Ingress doesn't stop when you stop playing. Other players are out hunting for your portals, and they'll kill them when you're having lunch, sleeping, or in the shower. They don't care, they just want your portals.
Ingress offers an alerting email system. It's fine as far as it goes, but it suffers from a few tiny problems.
1) There is no way of filtering the warnings to tell it to alert you about your vitally important guardian portal, but not some random portal you took on the way home from work yesterday. You'll get inundated with emails, and so you'll never bother to read them.
2) The emails that Ingress sends you are only triggered when a resonator or a mod are destroyed. By the time you get the email, there's a fair chance that the portal is already dead.
IGA offers you several ways to help improve these problems.
You can make sure you don't keep getting warned about attacks in progress. There's nothing more annoying when you're defending your portal, than to have your email beeping every 30 seconds to let you know the portal is under attack. With our alerting system, you simply say how often you want alerts to be sent to you.
If you're not interested in knowing about attacks on a portal, then don't request alerts on it, and we'll never email you any warnings about it.
So how do we do this? Simply, you forward the alert emails you receive from Ingress to us, and we'll filter them and send you warnings about the portals you're interested in.
Our quicker warnings system involves a plugin to your web browser, which will keep an eye on the intel map for you, and send you an alert email when your portals are under attack. As you can often get messages on intel quite some time before the alert email comes in, this may allow you to get quicker warnings.
The plugin is a simple install, nothing complex. Once you've installed it, it just works in the background to send us the information about what's going on, and to let us send you alerts.
We discovered, along the way, that with the information we were being sent, we could offer you a number of extra benefits. This is sortof an enticement to use our service.
As we get information about portals under attack, and about portals being captured, we can get a good idea as to who owns which portal. This means we can tell you which portals are unique captures for you.
Obviously we only know about them if we see them captured, or an alert email tells us who owns them, so it isn't a definitive list. It will have gaps, it'll not know about anything that happened before we started up, or that we weren't told about. It can tell you if a portal is definitely not a unique capture for you.
User Levels
There's always bickering in areas where both sides are fighting for a contested city. Both sides will claim that the other one outnumbers them, and that their side has to fight harder, and are the underdogs.
As we get information about both sides, we can log how many active users are on each side in a given area. This will mean we can tell you which side is really the underdog. If the frogs are the underdogs, we can use this data to show the smurfs just how hard we're fighting. If they're the underdogs, well, let's keep it to ourselves, huh...
Competitions
IGA provides a way for frogs around the world to set up competitions for their local groups. You can set up competitions with various goals, and offer prizes to the winner.
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