@Bloondie-ING Access to the town of Kalaupapa and access to the lighthouse have different routes. You can post about the trail being closed but NPS has at least one route to get to the lighthouse that doesn't require using the Kalaupapa Trail.
I have heard a rumor that someone told the health department that players were likely to trespass to get to the wayspot. I don't know if that is true but if it is then I'm disturbed by it on two different fronts-- involving a third party as tool in order to gain a factional advantage, and being inaccurate in doing so. In the nine years that I have had my eye on this portal I have never heard of anyone attempting to trespass to access it. There's been lots of spoofing but no trespassing that I am aware of.
Trust me, nobody wants to see that lighthouse go away more than I do... it's been a thorn in my side on and off for nearly a decade. I stand by my assertion that NPS personnel almost certainly have safe access to the lighthouse, and thus the wayspot does not meet the criteria for removal. I also hope I heard wrong about someone having contacted the health department to have it removed.
“I stand by my assertion that NPS personnel almost certainly have safe access to the lighthouse, and thus the wayspot does not meet the criteria for removal.”
@NitrousBlue-ING That is one of the removal criteria, yes. If you can prove that nobody has access to the portal, including NPS personnel, then that would be grounds for a legitimate removal request.
Removal criteria is completely different than rejection criteria.
For pedestrian access, Niantic will assume a Wayspot is 'accessible' if anyone (or at least one person?) can access the Wayspot, safely. Though this was misinterpreted by many people that restricted areas won't meet that 'safe pedestrian access' criteria.
@NitrousBlue-ING If I try to report something in-app I get a list of reasons:
No Pedestrian Access
Obstructs or interferes with Emergency Services
Private Residential Property
School (up to K-12)
Permanently removed from this location
Duplicate of another Portal
The removal criteria are different from and narrower than the rejection criteria. For example, "A generic business, chain, or franchise that is not locally unique" is one of the criteria for rejecting something during review but it is not a criterion for removal. Some of this is because there are many things in the games that were approved under earlier rules but would no longer qualify.
After reading what I could find, and considering Niantic mission & social impact statements, I can not believe that the intent is to have portals that no one can explore.
From my perspective, “No pedestrian access” means no public walking access.
@NitrousBlue-ING When you say "public walking access" do you mean things that everyone can access?
If so, that would radically change the landscapes of Niantic games and IMO not for the better. It would mean that there would be no wayspots in gated communities or on business campuses that were gated. (There's some really cool art at Pixar, for example, and all those wayspots would go away.) It would mean that people couldn't play Niantic games on the family areas of military bases.
This change would also complicate the review process because it would require reviewers to know whether a particular area was open to the public or not, and that information isn't always easy to find.
I honestly do think that Niantic should change the rules about accessibility a bit. One of the problems is that things get approved when there is public access but later that access goes away but the wayspot persists. Trinity Site is an interesting case of limited access that I think is a good one-- it is generally inaccessible but there are public tours twice per year. I think that Niantic should have a different set of rules than what they do right now, one that would allow Trinity Site and gated communities while also suspending or removing places like the lighthouse that don't have any public access route and relies solely on social engineering. That's a hard problem to solve, though.
@Hosette-ING you say “ Trinity Site is an interesting case of limited access that I think is a good one-- it is generally inaccessible but there are public tours twice per year.” That is a good example of why it this lighthouse is invalid. There are no public tours, and there haven’t been for years now. It is indefinitely closed to the public. No tours, in a closed county. That makes it in accessible with no safe pedestrian access. And please quit making inaccurate and false accusations.
@Hosette-ING You say “That is one of the removal criteria, yes. If you can prove that nobody has access to the portal, including NPS personnel, then that would be grounds for a legitimate removal request.” The entire county is closed. There are no medical facilities in the county. There is no safe pedestrian access. Period.
