OPR: Reviewer Help and Guidelines

So you have reached level 12 as an Ingress agent and now you want to be part of OPR?
Ok, OPR can be found here. Complete the basic training then let’s talk how to use it.

Before we start i just want to state a few things. First off, we are lucky that Niantic are so short staffed that they have outsourced this to us. It is a privilege that can be taken away from us and we will be back to waiting months to years for portals to be reviewed.
There are 2 rules to follow before starting.

1) Leave your faction at the door.
2) Don’t be a dick.

The main aim of this article to to get everyone on the same page so that portal candidates can be Judged fairly and properly. If everyone follows the same rules then the whole OPR experience should greatly improve.
So with that in mind let’s start.

OPR Set Up

Once you have completed the basic training you should click your profile photo in the top right and go to ‘Settings’

In this area we are going to set up your home and bonus locations. A little known secret is that there are actually 3 locations. Where you are/GPS location, Home location (settable) and Bonus location (settable).
Setting your home location to your home town is a waste of a location.
From what i can gather, the range of a location is from 0 to 200/300KM so you will want to place a location marker 100 – 200KM away from your home and the bonus location even further away.
***(If you want to do me a favour then setting your bonus to the middle of Scotland would be a huge help!)***

Now that you have picked a spread of locations you should have a wide variety of portals to review.

Judgement

If you have submitted portals before then you should have an idea of what to expect here.
Again i’d like to reiterate rules 1 and 2.

1) Leave your faction at the door.
2) Don’t be a dick.

Part of the problem currently with OPR is that agents are not following the Guidelines and/or are judging portals with faction bias in mind because they want to allow portals in their own faction area and deny portals to the enemy faction areas. Doing this breaks the system and will ultimately lead to OPR being removed from players because they are being dicks.

Once in to OPR you will be presented with a portal to Judge. This is random based on your locations.

If you have ever submitted a portal yourself you will get the usual submitted information such as the Title, Description and Location.

It’s as simple as 1Star = NO, 3Stars = Probably, and 5Stars = Definitely
You get 20 minutes before a review times out so take your time and give the portal as much reviewing respect as you would expect your own submissions to get.

Should this be a portal?
Niantic originally gave very vague guidelines as to what is a good candidate.
They later released THIS which should be your baseline for Judgement.
Since Niantic are terrible at being clear we also have the constantly updated Peardrop Criteria for candidates. (This has most of the info that will be helpful from suggested ratings to the Ask me Anything Questions and Answers for most submission and OPR related issues)
As well as the basic guidance above it is always handy to start a cross faction chat group to discuss potential candidates before submitting them. This has worked very well so far for the one I am in as Factions are left at the door and the people in the group are all sensible.
NOTE: Playparks are meant to be 5Star. I personally disagree with this but Niantic says 5Star so we need to just suck it up and approve them.

Title
For the title you are rating both the picture quality and the quality/appropriateness of the title given.
The photograph should be a clear indication of the candidate. Photographs with people in the way or rogue thumbs or framed by car interior from agents being lazy taking photos from inside cars should be scored low (1 or 2 stars).
The Title should accurately describe the candidate with bonus points for clever and witty title given. Titles with profanity or referencing agent names or real agent names should be 1Star.

Description
Some portal candidates are obvious and only require a few words of description. If a portal candidate has a long and believable description you can very likely verify it with a quick google. If the candidate has a cool story rate it high. If the story is lies rate it low. A good description/story is sometimes what makes a mediocre candidate portal worthy.

Is it historically or culturally significant?/Is it visually unique?
This part is the common sense judgement call. Remember that some areas have valid candidates that might not look much due to poverty or upkeep. Try to take factors such as whether the candidate is rural or in an area with no portals when being lenient.

Location
Location is probably the biggest issue in the whole of Submission/OPR. In many places Streetview is out of date or streetview isn’t available. In a lot of cases the Skyview (on the left there) is enough to make an educated guess. Agents can upload photospheres but these can take a while to appear.
My main advice on location for OPR agents is to use some common sense and trust. For example: in the above submission you can see from the skyview and the existing portals (on the right) that this is part of a nature trail and location should be given benefit of doubt. Especially since the agent stated in the description that they have double checked the location.
Candidates that are on streetview but you can’t see them may be a victim of the gps location issue when submitting where it sets the marker up to 200 feet in any direction. Make a token effort to find the candidate and correct the location by clicking [suggest new location] and adjusting the location pin. If you can’t find the candidate on the available streetview try the skyview to see if it is “maybe” there or a 1Star unlikely to be there.
If the portal is a duplicate submission you can select the existing portal on the right hand side and mark it as a duplicate.

Done
Click submit and you are done. If submit is greyed out it means you haven’t rated all sections yet.

I previously wrote an article for agents submitting portals to improve the quality of candidates that OPR agents will have to deal with but agents are human and will try to submit crap and will have issues with the location etc. Please share both this post and the one for submitting candidates to your local agents to help improve the over all process. If everyone sings from the same hymn sheet the whole thing will be much better.

Remember to Join The Resistance! 🙂

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