Well it appears obvious that the QA environment(s) that you test in are either not the same, or not synced...or they completely just skipped the QA/Test process.
Its obvious that they didn't test any sort of rollback of this update in such an environment. Then they'd have an actual playbook on what to do, if something went wrong.
And it was done before a holiday weekend? #baffling
A little closer on the answers we’re looking for. Any insight on how often portals will be synced to Ingress? Instantly as it’s been done historically? Or daily at a certain time as it’s been done in PoGo?
Also, here we are again, Niantic asking US for help. It’s about time for some serious conversation about what YOU are going to give us for our efforts. I think we’re past medals. CMU would be nice, but maybe trading reviews, scans and other wayspot updates for gear. 5 reviews might get you get a resonator, 1000 reviews might be worth a virus or extra kinetic cap. At this point, I’m not reviewing after you completely changed that (ruining the wayfarer plugin) and I’m done nominating wayspots until we actually know how to correctly get them into the game we’re playing…
It feels like it’s been a struggle to get quality wayspots into the game at times and now we’re being asked to “review” and filter out bad ones PURPOSEFULLY put into the game? The only one benefitting from this is Niantic, so WE can bolster their database and they continue to make dollars off the hard work of the community.
Many of us have been asking for Niantic to work with the community, but we’re back in the same position we’ve been at many times before. Honestly surprised we’ve even gotten responses in regards to all this, though I think many of us have more questions than answers at this point. I am at a point now where I truly believe Niantic has little care or reason to actually communicate with its user base beyond stuff like medals or basic UI issues. Past that, we get what we get….
"a location with cool story, place in history or education value"
"a cool piece or art or unique architecture"
"a hidden gem or hyper local spot"
Do you remember, NIANTIC?
when you let pogemon trainers submit trash to portal network, that was a huge mistake. it ruin games by a bunch of silly portal with silly description like, "there are many trainers here" but it just a house of that trainer who submit that poi.... we as "recon" try to clean it up. Then you change us to wayfarer.... make those silly can do what they want and boommmmm a lot of junk portal/ gym/stop which can only spoofer can access.... or private portals are up. Seem lik you told us to throw away rules and portal criteria. We cry a lot
Now! look like you want to destroy the whole game by import database from somewhere and destroy all ingress should be .... there are countless trash portals on portal network which you can just remove it by deleted them on you database.....
it's your game, Niantic.... Even we love to play, even we pay for every event which we can join, many of us travel to another country just for playing you game. or even we pay monthly or subscription. But We still cannot change anything which you do or want to do. The trust is you are creator. make it great again or destroy it. you can choose by yourself.
I hope you will choose the right way to move forward.
"a location with cool story, place in history or education value"
"a cool piece or art or unique architecture"
"a hidden gem or hyper local spot"
Agree with @Aunarisk It was great to go discover cool stuff. Sure - Ingress players put some... dubious stuff in. And there were troll subs etc. But generally, not too bad.
But when Pokemon players were allowed to submit, there was an instant decline in the quality.
"Many trainers here" "We need more pokestops" etc. Tree's, shrubs, household mailboxes, you name it, even piles of literal trash.
The portal quality has gone down significantly since some time. All you get to see now is players creating mosaic tiles next to their home to get home gyms/pokestop/portal.
Or they destroy company property by painting utility boxes. (Which is vandalism, but is being accepted as art…)
I believe there is even a rule; a playground can be a portal if it isn’t in x meters of a residence. (Which would make a huge percentage of portals invalid around here…)
Wayfarer just doesn’t work. And this doesn’t help.
I have no idea how the painting of power distribution boxes works outside of Germany. Whatever the case - in Germany it requires permits from the municipalities or the owners themselves.
Come on, nobody gets any permit to do this stuff. And it's wayfarer's fault for getting it 'in scope'.
You see, once portals/pokestops/whatever are in the game, people just drop the 'rules' and check to see if other portals like it exists and if so, they vote for it. Legacy portals were a cause for this under the Ingress playerbase, but the problem has expanded limitlessly when pokemon go players were incorporated. (They simply are with too many; hence all Ingress players dropping in rating in wayfarer...)