Again, Hosette, you’re missing the point. What I read was that the Department of Health was managing Kalawao County. You showed additional information to expand on that. You don’t see people supposedly on the same team calling the other a liar when adding information, now do you? Yikes Hosette, again, please take your trolling elsewhere. And the rules require safe pedestrian access. Does this sound like safe pedestrian access?
a Wayspot is 'accessible' if anyone (or at least one person?) can access the Wayspot, safely
Is there any wayspot in the entire world that would be determined as not accessible by "at least one person"? Could the Chernobyl Elephant's Foot be removed were it a wayspot, or could that be safely accessed if you have the right protective gear?
@Hosette-ING why was the Enlightened able to take down Drawbridge? With your rationale that any portal that can be accessible by NPS somehow makes it valid, wouldn’t they be able to access Drawbridge? Crossing the train tracks somehow made that an invalid portal because someone determined there was no safe pedestrian access because train tracks are dangerous to cross (???), but traveling through a closed county, closed by the Department of Health because it is a Leper Colony, somehow is determined to have safe pedestrian access?? Not even taking into account the perils of getting there, where they have no medical facilities available to the public and their phone system is failing, and it is CLOSED INDEFINITELY to the general public, and has been for over three years. But crossing train tracks is a valid reason to remove a portal. A county closed by the Department of Health vs. train tracks. Pffft
Under Safety, on their website, it says: “There are SIGNIFICANT SAFTEY RISKS when visiting Kalaupapa and no medical facilities.” How is that considered safe pedestrian access? Oh, and the county is CLOSED.
@Bloondie-ING You keep confusing the town of Kalaupapa with the lighthouse. Accessing the lighthouse can be done without ever using the Kalaupapa Trail or going into the town of Kalaupapa.
You are aware that the Moloka'i Lighthouse is an active light station, yes? That strongly suggests that someone is able to access it to perform routine and emergency maintenance. I would bet large sums of money that someone from NPS has access to the lighthouse because it would be dangerous to have an active navigational aid that could not be maintained. Also, NPS owns the land.
There's also something that you are overlooking-- people live in the town of Kalaupapa. They do not need a permit to be in the county and they do not have to hike the Kalaupapa Trail because they're already in town. Have you determined whether the residents of the town are permitted to go to the lighthouse? It's certain that residents could access the two wayspots in the town itself so those would not be candidates for removal.
As for "There are SIGNIFICANT SAFTEY RISKS..." there are also significant safety risks involved when climbing mountains to get to wayspots, or hiking through the wilderness to get to them, and there are no medical facilities on mountain peaks. That doesn't make those wayspots invalid, just challenging.
I've shown you that Niantic has rejected this argument twice already (November 2021 and January 2022), and once restored the lighthouse after it was accidentally deleted. What do you think has changed since those rejections?
I've been following this thread for a while, but not weighed in until now. What you've posted suggests that it's possible to get a permit to visit under certain circumstances. Additionally, the park has recently been advertising a job vacancy on Facebook.
This suggests that other workers would have access to the site even though it may be closed to the general public. Presumably that would also include workers who would have the job of maintaining the lighthouse. If that is the case, then it does indeed have safe pedestrian access, as the workers would physically be able to stand at the lighthouse to perform their job.
I can’t understand why this person wants this lighthouse gone so badly. It’s clearly not “to keep the gameboard accurate”. Something else is going on. Why are they getting so agitated and called people names over this lighthouse?
There is not one Ingress player that can legally access that Portal, and it has been that way for years. I don’t think that is in the spirit of the game to have a portal that is completely inaccessible by those playing the game. Portals have been taken down for less reasons than have been shown here. It’s that simple. The only reason it still up is because it is used to block our access to Hawaii from the West Coast of the US. If we owned that portal and did the same thing, they would’ve had that portal down along time ago. Drawbridge was taken down for a lot less reasons. Period.
Quick somewhat-simplified Ingress tutorial for those who aren't familiar
In Ingress you can link two portals together. This requires you to physically go to one of the portals in order to link it, and to have a portal key for the portal that you are linking to. Linking to the remote portal consumes the key, so a key only allows you to link once. You acquire portal keys by going to a portal in person and hacking it. Players can also pass keys off to other players by meeting in person.
