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Post by mapcat
I'll agree to call it "cheating" if it involves someone posting prices he didn't see himself, or prices that disagree with the sign. Not someone posting correct prices in good faith.

Consider this: if they agreed to your suggestion and made hitting Yes worth 4 points (or whatever), wouldn't the cheater actually have an incentive to make up a wrong price? Posting the correct price would be worth 4, but posting an incorrect one would be worth 8.

Would you also be in favor of changing how editing points are awarded? Right now, someone who spends ten minutes researching the correct street name for a new street gets the same number of points for his edit as someone who deletes a bogus camera.
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Post by mapcat
deeggo wrote:Just hitting ok to confirm the prices is much easier than typing new wrong prices. And, blindly typing numbers will probably lead to very odd prices, clearly wrong.
Again, if you reduce the number of points for hitting Yes, someone wanting more points will simply post something that's slightly more or slightly less than the price already posted. They won't blindly type in numbers, because that will be obvious and they will be caught.
There is a difference in the amount of work that goes into changing prices and just confirming. That's clear and could be translated in a difference in points.
As I stated above, Waze doesn't award points based on the amount of work editors do, so why expect it to be any different for posting gas prices? Even driving points work that way: you get fewer points for driving 10 km through city traffic than you do for driving 15 km on an open highway, which requires significantly less work.
Just wait for the first 'user x is confirming all the gas prices in my neighbourhood without actually checking them' thread. It'll come.
Firstly, you can't prove that someone isn't checking prices they post if their prices are correct. Secondly, if someone is caught posting bad prices for points, then that is the time to punish them. Not when they are out doing exactly what someone else did an hour before.

If you're really this concerned about people cheating with gas prices, maybe you ought to stop posting prices so that no one can copy your work anymore. Or focus on some other aspect of Waze you consider more egalitarian.
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Post by mapcat
Lots of things are bad here. ;) This is just one of them.

I was just wondering what made you think the point structure was worth changing. In your first post you said:
deeggo wrote:I fear people will just confirm prices of every station they pass, for gaining points.
But in your most recent post you said:
Come on Mapcat, I'm only signalling that the way the gas prices feature works now isn't very safe and reliable. I just want to make sure that the quality of that part of Waze's information is as high as possible, and I see room for improvement.
OK, so then what is the problem with people confirming prices for gaining points? If the prices are correct, great, then that's better quality information (i.e. more recent). If the prices are incorrect, then that's an opportunity to get the name of the person posting bad prices, submit it to Waze, and get them to change their behavior (or PM them yourself). Changing the way prices are entered will not suppress cheating if a cheater is determined to get points.

If you were signalling something else about the feature's safety and reliability, then it was not obvious to me from what you said.

Part of our difference of opinion may stem from me being in a country where the gas price feature is horribly unreliable and hard to use. If someone made up prices, they may be better than the ones I see whenever I think to check. At the same time, since I am in a country with a dedicated gas price app (GasBuddy), maybe I am more aware of what causes problems with gas price reporting, and what doesn't. That app has its own set of problems, but people getting points for confirming what other people posted doesn't seem to be one of them. The way it works, I can post prices for any station within 10 km of my house right now. I don't have to be within sight of its sign. Furthermore, I could get on the GasBuddy web site and post a price for a station in San Francisco, right now, 3000 km away. You could, too. People determined to cheat for points (in this case, post prices they can't possibly know to be correct) have many opportunities. However, this is not a problem for two main reasons: you only get points for 5 prices a day, and there are millions of people posting prices every day. A cheat can only get a tiny bit ahead by doing this, and even if he gets away with it, someone else will probably report prices for the same station within a few hours. The second person then has the opportunity to see that the prices were incorrect, and correct them (and optionally, contact the moderators and complain about the cheater). The community makes it safe.

So if you're concerned about someone making the data less safe in Waze, then I suspect that once price reporting becomes very popular, the problem will be insignificant.
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Post by mapcat
Nacron wrote:The top two ranked people in Hawaii weekly have probably 90% of their points from drive by confirmation of gas prices, almost all the time the prices are "confirmed" by them and are wrong.
Report them to support. Note the stations, time you saw the bad prices, and what the correct prices were. How many points are they getting by doing this?

FWIW, nobody's reporting prices around me (besides "3rd party") and the prices are wrong here too.
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Post by Marcoqwerty
When add gas station direcly from Waze?

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Post by mattlach
I just used the gas pricing function for the first time, and I have two comments:

1.) Not all gas stations use the trailing 9 in the tenth of cents field. It would be nice to have an option to enter a 0 there.

2.) It would be nice if we had the option of populating more fuel types than just regular, midgrade premium and diesel. My station also has E85 and Biodiesel (I buy E85)
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Post by McFloyd
Hi

In Switzerland, many gas stations are covered. Still, I can not enter the prices. When should this feature be turned on for Switzerland?

Thanks
Thias
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Post by McFloyd
foxitrot wrote:You should better ask Argus & Co. here: http://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=22555
Thanks! I found this link after
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Post by mchaves
If this helps the developers with the problem already reported for countries where dots are thousand separators (instead of decimal separators, like in the US), this is how the error is shown to me: I just tried to enter some fuel price in Brazil, running Waze 3.5 on iOS 6.0.1.

http://i48.tinypic.com/8wa1c7.jpg

There is no option to choose commas or dots, and I believe Waze just tried to prevented me to enter "thousands" of $$$ for the fuel prices.

By the way, congratulations on the great software!

Edit: tried entering one price at a time, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, so it is not related to comma x dots as decimal separators.
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Last edited by mchaves on Tue Nov 20, 2012 4:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Post by mchaves
mchaves wrote:There is no option to choose commas or dots, and I believe Waze just tried to prevented me to enter "thousands" of $$$ for the fuel prices.
I tried to enter one gas price at a time, as suggested already on this thread, and I was able to update only the regular price on two different places, so the problem is not related to commas x dots at all.

Could it be that for the other prices, Waze rejected my updates because the % change was too large? I also was not able to enter price for a box that had no prices before (ethanol in my case).

Thanks!
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