That’s how it works. Everyone has their pitchforks and says #neverforget & then we’re shown a new medal or event and everyone is heart eyes again and we’re all dealing with the “new” normal. This thread will join the others like it with a half @ss response from Niantic about how they can communicate better, but never actually saying, “sorry, we goofed, we’re gonna make this right, give us time.” Psh
quick thought, if you are "working on solution" and looking into different options.
I assume, the fake foursquare portals were added to give pokemon players more pokemon stops (and instead of foursquare it could be any other source, like post boxes database, or random coordinates). If you suggest ingress agents to clean garbage portals *from wayfarer*, pokestops will start to disappear. And then pokemon players will blame ingress (even if fake portals are reported by pokemon players or removed directly by niantic). Not good. Ingress is already a group of "elitist players" who do not want to give home pokestops to everyone, no need to add more hate.
In turn, if you remove all fake portals *from ingress* and make a rule that only user-generated portals enter the game, lightship can keep fake pokestops, and generate more. Everyone is happy. Even if some pokestops are cleaned by pokemon players or niantic - there will be no reason to blame ingress.
My agreements have slowed down immensely of late, and I'm worried about my nominations currently in voting. I fear that if I can't upgrade them, they'll be accepted but not show in Ingress. Since the beginning of August, only my upgraded portals have actually appeared on Intel.
I did one nomination in Hawaii about a week ago. It was accepted and showed on iitc immediately. I don’t plan to review or submit anything until all of this is figured out and Niantic continues to communicate with us about what’s going on. Would love a little more transparency, but that doesn’t seem likely.
Yeah, I’ve added my ones there that haven’t come through. Was surprised when the one today did. Got an Upgrade that should tick over some time tomorrow so should have another one with any luck by the end of Tuesday to see if it appears.
I’m also really annoyed at portals are not appearing properly in Ingress. As someone who submits a lot of portals and also tracks their status in Wayfarer semi-daily, I’ve noticed something that may be relevant and makes me suspect this is a bug…
Every portal I’ve had approved that didn’t show up in Ingress was never actually voted on… or at the very least was “in voting” for a minuscule amount of time. EVERY effected would-be portal just slipped through voting… most of them within a mere few days from submission; which in itself tells you something has gone WILDLY ASTRAY from the typical voting process in these cases.
It’s a loose thread for your devs to pull on at any rate.
I have had other approvals come through normally throughout this, which has been going on since at least August 12, probably longer... so it appears to be random. Since these appear to skip through Wayfarer voting though, maybe we're talking about a Wayfarer bug with these as opposed to a Lightship issue?
Any updates on why portals may or may not show up in Ingress, even if they follow traditional "rules" regarding distance from existing portals, etc. I see these questions are now being given copy/paste responses in the wayfarer forum.
There must be a reason why this is happening. I'm fine with, "We can't tell you right now, but we can share more in X days."
Hi everyone - I had a couple of days off to (try to) recover a bit plus we had the long weekend here in the US. I'm am going through all of the feedback (I haven't gotten through it all yet...) and trying to catch up on where everything is with this (some meetings later today will hopefully help!) - otherwise I don't have much right now and I'm sorry for that. Hopefully soon (I know...).
For transparency, here are the three main questions I'm working to get answers on.
1) Have the rules for what gets added into Ingress as a Portal changed? (AFAIK, no, but I want to double check.)
2) If the rules haven't changed, what is the cause for accepted Wayspots to not show up as a Portal in Ingress? Synching issue? Bug? We don't know yet? Is there a preferred way we want Agent to submit inquiries about this to look into it?
3) How are we doing on removing Portals that were added that may be problematic? Is there a preferred way we want Agents to submit this information if they want to help?
Hi @NianticThia ! Welcome back from your short break/recovery and thank you for looking into some of these questions. I appreciate the transparency, fact-finding efforts and @NianticVK ’s effort to look into missing portals in Ingress.
