Attention Turkish Agents –
As you may have deciphered, Machina is currently disabled throughout most of Türkiye. The NIA is working to update the Portal Network there to include only Portals approved by Agents and Wayfarers that have been accepted by Niantic Wayfarer, like we do in all other regions. Additionally, we’ve intercepted Signals Intelligence with just one phrase: machina veniet.
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I mentioned this in another thread but wanted to add its own thread here.
As you may know, the Wayspots that got added for India and Brazil recently did not get added to Ingress, which seemed to be a decision by that team (presumably due to Agent backlash on their forums from a previous import).
Adding my reply from that other thread here -
The removal of the Turkish imports will likely be done en masse, with even the correct and valid imported stops being removed from Ingress only. That means area agents will get a Duplicate rejection if they try to nominate any of those objects in the future, so they’re forever blocked for game inclusion. How frustrating this must be for the current Agent-Wayfinders in that area! Even moreso because Ingress does not display existing Lightship or Other Games Wayspots on their nomination screen, of course.
I’m a bit undecided how I feel about this, really. Ingress and Pokemon Go are very different games, and what works for one game (more free stuff, more research quests, more Kecleon) actually harms the other with in-game mechanics blocking Agent actions. I’d be all in favor of Ingress exercising their own Inclusion Schema in their game, IF (and only if) there was some mechanism to add the valid Wayspots to the game in the future without triggering an unexpected Duplicate rejection that no Ingress-only agent could ever work around or even anticipate.
Generally I don’t necessarily see the harm in added spots for Ingress.
But a few notes:
- Ingress uses proximity for inclusion so will get many more wayspots in an area added than other games (neutral to positive outcome)
- Ingress is able to disambiguate portals in their app (neutral outcome)
I don’t know how the mass imports work so some possible concerns:
- will it check for duplicates as they are brought in? If not, there will be more duplicates on an Ingress game board vs a Pokémon Go game board
- Same rational as above for out dated information — item no longer exists (as imported) or has been physically removed
- Again same as above concerns but for inaccurate location of the import — I’ve heard that the location accuracy of the mass imports may not be as good.
I think that including the mass import in Ingress would cause headaches since I think more would be inaccurate and would need to be fixed.
I would definitely be concerned about not being able to get legitimate new portals in Ingress because the nomination exists in the data base but is now barred from entering ingress. I was hoping when the courts of the world PoI showed up that once I added a picture they would sync to Ingress, similar as to how they used to show up in PoGo after a picture was added. That does not seem to be the case, so now I have a few basketball courts that will not make it into Ingress for that reason.
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I thought Foursquare imports only showed in PokemonGO, not Ingress. (IOW Niantic only paid Foursquare to use the data in one game.)
Was Türkiye an exception?
Yes. It was before the Ingress team said no to the imports
The issues with imported wayspots from foursquare are as follows
- Location accuracy is very poor.
- the photo is often not that object.
- A large number of wayspots with ineligible classifications are imported.
It is not a very good object.
But even if it is trash or rubble, many PGO trainers don’t seem to care, so somehow it seems to help improve the PGO experience.
Then the only solution is to import them into the PGO database, not the Wayfarer database.
That is the most natural solution since they are originally only displayed in PGO.
Only the Wayfarer team manager is unaware of this or ignores it even if they are aware of it.
My guess is that since India and Brazil followed, perhaps the next country to be imported will most likely be Indonesia, where the long-running PGO promotion is currently underway.
I’ve seen the Ingress Updates ENG (fan channel, not an official one) share this update.
PSA to all Agents in Türkiye!
Niantic has announced a while back that the team is working on removing Foursquare portals Türkiye and re-enabling Machina. There Portal removals are now ready and will happen in the near future.
All Foursquare Portals will be removed, even if they have been updated since they were added to the game via Title/Description edits or if they have received a picture. If you know of such Portals or have Portals with important Links, make sure to screenshot them. After the Portals have been removed you can appeal them to Niantic via the Wayfarer Forums and have them and any potentially broken Link restored.
For awareness, all the Foursquare imports to Türkiye have now been switched off according to players.
However as noted here - Four Square in Poland
Poland seems to have had theirs switched off also.
Hopefully Niantic will finally get the stupid Wayfarer app resigned to the bin and we can watch the fallout from having no way to see their next big dump on the map in Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Thailand or whichever country they decide needs M0ar.
Does seem strange and misleading to have an app that almost no one is supposed to use 
It was kind of a missed opportunity for people to be able to update stuff that isn’t part of their chosen game. I would update stuff that I cant see in Go if I had the means to. Kind of annoys me that I can’t.
Presumably that would have been helpful for these imports - they could have been updated, removed, corrected, but alot of players couldn’t see them in order to do so.
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I know on Ingress, many players did add photos and update titles/descriptions on the imports.
But they still got removed in this recent removal.
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I know the Ambassadors are ‘allowed’ to use it although they have never actually said what they are allowed to do.
As an Ambassador are you allowed to make submissions and edits through the app? @PkmnTrainerJ
Would it be reasonable to make it part of the Ambassador role that you have to do 150 app submissions/edits a week for us…The community you love soooo much.
Im not sure what the point was in dumping all these PoIs in, with no sense check or QA, letting some people edit them if they could see them in their game, and then removing them later.
Niantic can already add pokestops to Go that aren’t from Wayfarer - they do it for special events like Go Fest. Presumably its possible to do this kind of thing for other games too. That seems a better option if needed and then it doesn’t affect wayfarer or misrepresent things.
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I thought submissions via the app were lightship only, and therefore wouldn’t help anyone from the game communities? Edits seem to affect the games though. I’ve never managed to use it anyway - when I downloaded it I couldnt get past the login screen, and then I found out we’re not supposed to use it so I deleted the app
I have 35ish submissions from when it was initially released with my last one being Nov 22 2022.
Out of around 25 accepts three are on the map but don’t appear in Go.
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Wait the community loves me? Then why aren’t they all listening to me talk about Ingress every Sunday?
My wife also does not listen. 
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We listen to every word… we may not understand them… but we do listen… honest! 
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Wait the community loves me?
Of course
Then why aren’t they all listening to me talk about Ingress every Sunday?
Because you are talking about Ingress
My wife also does not listen.
Because you are talking to her about Ingress
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