"A Bug in Ingress Portal Evaluation System Prevents Portals (consequently Pokestops and Gyms) from being created to areas where a portal has previously been removed"

#PokemonGO: As you are all aware, pokestops and gyms in Pokemon GO are created through the Niantic game Ingress. Ingress players are allowed to submit portal suggestions, which are then evaluated in the in-game evaluation system Operation Portal Recon (OPR). The system works fine most of the time, and new portals are quite quickly converted to stops and gyms in Pokemon GO. However, occasionally a portal submission is NEVER evaluated. We say that the portal submission was left in the limbo. Recently we found out why.Empirical evidence collected in the cities Turku and Helsinki (Finland) confirms that portal suggestions made to certain areas can only receive a FAIL evaluation or be left in the limbo. We found a correlation that if a portal has been removed by Niantic from the same S2 cell as where the new suggestion is, that suggestion will be left in the limbo, if otherwise accepted. We have a few examples of OPR agents getting portals for evaluation from those areas, but the final decision whether it should be a portal or not is never ever made. Oldest suggestions in the limbo are 4 months old while usually an evaluation is complete within a week.TL;DR Read the title. Niantic can you plz look into this.REQUEST FOR PROOF: If anyone has an example of getting a new portal/pokestop/gym submission accepted to the S2 level 14 cell where a portal has previously been removed, please share. As of yet, with hundreds of attempts in two major Finnish cities, we have no such case that I know of. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2Cd4eva