A question(s) that I’d like to have addressed, if possible, is why has the language in the previous Ingress, “Congrats! PortalAccepted“ emails changed to, “Your portal is Eligible… if Accepted it might be Ingress“, if (as far as we know) the rules have not changed for Ingress portal acceptance. The new, non-committal language change in these emails seem to suggest some form of rule change.
— and if down the road you/we discover that the rules for what gets added in Ingress vs. PoGo/HPWU/etc. have indeed changed, why has this decision been made? What is the benefit of adding a nominated and eligible wayspot to only one or two games vs. all of Niantic’s games?
On Question 3, the purpose of injecting the Foursquare data was to create Wayspots where there were not enough Wayspots/players, so why would you assume there are players there willing to help? This is Niantic's mess and Niantic needs to clean it up.
Hi, I think the new formulation is linked to the lightship integration. The "wayspot" is accepted in lightship (for any game to use) but ingress might not accept it as a portal (so it could pop in pogo but not in ingress for example).
"New branding on Notification Emails: We know the emails have been historically bogged down with bugs - there are dependencies we built into the emails that are a bit unstable which we’d like to eliminate. Our refresh will mean replacing game email notifications with Wayfarer email notifications, with links back to your Nominations page (as your source of truth). We’re also updating the language in the emails to resolve the confusion and conflation of ‘eligibility’ and ‘accepted’ in our messaging, which are not the same concepts. We hope this also clarifies that contributions are to the Niantic Platform, for all Niantic games to consider using."
"Final Note - Where is my Wayspot in the game?
We see some ongoing confusion around why you are receiving wayspot acceptance notifications from a game but aren’t seeing the Wayspot in that particular game. Please be reminded that each Niantic game (not Wayfarer) chooses which Wayspots to use from the Niantic platform, and are at liberty to modify their gameboard at any time.
Wayfarer does not control how each game utilizes Wayspots. Games may also sync with Wayfarer’s Wayspots in a different cadence to each other, which Wayfarer also does not control or mandate. We hope this becomes more intuitively understood with our email refresh mentioned above!"
Junk portals submitted from Foursquare - why are they not being removed? It's not just the places, it's names as well. Or are we now reverting back to "let the players fix it"?
If not being removed- have portal criteria changed to include almost anything and Niantic are happy with the marked decline in the waypoint quality?
Portals not showing that have been accepted, even though they meet normal accepted rules for that game. (In this case Ingress).
This is absolutely based in the Lightship migration. The first problems surfaced in late July, during the preparatory stages, and we were advised that there may be delays and to please wait. Since that migration, the problem persists. It's intermittent, and cannot be linked to a particular pattern (although Niantic manual review may account for many occurrences). We did ask in the Bug Report forum for a simple clarification - is this intended behavior, or is it a glitch? We didn't need any details beyond that. Our inquiries, though, were met with extended silence. Only recently has @NianticVK circled back to ask for specific examples to aid in investigation. If there are indeed new rules or it's a conscious decision by Ingress to not publish these portals in game, why do other similarly-spaced, accepted, but upgraded portals appear on Intel exactly as they did before?
All of this is fine and completely understandable, but the WHY isn’t answered and hasn’t been answered as of yet. I’m completely baffled why answering this question has been so difficult for anyone with any team to answer.
Why would Ingress “choose” to not accept a nomination.
Comments
Well it appears obvious that the QA environment(s) that you test in are either not the same, or not synced...or they completely just skipped the QA/Test process.
Its obvious that they didn't test any sort of rollback of this update in such an environment. Then they'd have an actual playbook on what to do, if something went wrong.
And it was done before a holiday weekend? #baffling
A little closer on the answers we’re looking for. Any insight on how often portals will be synced to Ingress? Instantly as it’s been done historically? Or daily at a certain time as it’s been done in PoGo?