If you connect three portals together to make a triangle you create a control field. Control fields score Mind Units (MU) for your team, based on (a vague approximation of) the number of people who live under the field. Most control fields are fairly small and only score a few or a few hundred MU, but creating very large fields is a fascinating team effort and one field can cover hundreds of thousands, millions, or sometimes tens of millions of MU The largest legitimate control fields ever have scored more than a billion MU. (I use the word legitimate because an old bug in Ingress occasionally caused a bad MU calculation, and scored billions or in one case over a trillion MU for a very small field. I happened to be the person who accidentally created the trillion MU field, which caused Niantic to fix the bug.)
Why the Moloka'i Lighthouse matters
@29andCounting-PGO It's an Ingress thing and involves strategic control of the Pacific Ocean between the western coast of North America and Hawaii. There are many high-durability portals (i.e. ones that are very challenging to access) in Alaska and Hawaii as well as along the western coast of the US.
The Moloka'i lighthouse has been controlled by one faction for a long time and it is extremely difficult to gain access to. Because it's nearly impossible to access, plus key duplication means that the green team probably has thousands of keys distributed among their players, it means that they have control of the Pacific locked up. Even if the blue team was able to take down every link from the continent once a week I doubt we could ever exhaust their supply of portal keys. Several of the links from the continental side are from portals that are also very challenging to access.
To some extent I believe this is a flaw in the Ingress game design. Strategic and tactical portals have always been a key component of the game for those who play it in that way, but one of the limitations on them was that you had to physically go to the portal to hack keys. This meant that gaining keys to strategic portals required significant effort and thus they were used rarely and with careful planning.
Some years ago Ingress introduced a type of capsule that you could put keys (and other gear) in and items would duplicate. The chance of a duplication was random but was on the order of 1% per day. This allowed people to put high-value strategic keys into capsules and over time make more of them... exponentially more. For example: I was once gifted a souvenir key to a portal in Antarctica, just one. I put it into an interest-bearing capsule and let it cook and ended up with dozens... I gifted a key to a few friends so they could also have a cool souvenir and those people did the same thing and also ended up with dozens.
So imagine you somehow managed to get to the Moloka'i lighthouse and capture it for your team. You would farm as many keys as you possibly could while you were there, but unless you had a lot of time to spend there you could probably get a maximum of 50-100 keys. That's not a lot, and you would use them judiciously. Enter capsules that allow duplication. Assuming I've done the math right and that the interest rate was actually 1% (it was close to that but I'm not sure of the exact number) a year later you would have roughly 1900 keys... which means you could use them quite liberally. Two years later you would have over 71K keys. Even if you started with a more modest ten keys you'd expect ~375 after one year and over 14K after two years. One person can only hold 2000-3100 items, but that's OK... spread the keys out among a couple hundred players and the team still winds up with that many keys only they're geographically distributed for easy sharing and use.
Niantic recently removed the ability to duplicate items but for longstanding high-durability portals the damage is already done and will probably persist through the time that Ingress sunsets.
This combines with Niantic's rule that safe pedestrian access means that someone has to be able to access the portal and you get into situations where it's nearly impossible for anyone to ever access a portal and it becomes a permanent, untouchable asset for one team and that team now has nearly infinite resources to use it as often as they want. I've certainly gone to some extremes to access difficult portals and my teammates have as well. At some point difficult crosses over into impossible (at a practical level, at least) and Niantic doesn't handle this case very well. It's a thorny problem to be sure.
@Hosette-ING Your comment “This combines with Niantic's rule that safe pedestrian access means that someone has to be able to access the portal…” is again, not accurate. If that was true, Drawbridge would not have been removed. “Safe pedestrian access” means what it says. And the lighthouse is no longer accessible by pedestrians.
