"Niantic is beginning to work through their massive POI submission backlog with a new invite-only tool for high-level Ingress agents"

#PokemonGO: Progress! TechCrunch today revealed that Niantic is beginning testing on a tool called Portal Recon that aims to help Niantic work through its backlog of potential portal locations.It's prioritizing portals that have already been submitted (which had previously been stated to be 24 million potential portal locations).Only level 16 Ingress players are invited at the start, and the system has a number of checks in place to devalue information from trolls/manipulators. They appear to be playing it safe, and attempting to prevent the system from being manipulated through a combination of using trusted people and algorithmic balances. Here's what TechCrunch shared:In the initial closed beta rollout, the new hub will work in San Francisco and TokyoThe tool will initially only be invite-only, only open to Ingress players who’ve reached L16 — the highest level in the game. Getting there requires a helluva lot of time and dedication, but also suggests you know what a portal should be like.Players will ultimately be able to give feedback on potential portals in two places: the area they play most, and one other location of their choice that they have local knowledge of — be it their childhood hometown or a place they visit oftenPlayers give feedback on multiple factors — the photo, the Portal’s name, whether or not it’s a duplicate, etc. It’s not a straight up yes/no vote.They’ll be starting with Niantic’s existing backlog firstBehind the scenes, the hub weighs each player’s feedback based on how good they seem to be at ranking portalsOnce a portal gets enough positive feedback and an algorithm gives it the greenlight, the portal goes live in-game. If it’s working correctly, there’s no human intervention required on Niantic’s side.TC asked John Hanke when they would be expanding the program outside of the Ingress HQ's major target cities:“It will be very soon.” he said via phone, “I’m really interested in other places; Brazil’s a country I’m interested in launching in sooner rather than later. There’s not as many locations there as we’d like to see, for both Ingress and Pokemon Go. We don’t have a prefixed timeline, but we’ll do it as soon as we get comfortable.”Though it takes years to become a L16 Ingress player, it wouldn't surprise me if they allowed more and more players to contribute data over time. They're taking data quality very seriously, but their algorithms to devalue low-quality info are likely going to be tuned as they grow.This is good news for rural players of Pokemon GO, and those in countries where POI data is missing/scarce!Niantic has also tweeted it: https://twitter.com/NianticLabs/status/799313696346476544Here's TechCrunch's photo of the tool in action: http://ift.tt/2eKfIj1 via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2g2DoNy