This is probably for any other old timers that played Ingress before PoGo existed, possibly even before it was released.
I started having a vague memory about the policy for where wayspots should be place. Specifically, that they should be placed where the player should stand to in order to see the wayspot the same way it was in the image. And this was actually supported by making use of the geotag in the photo.
Obviously, this implies that the placement cannot be on the actual spot, and that there can only be one image (which I think was true in the early days).
One of the things I do is try to submit corrections to location. And I was suddenly wondering if that really old policy was why I find so many where the location is point-of-view.
Interesting question. I think first I’m most curious if you’re looking for historical answers strictly to answer why you discover misplaced Wayspots that don’t meet your expectations on location or other reasons in practice that justify those locations.
Also, if you’re looking for the current “best practice” in location accuracy.
I can’t immediately recall anything published other than OPR Candidate Action Guide and later answers in https://ingressama.com/
I’ve heard there was a Google Docs or chat but never saw anything in there.
Helpsite would have changed and been lost to time.
I can’t recall if the “point of discovery” was used on the Ingress community / Portal clarification page (which I was active on before the standalone Wayfarer forum).
I do want to make it clear for anyone joining the conversation that submitting in Ingress [Redacted] app (a discontinued version of Ingress) was known for being faulty and often could result in severely misplaced pins that were sometimes accepted by Niantic and the community. Of course, many newer misplaced pins are a direct result of intentional misplacement but some bugs to pop up resulting in inaccurate location pins.
If a waypoint is WAAAAY off location and needs correction then its a good thing to correct that. But if its on the POI to a degree, moving it may disrupt the entire cell and whats shown in some of the games, you may even say, remove a Gym from the map as the X poi you moved was proping up that S14 etc etc. What is the reason for this nostalgic poke into the past? Things have changed several times since then, which i see you’ve acknowledged.
If it’s way out of kilt then submit a location change. If the Coords of the Waypoint are near enough on the money then I would leave it be. You may end up making things less lucrative for those that took time to build that area up. If the poi is already accessible up close I would just leave it imo.
Location information is where the agent or trainer is, not the POI itself, because Niantic’s old UI was difficult to use and misunderstood by many Ingress agents. (In fact, I misunderstood it myself at the time).
I’ve heard that the nomination process was initially done by sending an email to Niantic with a photo and location of the POI candidate.
(I was not yet playing Ingress myself at this time, so I heard this through hearsay.)
Later, a recommendation feature was added within the Ingress application.
And there was a problem with the UI of the nomination feature built into this Ingress application.
Take a picture of the POI, enter a title and description.
The last step was to check the location.
The location information is already in at this stage.
The UI made me get the location information wrong.
Many Ingress agents, including myself, assumed that the location was the object I had photographed.
But in reality, the location was set to the location where the photo was taken.
This is why many of the old wayspots are the location you are in.
That is where the agent took the POI in the past.
Therefore, if the POI was large, such as a tower, the agent would have to move farther away in order to take a picture of the entire POI, resulting in a larger error rate.
Back when we were first able to nominate on the old redacted scanner (@BlameJamal just shivered) the location was set by placing your finger on the screen and then sliding left to activate the new portal submission process. There was no way to then to adjust the point of Interest on a map. That’s why a lot of really old points of interest can be off by a few meters to even a block or two depending on how much GPS drift there was. With the new interface it is a lot easier to make sure you’re placing it in the place that you want to place it and that it needs to be placed.
There were no nominations from late 2015 to late 2017. But once it came back in 2017, the location defaulted to where you stood (or sat in your car) - but you could move it. Like now, not everyone realizes the can and should move the pin. But then it was new to everyone.
I definitely make some location corrections where others might ask “why bother?” But for something as small as a meter, I have trouble imagining a case where I’d do so. I’ve seen objects “move” by more than a meter just because Google updated their satellite imagery, so I know that trying to move a wayspot to exactly where it appears on the satellite photo isn’t necessarily going to move it to a more accurate location.
