Updates on some mapmaker-syncer woes...

[Jayanth Mysore]

RERs and Advocates - This is a cross-post from the RER and Advocates mailing lists. You can skip it, if you've already read the message in those forums. Thanks a lot to Nuclear-Moose for pointing out that I had not posted on the general forum. Apologies to all users of this forum for the delay.

Thanks a lot for your patience,

Jayanth, Product Manager - Map Maker

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Dear users -

Thank you for bringing to our attention all the issues that you are facing with regards to editing of local listings on Map Maker.  

We have the mechanism to instantly syncrhonize the data base that hold user edits from all of you with the other db that has information from you AND from other sources (local business owners, data feeds, updates made by other Google teams in response to users who file feedback using "Report a problem").

What each of the bugs you have reported has indicated is a mismatch somewhere between these systems. I did not want to update anything here till we actually had some fixes in place. We do have some to report.

Issues fixed:

1. E-mail address changes by Map Maker users should no longer be reverted by the bot. They should stick and instantly update across the system. Example link to an edit.

2. Building outlines drawn by Map Maker users will stick and not be reverted by the bot. Example link to an edit.

Issues where we have made progress, but fix is not in place:

Issue with some listings wherein one of you edits it, it gets approved and then for unknown reasons it gets reverted back, soon thereafter.  Example link to an edit.

What is the progress we have made?

We know why this is happening and are making changes. The reason this is happening is because there is a small set* of listings which require approval by a select group of Google Reviewers to approve - not even the GRs that you normally work with are  authorized to approve changes to these.  For example, if you look atthis edit, the change that stuck was made by a GR from this team. This is a recent change in policy that governs this small group of listings that impacts several products, including Map Maker.

When one of us makes an edit (say change the phone number) to one of these listings, while the Map Maker trust system thinks it's a perfectly valid edit, it now instantly gets rejected by a downstream system as it is one of these "special" case listings.

*unfortunately a small set in our data set is still a pretty large number, and to the users impacted, which INCLUDES many of us on the Map Maker team itself - it is nothing short of intensely frustrating.

What are we doing about it?

We are making a set of incremental changes so that all of us, Map Maker users, know when we are touching one of these listings.

(a) The first change - quickest to get done -  the Map Maker system will no longer mark these changes as "approved" . To go along with this, there will be a change in the e-mail notification that you receive when you make an edit. We will explicitly call out that there may be delays in approving the edit for this reason

(b) We will add an icon to these listings on the Map Maker UI to signal that this is a listing that will require Google Reviewers to approve. That way both editors and reviewers on Map Maker can choose to suitably decide to touch/ignore these listings.

I will continue to update this thread as we make changes. Thanks again for your patience and feedback. We will get there...

Thanks

Jayanth