Also, here we are again, Niantic asking US for help. It’s about time for some serious conversation about what YOU are going to give us for our efforts. I think we’re past medals. CMU would be nice, but maybe trading reviews, scans and other wayspot updates for gear. 5 reviews might get you get a resonator, 1000 reviews might be worth a virus or extra kinetic cap. At this point, I’m not reviewing after you completely changed that (ruining the wayfarer plugin) and I’m done nominating wayspots until we actually know how to correctly get them into the game we’re playing…
It feels like it’s been a struggle to get quality wayspots into the game at times and now we’re being asked to “review” and filter out bad ones PURPOSEFULLY put into the game? The only one benefitting from this is Niantic, so WE can bolster their database and they continue to make dollars off the hard work of the community.
Many of us have been asking for Niantic to work with the community, but we’re back in the same position we’ve been at many times before. Honestly surprised we’ve even gotten responses in regards to all this, though I think many of us have more questions than answers at this point. I am at a point now where I truly believe Niantic has little care or reason to actually communicate with its user base beyond stuff like medals or basic UI issues. Past that, we get what we get….
Another nail in the coffin for ingress. Not sure why anyone new would bother playing it anymore.
"a location with cool story, place in history or education value"
"a cool piece or art or unique architecture"
"a hidden gem or hyper local spot"
Do you remember, NIANTIC?
when you let pogemon trainers submit trash to portal network, that was a huge mistake. it ruin games by a bunch of silly portal with silly description like, "there are many trainers here" but it just a house of that trainer who submit that poi.... we as "recon" try to clean it up. Then you change us to wayfarer.... make those silly can do what they want and boommmmm a lot of junk portal/ gym/stop which can only spoofer can access.... or private portals are up. Seem lik you told us to throw away rules and portal criteria. We cry a lot
Now! look like you want to destroy the whole game by import database from somewhere and destroy all ingress should be .... there are countless trash portals on portal network which you can just remove it by deleted them on you database.....
it's your game, Niantic.... Even we love to play, even we pay for every event which we can join, many of us travel to another country just for playing you game. or even we pay monthly or subscription. But We still cannot change anything which you do or want to do. The trust is you are creator. make it great again or destroy it. you can choose by yourself.
I hope you will choose the right way to move forward.
"a location with cool story, place in history or education value"
"a cool piece or art or unique architecture"
"a hidden gem or hyper local spot"
Agree with @Aunarisk It was great to go discover cool stuff. Sure - Ingress players put some... dubious stuff in. And there were troll subs etc. But generally, not too bad.
But when Pokemon players were allowed to submit, there was an instant decline in the quality.
"Many trainers here" "We need more pokestops" etc. Tree's, shrubs, household mailboxes, you name it, even piles of literal trash.
Then - You import Foursquare...
I think it's a case of $ vs Quality.
The portal quality has gone down significantly since some time. All you get to see now is players creating mosaic tiles next to their home to get home gyms/pokestop/portal.
Or they destroy company property by painting utility boxes. (Which is vandalism, but is being accepted as art…)
I believe there is even a rule; a playground can be a portal if it isn’t in x meters of a residence. (Which would make a huge percentage of portals invalid around here…)
Wayfarer just doesn’t work. And this doesn’t help.
I have no idea how the painting of power distribution boxes works outside of Germany. Whatever the case - in Germany it requires permits from the municipalities or the owners themselves.
I’ve had three nominations accepted in the past few days. One is showing on the Intel map. The others meet the usual rules but aren’t appearing.
@ForzaComo had an interesting theory here;
Weird, just had one come through, 3 years to the day.
No email, just a key. It's in Mongolia so unlikely to cap it any time soon.
Come on, nobody gets any permit to do this stuff. And it's wayfarer's fault for getting it 'in scope'.
You see, once portals/pokestops/whatever are in the game, people just drop the 'rules' and check to see if other portals like it exists and if so, they vote for it. Legacy portals were a cause for this under the Ingress playerbase, but the problem has expanded limitlessly when pokemon go players were incorporated. (They simply are with too many; hence all Ingress players dropping in rating in wayfarer...)