There are no Ingress Agents that have legal and safe access to that lighthouse any longer. That is not a portal that should be in the game if no agent can access it.
Sorry, but you keep specifying that Ingress Agents don't have legal access to it. That doesn't stop people who don't play Ingress from having legal and safe access to it.
As has been stated, lighthouse maintenance crews would be able to safely and legally access the lighthouse. Maybe they play Pokémon Go, or NBA All World, or Pikmin Bloom? Who knows? It doesn't actually matter though. Some people have legal and safe access to the lighthouse some of the time, and therefore it's a valid wayspot.
I get how frustrating it can be if the opposite Ingress faction has control over a strategic point, and you end up with a field over your area. I happen to live in an area where greens are incredibly territorial, to the point that I basically don't play any more because it's extremely difficult to actually play the game in any meaningful way, and it's basically not worth my time trying to undo what they've done when they'll just do it back again within a matter of hours. That is not a valid reason to report and attempt to remove a wayspot though.
Workers are still permitted to be there, otherwise they wouldn't have been advertising a job vacancy in the area. It would make absolutely no sense to advertise a job at a location if the location was literally inaccessible to everyone.
Unless you can somehow provide proof that someone working there isn't allowed to physically be there to do a job that requires them to be there in person... In which case I look forward to your explanation of that :)
So someone other than Pokémon go players are attempting to manipulate the game board to improve their game. Haha. Classic. (Just to point out though, when Pokémon players attempt to manipulate the game board it’s because they want more points added, not less)
Comments
@Bloondie-ING Access to the town of Kalaupapa and access to the lighthouse have different routes. You can post about the trail being closed but NPS has at least one route to get to the lighthouse that doesn't require using the Kalaupapa Trail.
I have heard a rumor that someone told the health department that players were likely to trespass to get to the wayspot. I don't know if that is true but if it is then I'm disturbed by it on two different fronts-- involving a third party as tool in order to gain a factional advantage, and being inaccurate in doing so. In the nine years that I have had my eye on this portal I have never heard of anyone attempting to trespass to access it. There's been lots of spoofing but no trespassing that I am aware of.
Trust me, nobody wants to see that lighthouse go away more than I do... it's been a thorn in my side on and off for nearly a decade. I stand by my assertion that NPS personnel almost certainly have safe access to the lighthouse, and thus the wayspot does not meet the criteria for removal. I also hope I heard wrong about someone having contacted the health department to have it removed.
Hosette
“I stand by my assertion that NPS personnel almost certainly have safe access to the lighthouse, and thus the wayspot does not meet the criteria for removal.”
I’m trying to find the criteria for removal.
Is this it?
thanks.
@NitrousBlue-ING That is one of the removal criteria, yes. If you can prove that nobody has access to the portal, including NPS personnel, then that would be grounds for a legitimate removal request.
Are there other criteria sources in addition to this? Any explaining perhaps more detail?
I did find this rejection criteria listed in wayfarer:
Removal criteria is completely different than rejection criteria.
For pedestrian access, Niantic will assume a Wayspot is 'accessible' if anyone (or at least one person?) can access the Wayspot, safely. Though this was misinterpreted by many people that restricted areas won't meet that 'safe pedestrian access' criteria.
@NitrousBlue-ING If I try to report something in-app I get a list of reasons:
The removal criteria are different from and narrower than the rejection criteria. For example, "A generic business, chain, or franchise that is not locally unique" is one of the criteria for rejecting something during review but it is not a criterion for removal. Some of this is because there are many things in the games that were approved under earlier rules but would no longer qualify.
Thanks for that.
After reading what I could find, and considering Niantic mission & social impact statements, I can not believe that the intent is to have portals that no one can explore.
From my perspective, “No pedestrian access” means no public walking access.
@NitrousBlue-ING When you say "public walking access" do you mean things that everyone can access?
If so, that would radically change the landscapes of Niantic games and IMO not for the better. It would mean that there would be no wayspots in gated communities or on business campuses that were gated. (There's some really cool art at Pixar, for example, and all those wayspots would go away.) It would mean that people couldn't play Niantic games on the family areas of military bases.
