Hello,
I was going for a drive along one of Maines worse roads and I constantly was receiving alerts for potholes. I found it extremely excessive for these to be reported because it’s like reporting “a vehicle stopped” in a parking lot. It seemed that this user was sitting in the passenger seat (hopefully) and spamming “report potthole” when it’s really just a bad road. It was a constant stream of potholes being reported. Anyway I had to turn off alerts because it was sincerely continuous. I find this to be an abuse of the system. The user is @BOOMBOxB
Hello @sashadakar and welcome to Waze discuss forums!
A better place to post this issue is the Maine discuss forum where it is more likely to get local editors attention.
Thanks,
Major
Moved to Maine forum for better assistance from the local editor community.
BOOMBOxB This does sound like a user was abusing the report field. What road are you referring to? Do we have it marked unpaved?
SNYOWL
Please let me know what road you are referring to? As one of Maine’s SMs I would like to see how we have it mapped and then followup from there.
Unsure of what road the user is referring to. That is important. There also are a significant amount of legitimate potholes in Maine roads today that motorists do not want to hit. I believe the Waze app notifies you when you have “too many reports”. Preventing the user from abuse/spamming.
@sashadakar - Thank you for the feedback.
As you know waze in-app reporting is a delicate balance. We do want users to provide feedback about road conditions, as the crowd sourcing is what makes it so powerful.
HOWEVER, we don’t want “excess” reporting because it desensitizes users for “true” irregularities in driving conditions and as you said can be distracting or annoying.
I don’t believe that the TOS of waze specifies that there’s a hard limit of the frequency of in-app reporting. Waze does have some clustering of reports in app to reduce unnecessary report and automated limits on reporting frequency but doesn’t seem to have triggered in your situation, or at least to your preference.
That being said, we don’t know the road conditions, the number of pothole reports, the density of potholes, the spacing in between them, or the timing between reports, and the driving speed. If it’s continuous potholes where the driving is basically slowly weaving around them and the whole focus of driving in that segment is looking for potholes (as I call it Mario Kart style) then we’re in agreement that pothole reporting is really more distracting than useful. If the road is really still a high speed road where drivers are focused more on other cars than road conditions, some other wazers may find more frequent pothole reports to be okay.
As far as the question of “abuse” - As a generalization, if a user is documented as being truly inappropriate, this can be reported and lead to restrictions on reporting, but requires the ability for the community to objectively come to agreement that the action is abusive. This type of complaint is difficult to verify and investigate since these report are by nature short-lived and automatically disappear when other users don’t indicate that it’s “still there”. When you run into this problem, please send screenshots showing details of the reports, perhaps a pic of the road conditions (unless Google Streetview shows it in it’s current state) and more details as far as location goes, and we can investigate further, and work on it locally including feed back to the wazer if it’s a known user within our community.