I think we all need cooldawn and wait a little for a new badge "cleaner"
Now at four. Grateful for all the acceptances, not so much for the lack of keys/appearance on Ingress.
The one that did appear was nominated on Pokémon GO. The others in Ingress.
That’s how it works. Everyone has their pitchforks and says #neverforget & then we’re shown a new medal or event and everyone is heart eyes again and we’re all dealing with the “new” normal. This thread will join the others like it with a half @ss response from Niantic about how they can communicate better, but never actually saying, “sorry, we goofed, we’re gonna make this right, give us time.” Psh
@NianticThia,
quick thought, if you are "working on solution" and looking into different options.
I assume, the fake foursquare portals were added to give pokemon players more pokemon stops (and instead of foursquare it could be any other source, like post boxes database, or random coordinates). If you suggest ingress agents to clean garbage portals *from wayfarer*, pokestops will start to disappear. And then pokemon players will blame ingress (even if fake portals are reported by pokemon players or removed directly by niantic). Not good. Ingress is already a group of "elitist players" who do not want to give home pokestops to everyone, no need to add more hate.
In turn, if you remove all fake portals *from ingress* and make a rule that only user-generated portals enter the game, lightship can keep fake pokestops, and generate more. Everyone is happy. Even if some pokestops are cleaned by pokemon players or niantic - there will be no reason to blame ingress.
Any updates before the weekend?
Just keeping track. I’ve had an Ingress nomination accepted and it’s shown up on the Intel Map.
Hopefully something has changed behind the scenes and it’s being fixed.
Judging from the volume of new posts in https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/16194/approved-portals-not-showing-on-map-no-key-in-inventory , the problem persists. My candidate accepted August 3 is still not in game, and I check daily.
My agreements have slowed down immensely of late, and I'm worried about my nominations currently in voting. I fear that if I can't upgrade them, they'll be accepted but not show in Ingress. Since the beginning of August, only my upgraded portals have actually appeared on Intel.
I did one nomination in Hawaii about a week ago. It was accepted and showed on iitc immediately. I don’t plan to review or submit anything until all of this is figured out and Niantic continues to communicate with us about what’s going on. Would love a little more transparency, but that doesn’t seem likely.
Yeah, I’ve added my ones there that haven’t come through. Was surprised when the one today did. Got an Upgrade that should tick over some time tomorrow so should have another one with any luck by the end of Tuesday to see if it appears.
Bouncing between here and the Wayfarer forums. NianticGiffard says they’re on the case.
I’m also really annoyed at portals are not appearing properly in Ingress. As someone who submits a lot of portals and also tracks their status in Wayfarer semi-daily, I’ve noticed something that may be relevant and makes me suspect this is a bug…
Every portal I’ve had approved that didn’t show up in Ingress was never actually voted on… or at the very least was “in voting” for a minuscule amount of time. EVERY effected would-be portal just slipped through voting… most of them within a mere few days from submission; which in itself tells you something has gone WILDLY ASTRAY from the typical voting process in these cases.
It’s a loose thread for your devs to pull on at any rate.
I have had other approvals come through normally throughout this, which has been going on since at least August 12, probably longer... so it appears to be random. Since these appear to skip through Wayfarer voting though, maybe we're talking about a Wayfarer bug with these as opposed to a Lightship issue?
Any updates on why portals may or may not show up in Ingress, even if they follow traditional "rules" regarding distance from existing portals, etc. I see these questions are now being given copy/paste responses in the wayfarer forum.
There must be a reason why this is happening. I'm fine with, "We can't tell you right now, but we can share more in X days."
Hi everyone - I had a couple of days off to (try to) recover a bit plus we had the long weekend here in the US. I'm am going through all of the feedback (I haven't gotten through it all yet...) and trying to catch up on where everything is with this (some meetings later today will hopefully help!) - otherwise I don't have much right now and I'm sorry for that. Hopefully soon (I know...).
For transparency, here are the three main questions I'm working to get answers on.
1) Have the rules for what gets added into Ingress as a Portal changed? (AFAIK, no, but I want to double check.)
