Idea: Highlight Portals with Generic Images (i.e. missing photo)

[tb52s7]

For infastructure maintenance. Some people like to "fix" their city.

[jonatkins]

Sounds like a great idea for a highlither plugin

[yoshimo]

I think one could extend that kind of fixme highlighter with Portals that are less than x metres from each other , last Niantic maintenance moved a lot of portals in my city on top of each other and those portals that have certain certain "generic" substrings in their name as "Unknown" "without title" and so on, that result from the old submit by e-mail option where people didn't enter a good title.

[vita10gy]

Is there anything else we could add to this that would help the infrastructure?

Red could mean needs picture, and would be the big one. Maybe we could highlight no description? Are there any ones titled "untitled" or anything like that?

[tb52s7]

highlight portals with multiple photos. for example, we have an agent around here who likes to submit portals at night, so multiple photos means somebody didn't like the original photo enough to create another, in which case that agent would want the others to "thumbs up" the photo. this could be accomplished in a single "highlight portals with anomalous photos" (or some other name which will probably be much better) by using different colors to differentiate photo status.

[tb52s7]

Ah yes, "Highlight Photo Status" as the name of the plugin. One photo is transparent, zero photos is red, and multiple photos could be either a different color, or a gradient for increasing number of photos.

[vita10gy]

Red no photo; Orange multiple photos, which might mean the original is crappy; Yellow - no description or bad title (to the extent we could detect that anyway)

[jonatkins]

I'm not sure it's worth highlighting portals with no description - many portals don't need them. But agree on the rest - no photo, multiple photos, bad titles.

The only bad title I've seen so far is [Untitled]. Does anyone know of any more cases?

[vita10gy]

I've seen [Untitled] as well.

[gabrielsjoberg]

I was planning on making a plugin to list portals with filters for various "bad" attributes: missing photo, missing title, and missing description. The plugin would scan through all visible portals and display a list matching the selected filters.

As for bad titles, "[Untitled]" is one, but we could also flag potential misspellings using a dictionary approach and/or some light natural language checks (I've seen portals with XML entities in them even in the scanner). Some titles are also too long for display, especially when labelled with multiple pieces of information. Many of these titles can be improved by using a shorter name or common abbreviations.

I would make the plugin extensible, so I could add in more filters as people come up with new ways to improve portals. I could probably even add a datastore so you could mark portals as "ignored" because you don't wish to change them or see them in the list.

Anyone interested in me taking this approach?

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Possible filters:

• No title
• No description
• No photo
• Multiple photos
• Title/description contains misspellings
• Title/description comes from an external source (such as Panaramio), which are often bad
• Title too long/short
• Title/description grammar issues (all caps, all lowercase, etc.)
• No votes
• Portals with duplicate names (with heuristics and possibly limited to a configurable distance)

Any others?

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• Sample misspelling that would be caught by dictionary:
• Sample unescaped XML:

[jonatkins]

I think I prefer the highlighter approach to this - seeing the portals positioned on the map seems more useful than a list.

Also, some other ideas for names that can be flagged for review. XML/HTML style entities, as you mention, is one. Also rather generic titles could be worth highlighting - e.g "Statue", "Sculpture", "Church", "Post Office".

[yoshimo]

What about those portals that are within 10-15m of each other or even less? Those are difficult or often impossible to click seperate when they literally stack on top of each other. If IITC could highlight them, more people would report these inaccessible or duplicate portals and we get rid of them

[vita10gy]

That might be a lot of processing.