History

Ingress Alerts, or IGA, was started in 2015 because one frog was just annoyed that by the time alerts came in, it was usually too late to save a portal. The game is already stacked against defence, deliberately to keep the game fluid, but there's a big difference between it being hard to defend, and missing the battle entirely.

So, in an attempt to improve things for frogs, IGA was created. It was originally designed to just get copies of the emailed Ingress attack emails, and to forward them back to the player if they were about portals they were interested in. If multiple people all get the same alert email forwarded to IGA, then everyone who is interested in a portal gets the alert at the speed of the fastest email that is received, not the speed of just their own alert.

Then we had the idea of making groups of portals. That'd be cool, because then you only get one alert when your farm is attacked, not a hundred of them. That makes emails much more managable.

Then someone had the bright idea of checking intel, and seeing what benefits we could get there. That led to the creation of the IGA intel monitor browser extension, which watches the messages as they come in, and looks for attack information on your favourite portals. This means that we can often even beat the regular Ingress emails to alerting you about an attack. Our emails aren't just more targeted with this, they can be much faster.

Of course, with this information, we found some new things we could keep track of. We've made sure to try and keep within the spirit of the game rules, so you won't get any data that you can't get by keeping a really detailed spreadsheet at home, but we tried to make tools which you might find useful.

Statement of Intent

While IGA may share some similarities with other Ingress data tools, there are also significant differences. IGA will never - ever - be turned into a tool for guardian hunting or people stalking. Its primary use is always going to be sharing current realtime information between players, visualising current data in new ways, and showing historical data about only yourself for guardians and uniques.

The only area which may cause some concern is player histories, which are deliberately made vague over a longer period of time, specifically so that you can never use it to "track" someone to find their home portals and/or workplaces. Significant thought was put in to make sure that the tools would be useful but would respect privacy as much as possible. IGA will remain a tool which, while we may sail a little over the line of the TOS, will never break the spirit of the rules for the Ingress game.