This change would also complicate the review process because it would require reviewers to know whether a particular area was open to the public or not, and that information isn't always easy to find.
I honestly do think that Niantic should change the rules about accessibility a bit. One of the problems is that things get approved when there is public access but later that access goes away but the wayspot persists. Trinity Site is an interesting case of limited access that I think is a good one-- it is generally inaccessible but there are public tours twice per year. I think that Niantic should have a different set of rules than what they do right now, one that would allow Trinity Site and gated communities while also suspending or removing places like the lighthouse that don't have any public access route and relies solely on social engineering. That's a hard problem to solve, though.
For completeness, I looked for previous cases of this wayspot being discussed here.
January 2022 which was denied by Niantic.
November 2021 which was denied by Niantic.
Discussion of the February 2021 move that dropped all links wherein Niantic accidentally deleted the portal. They restored it and the link that were attached, and locked it from future moves.
@Hosette-ING you say “ Trinity Site is an interesting case of limited access that I think is a good one-- it is generally inaccessible but there are public tours twice per year.” That is a good example of why it this lighthouse is invalid. There are no public tours, and there haven’t been for years now. It is indefinitely closed to the public. No tours, in a closed county. That makes it in accessible with no safe pedestrian access. And please quit making inaccurate and false accusations.
@Hosette-ING You say “That is one of the removal criteria, yes. If you can prove that nobody has access to the portal, including NPS personnel, then that would be grounds for a legitimate removal request.” The entire county is closed. There are no medical facilities in the county. There is no safe pedestrian access. Period.
Your source please? Or did you try to make up the argument?
Again, Hosette, you’re missing the point. What I read was that the Department of Health was managing Kalawao County. You showed additional information to expand on that. You don’t see people supposedly on the same team calling the other a liar when adding information, now do you? Yikes Hosette, again, please take your trolling elsewhere. And the rules require safe pedestrian access. Does this sound like safe pedestrian access?
@patsufredo-PGO “Your source please? Or did you try to make up the argument?”
The Kalaupapa Website. Look it up.
a Wayspot is 'accessible' if anyone (or at least one person?) can access the Wayspot, safely
Is there any wayspot in the entire world that would be determined as not accessible by "at least one person"? Could the Chernobyl Elephant's Foot be removed were it a wayspot, or could that be safely accessed if you have the right protective gear?
@Hosette-ING why was the Enlightened able to take down Drawbridge? With your rationale that any portal that can be accessible by NPS somehow makes it valid, wouldn’t they be able to access Drawbridge? Crossing the train tracks somehow made that an invalid portal because someone determined there was no safe pedestrian access because train tracks are dangerous to cross (???), but traveling through a closed county, closed by the Department of Health because it is a Leper Colony, somehow is determined to have safe pedestrian access?? Not even taking into account the perils of getting there, where they have no medical facilities available to the public and their phone system is failing, and it is CLOSED INDEFINITELY to the general public, and has been for over three years. But crossing train tracks is a valid reason to remove a portal. A county closed by the Department of Health vs. train tracks. Pffft
@29andCounting-PGO To the trail. The county is still closed. Read the first alert.
Under Safety, on their website, it says: “There are SIGNIFICANT SAFTEY RISKS when visiting Kalaupapa and no medical facilities.” How is that considered safe pedestrian access? Oh, and the county is CLOSED.
@Bloondie-ING You keep confusing the town of Kalaupapa with the lighthouse. Accessing the lighthouse can be done without ever using the Kalaupapa Trail or going into the town of Kalaupapa.
You are aware that the Moloka'i Lighthouse is an active light station, yes? That strongly suggests that someone is able to access it to perform routine and emergency maintenance. I would bet large sums of money that someone from NPS has access to the lighthouse because it would be dangerous to have an active navigational aid that could not be maintained. Also, NPS owns the land.
