Ingress bug causes deleted Wayspots with vulgar/sexually explicit content to stay as live portals
I am reporting an Ingress bug on behalf of the team of Wayfarer Ambassadors.
Due to a bug in Ingress and it's way of interacting with the Lightship database, under certain circumstances, Wayspots which have been deleted by Niantic staff can remain live in Ingress indefinitely. Further actions from Wayfarer support staff are unable to remove said portals from Ingress.
The Niantic staff from the Wayfarer team have told the Ambassadors that this is not a bug with Wayfarer, and that it is a bug with Ingress, which the Ingress team needs to fix. Hence I am raising this report directly with Ingress.
Why the bug exists
Niantic staff have two ways of retiring a Wayspot:
- Changing the game state for the Wayspot in Lightship from 'LIVE' to 'RETIRED'. This keeps it in the Lightship database, but causes it to get removed from games and it hides the Wayspot from the Wayfarer app and Lightship-based services. Most Wayspots are retired this way.
- Deleting the Wayspot entirely from the database. This removes it completely, and is generally reserved for the most extreme cases, such as the ones which I will describe below.
The Ingress bug occurs whenever Method #2 is used. The Ingress portal database does not detect that a deleted Wayspot should result in being retired. For example, perhaps when the daily synchronisation process happens it looks for differences in data for Wayspot records between Lightship and the Ingress db, but because the deleted Wayspots don't appear in this comparison list it thinks there is not changes.
Examples of Affected Portals
There are at least five Wayspots which the Ambassadors know of which are subject to this bug. All five were deleted from the Lightship database (i.e. Method #2) after they were referred to Wayfarer staff by the Ambassador team.
One of these Wayspots is the 'Nianshit' portal that was accepted in an area subject to heavy Wayfarer abuse. 'Nianshit' was reported to Niantic Tintino on 2023-07-12, who removed it that same day and said that it should it should "disappear in the next sync." It has been three daily syncs since then and 'Nianshit' is still live.
The other four Wayspots we know about which are affected by this are a series of faked pornographic artworks. This includes depictions of a woman urinating, a **** woman visibly engaging in masturbation, and a woman and man having intercourse. There were originally 14 of these sexually explicit Wayspots; Ten of them were 'retired' and four were 'deleted' on 2023-06-19. It is now almost a month later and the four 'deleted' porno artworks are still live in Ingress. Due to the nature of the images I will not post the portal details here.
What needs to happen
There needs to be an overall correction to this bug to not only address these five cases, but also address future cases, as well as any other existing cases which we don't know about. Deletion of Wayspots from Lightship database generally only occurs in extreme cases where the Wayspot remaining in the database would cause harm or offense to players. If this bug is not fixed then such extreme cases will continue to remain in the Ingress game client.
Correcting the bug means incorporating into the daily synchronisation code a check whether there are portals which are no longer in the Lightship database (excluding Sponsored/Anomaly portals), and if the portal no longer exists in the Lightship database then the portal should be retired.

Comments
It took some time for my forum post to get approved (as one can imagine given the nature of the discussion).
Since I made the forum post, I can confirm that the ‘Nianshit’ portal was taken down by the Ingress team and no longer appears in the game.
However, the pornographic themed artworks, which were still in game due to a similar issue, are still live in the game. This indicates that an overall ‘fix’ has still not been made,’or if it has then it wasn’t retroactively applied. It appears that it was a manual intervention for a single portal which doesn’t solve it for others in similar situations.
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Correcting the bug means incorporating into the daily synchronisation code a check whether there are portals which are no longer in the Lightship database (excluding Sponsored/Anomaly portals), and if the portal no longer exists in the Lightship database then the portal should be retired.
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That is not reasonably feasible. They would have to compare ~19 millions database entries (portals) against the Lightship database which has the same count or more entries. And that's with each sync.
It's a conceptual problem at the Wayfarer side. Method 2 - simply deleting database eintries - should never happen on a database, which will be synced to other databases.
A sync usually works like this: select all database entries which have been changed (or are new) after the date of the last sync. Deleted entries do not have an "last updated" field, because they do not exist anymore.
So, to fix this, simply deny method 2. If this is not possible, then when someones deletes data from Lightship database add that record (primary key/guid should be enough) to a deletion log. Then, when sync happens process the deletion log additionally to the already existing sync mechanism.
(how can I quote only parts of a post in this forum?)