Arc will ask for confirmation of auto place assignments if it’s not confident in its selection. The most common reason for that is that there’s another place, second in the list, that also has a similar probability of being correct. If the best match isn’t significantly more likely than the second best match, it will ask for confirmation.
So yeah, that’ll be what we should look for first: What’s the second place in the list? And why does Arc think that second place is also a very likely candidate?
I have reviewed 5 years of recordings. Everything looks correct to me. I live in the countryside and the only place I occasionally go to is a bakery that is 500 meters from my house.
In short, nothing seems to have a level of confidence such that Arc confuses its location with a place where I am every day.
Incidentally, I must say that I am also affected by the infamous bug that forces other users to reconfirm locations that had already been confirmed.
Hm. So the second place in the list is that bakery? That one should be excluded from automatic assignment, due to lack of overlap.
Could you send me a screenshot (to matt@bigpaua.com) of the place results list? If the second in the list isn’t overlapping/nearby, I can’t think of any other good reason why it shouldn’t be feeling confident in the best match.
So… the bakery definitely doesn’t overlap the visit, because there’s an underline between Home and the bakery in the results list. (That underline is to separate the “overlapping places” at the top of the list from places that don’t overlap the visit’s radius).
And the bakery is almost 400 metres away, which again makes is a really bad match.
Hmm… There really is no obvious good reason why it’d be asking for confirmation. I’m having a poke through the code now, to see if I can spot any more potential clues. And… I’m not seeing any useful clues there either. Damn.
I wonder if it’s a case of one or more Home visits being incorrectly assigned to the bakery. It’s a long shot, given that you’ve already vetted a lot of timeline history! But at this stage I’m not thinking of any other clever ideas, let alone not-so-clever ideas.
The place match scoring makes use of distance from place centre, but it also makes a map of the “shape” of the place, based on locations within previous confirmed visits, and includes in the score whether the visit’s centre touches that “map”. So for example if a place has two adjacent buildings, the shapes and locations of those two buildings will be included in that “place map”, and… Eh, I’m confusing myself with this explanation.
But anyway, yeah, it’s a long shot, but that’s all I’ve got at this stage. Maybe a Home visit has been misaligned to the bakery, messing up the bakery’s “map”. That shouldn’t mess up the auto assignment confidence enough to require confirmation, but yeah, otherwise I’m all out of guesses!
I’m also suffering this issue without an obvious overlap with another location. I have two different ‘home’ locations where I’ve spent a large amount of my time over the past years and it’s almost always these locations that appear as uncertain. I’ve checked for duplicates at both locations and there also don’t seem to be overlapping locations.
Hmm. @gsoper sounds like the usual clues / fixes don’t apply in that case then! Unfortunately that means I don’t have any guesses for what the cause might be.
Does it still manage to auto assign the correct place, but just require you to confirm it each time? Or is it failing to actually auto assign the correct place?
I think first step I’d take is going into the Place Details view, then tap on “Total visits” and slowly scroll down the list, letting the map update to show each visit, so that I could spot any assigned visits that look clearly in the wrong place.
Though it could be the other way around - another nearby place that’s had visits assigned that should have instead been assigned to Home. In that case you have to guess what that other place might be, and do the same scrolling down of “Total visits” until you spot a visit that looks like it should’ve been assigned to Home instead.