"Pokestop Nominations have been in Beta for a year now"

#PokemonGO: It's been over a year since Niantic announced beta Pokestop Nominations for Brazil and South Korea. Since then 30 more countries have been added, with Turkey being the latest one. When first hearing about Pokestop Nominations I was so hyped. My town has a decent amount of stops and gyms for its size, but there are also so many playgrounds, information signs, historical landmarks that could easily become stops and would increase the player experience here massively. The only thing I was worried about back then, is that it would come before I would hit level 40 and therefore still couldn't nominate stops.Now we're a year further, my country doesn't have Pokestop Nominations yet and I'm only half a million XP away from hitting level 40. Where I thought that I had to wait a long time to nominate pokestops because I would not be level 40 yet, it turned out to be the complete opposite.The worst part is not even that my country doesn't have it yet, but for the countries that do it doesn't work properly. All I ever hear from other countries is how terrible the experience is, players have to wait weeks if not months for their request to get, if lucky, accepted. And the weirdest thing about all of it is that everyone knows where to problem lies: there aren't enough reviewers. Currently only Ingress players who are level 12 or higher can review POI's (points of interest) and decide whether they become a landmark in one of Niantic's games or not, which is only a fraction of all players among all of Niantic's games. Especially for countries that are not so densely populated in most areas (most Latin American countries that have access to Pokestop nominations right now) the chances of there being a level 12 Ingress player around to review your nomination is almost 0. I get that Niantic can't just throw new stuff our way all the time but come one, Pokestop nominations have been in beta for a year and Niantic has come with 0 solutions.Then there is the problem with having duplicate nominations. There is no way for players to know if they're going to nominate a POI that has already been nominated, or already is a portal in Ingress but due to cell rules won't show up in Pokemon GO. It is simple math, if the same POI gets nominated 7 times, it takes 7 times longer for other POI's to get reviewed.Now I think that it would be unfair for me to just rant about Niantic's way of handling this without giving any solutions myself, and even though I find them not too hard to come up with, here are some from me and the community:Simply give certain Pokemon GO players access to the OPR system. The restrictions are up to Niantic, but it could for example be Level 40 players with a certain amount of golden medals, or players that have X0+ million XP. Whatever it is, it should only give access to experienced enough players but not to a too small group as well.Niantic should launch an app kind of similar to OSM, where everyone that passes a test can submit POI's. After all Niantic is aiming for the most complete POI database as possible, so an app dedicated to this sole purpose is in my eyes only beneficial for them. People can for example become reviewers when they have a certain amount of POI's accepted. All POI's will just be on a map like OSM or Google maps, and new POI's can be synched into Niantic's other games afterwards. This new map with all POI's can in my eyes also be used by players and Niantic to prevent duplicate nominations.I'm sorry for this long post but I really wanted to write this because it's a very promising feature that I've been waiting for for so long, and yet it still seems very far away. It just seems so cool to me to catch some Pokemons, find a cool new POI I've never seen before and help it make into the game. Please let me know if I've broken any rules by accident, spreading wrong information or when something is unclear. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2I7O9g2