2) If the rules haven't changed, what is the cause for accepted Wayspots to not show up as a Portal in Ingress? Synching issue? Bug? We don't know yet? Is there a preferred way we want Agent to submit inquiries about this to look into it?
3) How are we doing on removing Portals that were added that may be problematic? Is there a preferred way we want Agents to submit this information if they want to help?
Hi @NianticThia ! Welcome back from your short break/recovery and thank you for looking into some of these questions. I appreciate the transparency, fact-finding efforts and @NianticVK ’s effort to look into missing portals in Ingress.
A question(s) that I’d like to have addressed, if possible, is why has the language in the previous Ingress, “Congrats! Portal Accepted“ emails changed to, “Your portal is Eligible… if Accepted it might be Ingress“, if (as far as we know) the rules have not changed for Ingress portal acceptance. The new, non-committal language change in these emails seem to suggest some form of rule change.
— and if down the road you/we discover that the rules for what gets added in Ingress vs. PoGo/HPWU/etc. have indeed changed, why has this decision been made? What is the benefit of adding a nominated and eligible wayspot to only one or two games vs. all of Niantic’s games?
Thank you for helping us understand.
On Question 3, the purpose of injecting the Foursquare data was to create Wayspots where there were not enough Wayspots/players, so why would you assume there are players there willing to help? This is Niantic's mess and Niantic needs to clean it up.
Hi, I think the new formulation is linked to the lightship integration. The "wayspot" is accepted in lightship (for any game to use) but ingress might not accept it as a portal (so it could pop in pogo but not in ingress for example).
It could be more understandable I think.
"New branding on Notification Emails: We know the emails have been historically bogged down with bugs - there are dependencies we built into the emails that are a bit unstable which we’d like to eliminate. Our refresh will mean replacing game email notifications with Wayfarer email notifications, with links back to your Nominations page (as your source of truth). We’re also updating the language in the emails to resolve the confusion and conflation of ‘eligibility’ and ‘accepted’ in our messaging, which are not the same concepts. We hope this also clarifies that contributions are to the Niantic Platform, for all Niantic games to consider using."
"Final Note - Where is my Wayspot in the game?
We see some ongoing confusion around why you are receiving wayspot acceptance notifications from a game but aren’t seeing the Wayspot in that particular game. Please be reminded that each Niantic game (not Wayfarer) chooses which Wayspots to use from the Niantic platform, and are at liberty to modify their gameboard at any time.
Wayfarer does not control how each game utilizes Wayspots. Games may also sync with Wayfarer’s Wayspots in a different cadence to each other, which Wayfarer also does not control or mandate. We hope this becomes more intuitively understood with our email refresh mentioned above!"
Priorities should be:
Junk portals submitted from Foursquare - why are they not being removed? It's not just the places, it's names as well. Or are we now reverting back to "let the players fix it"?
If not being removed- have portal criteria changed to include almost anything and Niantic are happy with the marked decline in the waypoint quality?
Portals not showing that have been accepted, even though they meet normal accepted rules for that game. (In this case Ingress).
This is absolutely based in the Lightship migration. The first problems surfaced in late July, during the preparatory stages, and we were advised that there may be delays and to please wait. Since that migration, the problem persists. It's intermittent, and cannot be linked to a particular pattern (although Niantic manual review may account for many occurrences). We did ask in the Bug Report forum for a simple clarification - is this intended behavior, or is it a glitch? We didn't need any details beyond that. Our inquiries, though, were met with extended silence. Only recently has @NianticVK circled back to ask for specific examples to aid in investigation. If there are indeed new rules or it's a conscious decision by Ingress to not publish these portals in game, why do other similarly-spaced, accepted, but upgraded portals appear on Intel exactly as they did before?
All of this is fine and completely understandable, but the WHY isn’t answered and hasn’t been answered as of yet. I’m completely baffled why answering this question has been so difficult for anyone with any team to answer.
Why would Ingress “choose” to not accept a nomination.