Trusted Reporters. Vanguards are not aware of the identities of the Trusted Reporter participants. The intention with the new process is to keep the Trusted Reporters anonymous and separated by Faction. Both the Vanguards and the Trusted Reporters have agreed to a non-disclosure agreement and will be unable to discuss the details of the program.
Edit: Vanguards can still help with standalone reset requests. The Trusted Reporters are for flagging spoofer activity AND resets that are needed as a result. As part of the workflow, if a TR report needs a reset it will get routed to the Vanguards properly and in a way to preserve the TR anonymity.
Comments
Nice
Thanks for the TR system. It should help players to do again amazing operations.
Nevertheless, could you confirm that base user report will not more autoclosed without being investigated?
Thanks for the update and the effort!
Procedure question: does the bot anonymize the Telegram name of the reporter?
Hmmmm... Is your reversion script working now? It didn't seem to be working last week when I was told our portal would get restored and we waited around patiently for a week, holding the lanes open.... only to be told there was an error in the script and to keep waiting.
This is fine.
Thanks for the update. How were the TRs selected?
"A Spoofer neutralizing a Portal in a dense urban area that can be recaptured with very little effort should be reported to NIA OPS yourself via http://support.ingress.com and not flagged to a Trusted Reporter. "
this is how the spoofers level up to be able to take out more strategic portals.
If you mean the name of the reporter meaning the player sending the information to the TR, no. If you mean the TR responding to the player, yes.
Reports should be done on what language? English or local?
-Do not submit actions to Trusted Reporters that are over seven (7) days old.
So spoofs that happened while the TR program was down are irrelevant?
This is great news. I'm a little suprised its been segregated by faction. Surely reports should be faction agnostic?
Any comment why spoofer tickets submitted the regular way via Help were basically auto closed for the past few months, even for very obvious spoofs, (like Antarctica). A "we weren't processing during this time" is fine, but it's concerning players that their non TR reports are not treated seriously.
Again thanks for reinstating the TR program.
Thanks for the quick response! I meant the player sending the information to the TR, yep -- sorry I was unclear.
its always been segregated by faction, even in v1 of the TR program.
Thanks for the update. How were the TRs selected?
Also, regarding "Do not submit actions to Trusted Reporters that are over seven (7) days old," What about reports from the interim period when they were languishing and auto closed through http://support.ingress.com as nearly all reports end up? Are those a lost cause?
Additionally, spoof accounts are often leveled up in "dense urban area(s)". Reporting them via http://support.ingress.com ends up with an autoclosed ticket and more often than not, no action. How should these be addressed?
One last thing, in cases where the result is that the spoofer is banned, are we still utilizing our Vanguards to have portals and links restored, or will that process be revised as well?
Thank you very much.
@NianticBrian @RedSoloCup @NianticOfficial
Can you confirm pls, the bots are - all ENL report spoofing to the ENL bot, and all RES report spoofing to the RES bot, or is it "report RES spoofing to the RES bot and ENL spoofing to the ENL bot"
The post is a little unclear. I feel it's probably the latter. But as you're already threatening to ban people for doing it wrong, I feel a little clarification is in order.
Also, why faction specific?? Spoofing is non-faction. This helps to make people think Niantic judge cheating as a faction thing, which makes it a LOT harder for communities.
Awesome news! Thank you to all involved for the work you've put in to getting this operational again!
I'm sure they'll inform you if they are not fluent in your language.
Thanks for resuming the program! How many participants?
When you go through the TR process, it'll ask you if the Portal needs to be reset and if a Vanguard can contact you. If you answer yes to both of those a Vanguard will reach out to you. The workflow separates at a certain point. Vanguards can still assist with standalone reset requests if needed.
If you are a RES Agent, use the RES bot. If you are an ENL Agent, use the ENL bot. It is YOUR faction not the faction of the Spoofer. Spoofers have no faction even if their accounts do.
Rumors say, older data cannot be analyzed as easily, so you are probably out of luck.
@NianticOfficial are spoofs of so-called long term portals in remote places - even though they might not be strategically worthy for bafs etc. - relevant for the TR program?
This isn't something we'll be disclosing or discussing.
Without more information on the specific Portal, it would seem likely. Things are very subjective as you can imagine. Strategic worthiness is only one aspect that is reviewed.
I second this question. This reporting system sounds all well and good, but doesn't help at all for city spoofers and doesn't help at all if we will continue to see reports being closed automatically with no action being taken. This remains an issue Niantic has not addressed correctly or, if I'm not mistaken, at all.
Will this info please be added to the help page?
agree with others who have stated this bit doesn't make sense:
"A Spoofer neutralizing a Portal in a dense urban area that can be recaptured with very little effort should be reported to NIA OPS yourself"
Should say TR the spoofer, you might stop them before they visit a mountain top. Don't ask for the urban portal to be reset.
Where does location locking fall into this? Would that be considered spoofing? I havent seen it since redacted was ended, but does locking location while traveling count as an offense for TRs?
@NianticOfficial so since there wasnt a public call for volunteers, i think its easy to say that they were recruited in the same fashion as the previous version?
What would be extremely welcome is some kind of periodic report showing numbers (or just a ratio) of cases that were resolved by TR escalations vs those that were resolved without them.
A single bot able to query the nickname of the reported spoofer to find his faction and routing the request to the appropriate faction TR could clear the process.