Mass changes to portal coordinates by tiny increments
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Multiple users have observed that portals have changed by ±0.000001 latitude/longitude in the last 48 hours. This has been reported in multiple countries globally.
Examples:
- "Kanalen" was moved from 60.778883,9.9689 to 60.778882,9.9689
- "Holmvassdammen turskilt" was moved from 60.736472,9.911927 to 60.736471,9.911927
- "Hulme court Wall Art" was moved from -32.044750,115.811986 to -32.044751,115.811987
- "Swan River Dot Mural" was moved from -32.043374,115.81371 to -32.043375,115.81371
- "Pitman Park" was moved from -32.041533,115.814412 to -32.041533,115.814413
The changes in location always seem to be in a southwards or eastwards direction.
The changes are not rare/isolated. In some areas the mass changes have affected thousands of portals.
Wayfarer Ambassadors already raised this with the Niantic Wayfarer team. They have confirmed that the changes were not a result of any changes on a Wayfarer end. The Wayspots detailed we shared have not had any changes to their location details since the Wayspots were originally created. This indicates that the issue is with Ingress ingestion process, i.e. possibly how the lat/lng is being rounded.
The reason why this is an issue is because it has gameplay impacts on Ingress. The movements did not break links or fields, but the portal itself has moved. For example, the screenshot below shows a portal which was moved south by 0.000001 degrees latitude (~10 cm) and is not inside its own field and cannot be linked to. (Note: This map is zoomed in well beyond the normal zoom limits of the default Intel map; Users in these cases cannot visually see why they cannot link to portals using the game app or Intel website.)
Comments
Can confirm. It's difficult to spot, but (some) portals have been moved by the same ~11cm and in the same direction (directly south).
This would also explain why some agents are reporting linkability issues while trying to link to specific portals.
Same as this issue. https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/21527/unable-to-create-links-to-portals-from-one-direction-after-portal-move-report/p1?new=1
Why not just move the links to the new portal location?
For the value to increase by 0.000001 would be a normal rounding calculation where the 7th decimal place value of 5 or above. This is 11.1 cm movement. And that movement could easily mean non moved portals are now in the way for links.
But the decrease of 0.000001 ... I've seen this is systems that don't do odd values. For example, on a very old version of MS-DOS, file creation time was held 2s, not 1s.
But that was due to very limited memory and disk space and probably very very hard to find on anything in the last 23 years as the Y2K issue required a lot of reworking to be done.
Another way data can be made different is if the data is truncated so the 7th decimal place is not sent, so if it is then sent and causes rounding, only an increment of the 6th decimal place is feasible. I can't see any reason for the decrement of the 6th decimal place unless there has been a series of bugs in getting the data from source to destination. The bugs could be new so the recent movement is wrong. The bugs could be old and so the movement is right.
Will have to wait and see what we are told.
http://wiki.gis.com/wiki/index.php/Decimal_degrees gives good information about what each value and decimal places mean at the equator. As you move further away from the equator, the difference decreases.
NIA why you gotta break everything that's working just fine? You broke ugprades in Wayfarer and now you broke this. Really interesting to know how you managed this, did some dunce change the floor/ceil function and just go "Well let's just move this into production, it's weekend, what could possibly go wrong?" or how do things like this happen? Asking as a professional software architect with 25 years of working experience.
I tried on two different days to make some fields and couldn't. All of the requirements for making a link seemed to be met, but the game wouldn't let me do it. It was frustrating at first, until I started hearing about portal moves in local chats. Eventually I gave up, recycled the keys, and will find something else to do while waiting.
This happened to me while trying to layer a field a couple days ago. The bugged anchor I failed to link to was around a quarter mile away. But yesterday it happened again, to two portals that were less than 100 feet from each other.
The simple solution would be to flip it blue and break the old links. But I have no certainty whether I can link them back, as I don't know how many other portals are effected by this mess.
With the absolute lack of response from NIA, I wouldn't be surprised if their attitude was for the player base to sort the issues out themselves, aka attacking and breaking links, or just stop playing and let things fall into decay, breaking the links in time.
But yeah let's add new premium shop items and feature promos while 1/2 of the game elements is dead.
In my city of 2-3 thousand Portals, 160+ were broken by this change. Several of these have been captured for a long time and support a bunch of fields, but now I can't use any of them. This is incredibly frustrating and I hope NIA can somehow fix this without breaking both new and old links
Same problems for me. Drove miles yesterday and the day before in order to make some links and fields but it was impossible. I'd checked feasibility on the Intel map before setting out and rechecked on returning - no reason why the links couldn't be made. Then I found this thread. Am I p*ss*d? Doesn't even begin to describe my feelings. In my area certain players mult-account, account-share, spoof and utilize recharging bots. Niantic do nothing. Now a legitimate player can't play while following all the rules. Will be cancelling my subscription.
Programming tips for Niantic:
(1) Address the carelessness of whatever project did this. (2) Testing should have caught it before going live. (3) Even vanilla diagnostics should have pointed this out on installation. (4) Daily stats should have shown it.
KEEP COUNTERS of how many things change each day (new portals and pictures, changed location and text). Learn what's average, and how the numbers are trending. Then, if you suddenly have a 10000x increase in any one thing, or if something drops to nearly zero - INVESTIGATE!
As of a few moments ago, this should be resolved. Scanner/Intel refreshes may be necessary to notice the fixes.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention!
Close, but not quite. I have an example where the portal moved, it was broken, has moved back, but not quite enough.
Couch Portal: https://intel.ingress.com/?pll=32.780033,-96.793815
Target Portal: https://intel.ingress.com/?pll=32.777034,-96.788885
Can't link those, as it crosses links from this portal: https://intel.ingress.com/?pll=32.777797,-96.790138
All those links/fields you see were created before the moves over the weekend, and my couch was also killed before those moves. This is a standard small microfield zone, takes me 1h20m to relink it in the morning, and I time it such that I have coffee from home, and get it all done just as the coffee shop at the target zone opens at 7.
Why were all these portals moved? Of course a valid move of a portal should also change links, but why move so many portals? That's the bug that needs to be addressed.
A change a while ago was made such that links do not move with the portals because moving links would cause cross linking of existing links. Prior to that, a change was made to stop links from being removed when a portal moved.
Both of these things were because malicious editors were using portal movements to destroy fields or blockers by putting in small adjustments that Wayfarer users didn't realize would mean the portal was shifted into a damaging location.
We are why we can't have nice things.
Can anyone confirm if this problem is actually fixed? I still see the portals from the first post in their "new" coordinates (and same with other portals in my city, even these have been neutralized and recaptured and nothing has changed). I've tried opening Intel on new devices and browsers and nothing, I need to know if the portals have really been returned to their original coordinates in case I have to clean up something else on my end to see these changes.
The fix was to move all misaligned links to the new location. Portals were not moved back.