There's also something that you are overlooking-- people live in the town of Kalaupapa. They do not need a permit to be in the county and they do not have to hike the Kalaupapa Trail because they're already in town. Have you determined whether the residents of the town are permitted to go to the lighthouse? It's certain that residents could access the two wayspots in the town itself so those would not be candidates for removal.
As for "There are SIGNIFICANT SAFTEY RISKS..." there are also significant safety risks involved when climbing mountains to get to wayspots, or hiking through the wilderness to get to them, and there are no medical facilities on mountain peaks. That doesn't make those wayspots invalid, just challenging.
I've shown you that Niantic has rejected this argument twice already (November 2021 and January 2022), and once restored the lighthouse after it was accidentally deleted. What do you think has changed since those rejections?
I've been following this thread for a while, but not weighed in until now. What you've posted suggests that it's possible to get a permit to visit under certain circumstances. Additionally, the park has recently been advertising a job vacancy on Facebook.
https://www.facebook.com/111307082256139/posts/pfbid032U6V1wdkNAW7Kx2j1UMRtbU7WdX2mk29AUkBMLy6U8gS8nVsMmt6s9PARGRAJgsGl/
This suggests that other workers would have access to the site even though it may be closed to the general public. Presumably that would also include workers who would have the job of maintaining the lighthouse. If that is the case, then it does indeed have safe pedestrian access, as the workers would physically be able to stand at the lighthouse to perform their job.
I can’t understand why this person wants this lighthouse gone so badly. It’s clearly not “to keep the gameboard accurate”. Something else is going on. Why are they getting so agitated and called people names over this lighthouse?
Why on earth should anyone willingly WANT to be in a Hansen's Disease colony in the first place???
There is not one Ingress player that can legally access that Portal, and it has been that way for years. I don’t think that is in the spirit of the game to have a portal that is completely inaccessible by those playing the game. Portals have been taken down for less reasons than have been shown here. It’s that simple. The only reason it still up is because it is used to block our access to Hawaii from the West Coast of the US. If we owned that portal and did the same thing, they would’ve had that portal down along time ago. Drawbridge was taken down for a lot less reasons. Period.
Quick somewhat-simplified Ingress tutorial for those who aren't familiar
In Ingress you can link two portals together. This requires you to physically go to one of the portals in order to link it, and to have a portal key for the portal that you are linking to. Linking to the remote portal consumes the key, so a key only allows you to link once. You acquire portal keys by going to a portal in person and hacking it. Players can also pass keys off to other players by meeting in person.
If you connect three portals together to make a triangle you create a control field. Control fields score Mind Units (MU) for your team, based on (a vague approximation of) the number of people who live under the field. Most control fields are fairly small and only score a few or a few hundred MU, but creating very large fields is a fascinating team effort and one field can cover hundreds of thousands, millions, or sometimes tens of millions of MU The largest legitimate control fields ever have scored more than a billion MU. (I use the word legitimate because an old bug in Ingress occasionally caused a bad MU calculation, and scored billions or in one case over a trillion MU for a very small field. I happened to be the person who accidentally created the trillion MU field, which caused Niantic to fix the bug.)
Why the Moloka'i Lighthouse matters
@29andCounting-PGO It's an Ingress thing and involves strategic control of the Pacific Ocean between the western coast of North America and Hawaii. There are many high-durability portals (i.e. ones that are very challenging to access) in Alaska and Hawaii as well as along the western coast of the US.
The Moloka'i lighthouse has been controlled by one faction for a long time and it is extremely difficult to gain access to. Because it's nearly impossible to access, plus key duplication means that the green team probably has thousands of keys distributed among their players, it means that they have control of the Pacific locked up. Even if the blue team was able to take down every link from the continent once a week I doubt we could ever exhaust their supply of portal keys. Several of the links from the continental side are from portals that are also very challenging to access.
See the map below for the current status.
