Tracking the Health of Maps Photos and Reviews

[tony_b]

Most here on Connect will know about the Top 100 Local Guides Leaderboards posted here by @AdamGT  and the powerful system behind them which he created and makes available to all Connect Local Guides. This has been the core of significant engagement and discussion on Connect among like-minded Local Guides interested in improving the quality of their contributions and by this, the reach and impact on their communities. The system behind the Top 100 Local Guides Leaderboards has a number of powerful features and as listed here, these features have been written about by various Local Guides.

Like others, among the many features, I've been regularly using the Health Check system to routinely check and track the health of my reviews and photos that I have added on Maps.  As soon as I update my Maps contributions data, this Health Check feature checks and reports on the health of both my reviews and photo contributions.  It really is simple and is automatically done for me and immediately available once I press the Submit button.  The system produces an excellent summary and being in both tabular and chart format, I can quickly see if the Google Maps AI has found any issues with my historical reviews or photos. Other Local Guides have reported the same experience. See for example the Working out the Number of Hidden Reviews & Photos post by @LightRich  and the Improving the quality of my Google Maps Contributions by using the Top 100 System post by @Trail_blazer.

LightRich wrote "Well for a few months now I have been using a very simple approach for this problem. I just use the Top 100 Local Guides System each month. I spend only a few minutes updating my data for the leaderboards here on Connect, and each time the system analyzes my contributions and tells me how many hidden reviews and photos I have. I don’t have to do any complicated calculations because it's automatically calculated for me.  It's just so simple! And this system then makes a number of tables and charts about hidden reviews and photos that are easy to read and understand."

Trail_blazer wrote "Lots of users don’t realise that they have hidden photos too and the calculations of how many are hidden is tricky at the best of times and the trouble is you have to regularly keep calculating this. However, as others have found, it’s available and very easy to do using the inbuilt Health Check feature of the Top 100 System and it does this each time you update your data!! Finding the number of hidden items is pretty straightforward."

Adam has often said that the Top 100 Local Guides leaderboards are much more than just about rankings and I totally agree and the Health Check feature is just one example of this. While I'm from a small country and thus don't have the large number of photos and reviews that others have, the Top 100 System saves me a lot of time and effort and helps me better manage and monitor my Maps contributions with minimal effort so thank you AdamGT for making this system available to all Local Guides.

Just one thing I do want to mention, I've been noticing for a long time that the Health Check tables and charts always included an additional month beyond the one under review which distorted the appearance of health. There was a glitch where the system seemed to assume that the unreported month is a month with ALL hidden. For example, I have 1 hidden review and 6 hidden photos, but the chart this month correctly showed the 6 hidden as at Aug !st, and reported over 500 hidden for Sept 1st (a date in the future). This has finally been fixed, so anyone who was confused about what they were seeing before, should take a look now. 

Happy and "Healthy" guiding, everyone.

[AdamGT]

Thanks @tony_b for describing your experience of how you also use the System that is behind the Top 100 Local Guides leaderboards to routinely check the health of your photos and reviews that you contribute to Maps. You are so right, the Health Check feature which I first mentioned back in August 2021, is a great example of how the Top 100 Local Guides leaderboards are much more than just about rankings of Local Guides!

Also, thank you for pointing out the distortion that you found with the last entry in the Health Check tables and chart which as you have mentioned has now been fixed.  However, that's a temporary fix because there's an even better and much more elegant solution that came about after both @PrasadVR and @JustJake raised this.  Let me explain. 

Previously, once the leaderboards were posted on Connect as we've just done for August, Local Guides would start entering their data for the September, being the next month. For good reasons (e.g. Core Vitals Analysis and charting etc), some advanced Local Guide T100 System users, like Jake, also enter their data several times in that period. After all it only takes a few minutes to enter your data so why not take advantage of the powerful tools that you have access to, to really monitor and fine tune things relevant to any information updates you get from Google on your contributions!  Pre the recent interim fix, the System catered for this BUT until you did updated your data in the new month it assumed that your data hadn't changed and that it was as at the start of the month and this is what causes the distorted health appearance that you mention. So how do we have our cake and eat it too?

Well in the new solution just implemented in the Core Vitals sections, the data entries for the next month (September in our example here) will appear in all tables and charts if and when that data is entered. Therefore, if for example you update your star views data today, then the Star Photos Vitals would immediately reflect that update however everything, including Vitals for Points, Views and Contributions and the Health check would end at August, being the last data point for these metrics. So this means that users like Jake wouldn't loose the ability of doing the progressive analysis that I mentioned above and the distorted end of month views that you and Prasad mentioned would happen. All tables and charts in the System will only reflect the data that you have entered. I will implement this refinement now for the Health Check feature so that you can test it out. Do let me know how you go.