Approved Wayspot Never Went "Live"

Wayspot Appeals
1

Hi, I’m posting to request that an approved Wayspot be updated to “live” in the Wayfarer database. TLDR: The Wayspot was approved years ago but blocked from going live due to the legacy Ingress-based rules, and its status was never corrected after the database migration.

  • Wayspot Title: Doris and Gunther Kohn Plaza

  • Location (lat/lon): 38.648244,-90.311297

  • City: Clayton, Missouri

  • Country: USA

  • Screenshot of the Rejection Approval Email:

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    image1129×1473 161 KB

This Wayspot was nominated on 4/6/2020 and approved on 8/31/2020, however it never went “live” due to its close proximity to a nearby pre-existing Wayspot (ie “Simon Hall” at 38.648276,-90.311233).

As some community members know, before the Lightship migration Pokémon GO’s map relied entirely on the Ingress portal database. Because Ingress enforced a strict 20‑meter separation rule, any approved Wayspot located within 20 m of an existing Ingress portal was blocked from appearing on the Ingress map — and therefore never had the opportunity to appear on the Pokémon GO map, even if it technically met Pokémon GO’s own eligibility criteria. This created a long-standing mismatch where Pokémon GO‑eligible Wayspots were effectively filtered out by Ingress‑specific proximity rules.

My understanding is that the “Doris and Gunther Kohn Plaza” Wayspot was marked as “inactive” in the Ingress database for exactly this reason. After the migration to Lightship, its status appears to have remained “inactive,” which prevents it from being considered as a Power Spot (whether Pokémon GO’s own eligibility criteria would allow it to appear as a PokéStop or Gym is a separate matter — and based on my understanding, it likely would not). It makes sense that many similarly affected Wayspots were never updated to “live,” since some were later re‑submitted and added successfully, and others may no longer exist in the real world.

However, in this case the Wayspot was never re‑submitted, and the physical plaque is still permanently installed at the same location as it was in 2020.

Could someone from the Wayfarer team please update its internal status to “live” so that it can be evaluated for inclusion as a Power Spot (or other in‑game location, if eligible)? Thank you so much.

2

I can’t see your mentioned wayspot at those coordinates so perhaps you could just nominate it again

3

As I mentioned in my original post, my wayspot does not appear on the map precisely because it is likely marked as “inactive” (or otherwise blocked), due to the reason I explained above. Sure, I could always circumvent the problem by re-submitting but the whole point of this appeal is to lobby for the original approved wayspot to be unblocked.

4

Back when you submitted this, if a nomination was approved but was within 20 metres of an existing Ingress Portal, it simply would not get added to the database as far as I’m aware. So that would mean that there is no wayspot for them to set as live, because it never went into the database and it’s basically as if your submission never existed in the first place.

Resubmitting it is the correct way to resolve this.

3 Likes
5

The OP is aware of the comments made above, this is a request directly to the Wayfarer team, they should be able to answer if they are able to follow through with this request or not.

1 Like
6

Hey @Jammelev ,

Thanks for your feedback.

@hankwolfman is absolutely spot on with their analysis. The only option here is to resubmit.

Thanks,

5 Likes
7

Thank you @hankwolfman for your input and thank you to @NianticAaron for confirming their understanding of the situation. I had assumed that approved submissions which didn’t appear on the Ingress map due to Ingress proximity rules (back when the Ingress map served as the primary database) were still added to the database in some kind of inactive state. I now understand that the Ingress inclusion rules prevented such submissions from being added to the database at all, meaning that the only solution is to resubmit.