Additional notes
To some extent I believe this is a flaw in the Ingress game design. Strategic and tactical portals have always been a key component of the game for those who play it in that way, but one of the limitations on them was that you had to physically go to the portal to hack keys. This meant that gaining keys to strategic portals required significant effort and thus they were used rarely and with careful planning.
Some years ago Ingress introduced a type of capsule that you could put keys (and other gear) in and items would duplicate. The chance of a duplication was random but was on the order of 1% per day. This allowed people to put high-value strategic keys into capsules and over time make more of them... exponentially more. For example: I was once gifted a souvenir key to a portal in Antarctica, just one. I put it into an interest-bearing capsule and let it cook and ended up with dozens... I gifted a key to a few friends so they could also have a cool souvenir and those people did the same thing and also ended up with dozens.
So imagine you somehow managed to get to the Moloka'i lighthouse and capture it for your team. You would farm as many keys as you possibly could while you were there, but unless you had a lot of time to spend there you could probably get a maximum of 50-100 keys. That's not a lot, and you would use them judiciously. Enter capsules that allow duplication. Assuming I've done the math right and that the interest rate was actually 1% (it was close to that but I'm not sure of the exact number) a year later you would have roughly 1900 keys... which means you could use them quite liberally. Two years later you would have over 71K keys. Even if you started with a more modest ten keys you'd expect ~375 after one year and over 14K after two years. One person can only hold 2000-3100 items, but that's OK... spread the keys out among a couple hundred players and the team still winds up with that many keys only they're geographically distributed for easy sharing and use.
Niantic recently removed the ability to duplicate items but for longstanding high-durability portals the damage is already done and will probably persist through the time that Ingress sunsets.
This combines with Niantic's rule that safe pedestrian access means that someone has to be able to access the portal and you get into situations where it's nearly impossible for anyone to ever access a portal and it becomes a permanent, untouchable asset for one team and that team now has nearly infinite resources to use it as often as they want. I've certainly gone to some extremes to access difficult portals and my teammates have as well. At some point difficult crosses over into impossible (at a practical level, at least) and Niantic doesn't handle this case very well. It's a thorny problem to be sure.
@Hosette-ING Your comment “This combines with Niantic's rule that safe pedestrian access means that someone has to be able to access the portal…” is again, not accurate. If that was true, Drawbridge would not have been removed. “Safe pedestrian access” means what it says. And the lighthouse is no longer accessible by pedestrians.
There are no Ingress Agents that have legal and safe access to that lighthouse any longer. That is not a portal that should be in the game if no agent can access it.
Sorry, but you keep specifying that Ingress Agents don't have legal access to it. That doesn't stop people who don't play Ingress from having legal and safe access to it.
As has been stated, lighthouse maintenance crews would be able to safely and legally access the lighthouse. Maybe they play Pokémon Go, or NBA All World, or Pikmin Bloom? Who knows? It doesn't actually matter though. Some people have legal and safe access to the lighthouse some of the time, and therefore it's a valid wayspot.
I get how frustrating it can be if the opposite Ingress faction has control over a strategic point, and you end up with a field over your area. I happen to live in an area where greens are incredibly territorial, to the point that I basically don't play any more because it's extremely difficult to actually play the game in any meaningful way, and it's basically not worth my time trying to undo what they've done when they'll just do it back again within a matter of hours. That is not a valid reason to report and attempt to remove a wayspot though.
i think you missed the point that the lighthouse is in the National Park that is closed to all. (not just ingress agents)
Workers are still permitted to be there, otherwise they wouldn't have been advertising a job vacancy in the area. It would make absolutely no sense to advertise a job at a location if the location was literally inaccessible to everyone.
Unless you can somehow provide proof that someone working there isn't allowed to physically be there to do a job that requires them to be there in person... In which case I look forward to your explanation of that :)
So someone other than Pokémon go players are attempting to manipulate the game board to improve their game. Haha. Classic. (Just to point out though, when Pokémon players attempt to manipulate the game board it’s because they want more points added, not less)