Wondering what other experiences of adlocked places are :?: I’ve never seen one with regard the usual BP, McDonald’s, ScrewFix, etc. But recent stumbled upon a Lidl last edited by avseu, who I assume is a bot as they don’t have a profile. What they may have changed I don’t know as there is no history but the store has alternate names being Lidl & lidl, rather pointless.
I’m guessing there is no way to find out when the place may become editable again :?
I’m not sure that any of the place data gets edited as part of the adlocking process, other than the property which is used to say that it is or isn’t adlocked.
Wonder how accurate Lidl’s store location data is - please let this ad campaign not generate the same number of URs as the Screwfix and McDonalds ones have done…
I’m quietly confident that this store didn’t have the alt names and had the nav point at the edge of the car park before today… but as I’m only a volunteer I know HQ will only have added value to the map with any edits that may have been done.
Interesting… particularly given how little use the app appears to make of the native data when users try navigating to one of these places anyway. Almost makes you wonder why the place needs to be protected from editing at all :?
Just found one in Cornwall. If this becomes the norm for any place being advertised, perhaps we need to start a “staff request” page. All I was trying to do was link the google place!
I can see no benefit in having alternate upper and lower case names, but perhaps making it an area and added the road in and car park would have been useful.
Found a new place marker in Kempston, Nr Bedford, close to a Lidl, but incorrectly named as Lidl - Hull-Hedon Road!!
So, not only is it in the wrong place for the Lidl in Kempston, but it’s a couple of hundred miles away from the correct location based on the name in Hull!!!
edit:Oh, that’s weird, just followed my permalink and checked again, and it now shows the correct name, allbeit in the wrong location. Perhaps WME has a funny…here’s a screen print to show I wasn’t seeing things!
edit again: definitely something odd going on here, perhaps there’s 2 placemarkers on top of each other…
Thinking I might just delete the Hull one (even though it’ll require moderation), unless there’s some discussions going on behind the scenes about these?
Sigh… doesn’t it do wonders for editor morale to see their hard work treated with such respect by the editbots unleashed by HQ. Even better for morale is all the fun we then have dealing with the resultant URs from users wondering why Waze no longer seems to know how to navigate to [insert name of latest location to be royally screwed over by an ad campaign] any more.
You do have to question where the data feed for the avseu-bot has come from this time, because Lidl Germany provides POI datasets in pretty much every conceivable format for all of their stores across Europe (https://www.lidl.de/de/navigation/s2319), and the “Generic” version I’ve just downloaded (updated 01/09/2017, so about as up to date as you could hope for) doesn’t refer to any store with “Govan” in its description…
…this POI data may at least be of some use in fixing all the errors introduced by avseu once the ad campaign comes to an end, if Waze themselves don’t/can’t rollback to the correct data that was there before they cried havoc and let slip the bots of wherethehellarewe?
Wherever Waze got these locations from is ridiculous, Lidl have their stores located correctly on their website but this ad campaign has a store 1200ft out, the names of the stores don’t even tally with those supplied by Lidl :x
Not exactly knowing the internal workings of Waze, I’d guess that the UK Marketing team would be concerned about this. A group of us London editors are meeting with TfL today. Robyn Bemment from Waze is coming too, so a perfect opportunity to get this flagged to them. Twister - can you lead on that as you’re the expert on data manipulation?
Sent from my SM-G930F using Tapatalk and edited from my desktop to correct auto-correct spelling
Follow-up email summarising this thread and adding some additional information has just been sent to Finlay.
As part of composing that email I thought it only appropriate to try and see if the problem was genuinely as widespread as it appears, or if the sites already mentioned here were just isolated exceptions. I now think it’s safe to assume it’s the correctly located/named stores which are the isolated exceptions, as 3 out of the 4 advertised Lidl stores near to me have location or naming errors in their corresponding WME place data :shock:
