Hello, this wayspot has been a gym in Pokemon Go for many years. However it recently got slightly moved into a neighbouring L17 cell, and as a result it has been demoted from a gym to a pokestop. Given that the new position is even further away from the object itself, can the portal be restored into its original position and most importantly can it be upgraded back to a gym?? (without affecting any of the other wayspots)
The community is very disappointed with the current status.
Thank you.
I tried to figure out what has happened here. Checking Campfire, it looks like there are three gyms in the L14 not counting that one, which is the max that can be created through Wayfarer:
Lakeside Fountain
Keighton Auditorium
Engineering and Science Learning Centre
I think that the edit made the status recalculate, and even if it were returned to the position on the north side of the line, there are three gyms already, so it won’t go back to gym status.
I know there can be a delay in what Campfire shows. Is that gym list accurate?
Yes it is accurate, sadly you are completely right. we don’t know how the Chimney got moved, whether it was a deliberate sabotage, or someone’s old edit requests which eventually got through the system. I know we had a precarious situation with 4 gyms and something like this was due to happen (even just by a triggered sync without any move) but I think it remains important that the ability to withdraw old edit requests which are already in voting gets added to Wayfarer, it could help preventing situations like these.
I am so sorry this happened, and completely agree with needing to be able to withdraw in voting old edits!
Thank you for sharing this with us. I had not seen a gym change status before unless edited across an L14 boundary.
Got a response from Wayfarer Help Chat. They have now restored the correct location but it seems indeed we have no hope of getting the Gym back… (unless another of the three existing gyms gets somehow sacrificed). This is very disappointing as the Chimney should have never been moved away from its correct location in the first place!
I can appreciate it might be disappointing, but at the same time, the fourth gym shouldn’t have been able to exist in the first place. It only existed due to a flaw in the system, which has since been fixed, so you can’t really complain too much about it being demoted.
Again, thank you for sharing this information. An existing fourth gym in an L14 is not something I run into often.
I know, i have explained this to my local community already. Speaking with some early days Ingress users, this happened because the Lakeside Fountain gym was created in a neighbouring S14 cell and then moved to its current location in the cell where Chimney and the other gyms already existed. Back in the day, apparently moving gyms would not alter their status (which led to spectacular abuse in some locations), so we were left with 4 gyms in this cell, until the current development. I agree, it is more of a nostalgic sentiment than an actual complaint, because things are in fact running as intended.
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I have seen this happen a few times, it seems to happen when even a slight edit gets made to a PoI, it then recalculates the gym set up and if there is too many gyms it will get demoted. This only seems to happen if the edit is to a current gym/stop. Recently had a pokestop locally get updated with a new photo. It was in an L17 with another stop already, the new photo made the stop dissappear, as it recalculated the inclusion rules.
I’d think this is to battle abuse.
Lol
In my country, I also encountered similar situation, but the main reason was not that the bug in the past caused 4 gyms, but because the Sponsor’s too many Gyms, causing five or six or even more gyms in one L14 cell, and then as long as some random guy makes a random edit, the unlucky non-sponsor gym will be demoted to Pokestop out of thin air. I think Niantic has probably never thought about the issue of sponsor gyms exceeding the upper limit.
That seems unfair!
