Welcome to a status update about what’s happening at portal reviewing HQ… Or at least what the stats tells us is happening… As there are no previous entries here, this one will be quite detailed.

This Update is based on data collected by IPST Stats. Those stats are a Snapshot based from 2015-08-13 using info from about 11360 portals. Let’s dive straight into the stats!

First let me introduce you to this graph that shows the date the portal was submitted in relation to days in queue before being reviewed. Looking at this graph we can see that in early 2014, Niantic had a two queue system, one with around 100 days waiting time and one with around 60.

Around May 2014 those two queues little by little, over a month, became one with around 100-130 days in Queue, it appears that something went wrong here because forgotten submissions start to become a thing.

Niantic seem to have made this conclusion as well because somewhere around June 2014 they tried to reintroduce the two queue system, which seems to have failed with waiting times up to 240 days for the top queue and the bottom queue acting as the May-June queue raising from 130 days in Queue to 200 days in Queue before Niantic seemingly abandons this system once again (note: this is speculation and conjecture based on the data).

Around October 2014 the queues unify once again, and it seems this has been the pattern until January 2015 with around 210 days in Queue.

Since October there has been an increase in “out of queue” reviews (portals being reviewed long before the queue would say they’re due). Since the beginning of 2014 there have been almost instant reviews for a minority of the submissions (some possibly due to #portalgem submissions and other exceptions). Since October there are also those which fall between the “normal” queue time and instant approval. The queue is currently processing Jan 2015, and, since that date, it appears there is only one review process.

Yellow: no reviews between instant and the queue, Black: out of queue reviews

So what about forgotten submissions…

The oldest portal in IPST Stats records that hasn’t yet been reviewed is from 5th July 2013 but I would say every portal that has been in the queue more than 300 days is forgotten, and that’s around 6% of all submissions. The review that took the longest time took 261 days (it was rejected).

So, about the portals which have actually been reviewed… Let me introduce you to these two charts:

(following stats is based on a database including 11841 portals)

The first one tells us that ~30% of all submissions are accepted, ~32% rejected and ~38% are still pending.

The most common reason for a reject is that the portal “does not meet portal criteria” ~77% of all rejects, ~15% is duplicates or too close to other portals, ~8% is too close to another portal, and 0.1% are “other” reasons.

Kudos to IPST for creating the app that made this possible.

Guest Writer: Svante Bengtson