Seer Medal after 2014

What is the current state of the Seer Medal? I thought it got "temporarily suspended" in that way that:

The locked medal does not appear on the scanner any longer
Portals submitted until December 2014 do still count
Portals submitted since January 2015 do NOT count

Here is an original statement from Niantic:

[...] we’re working to reduce the time needed to process the thousands of new Portal submissions and edits we receive every day. In order to help us address our growing queue of new Portal submissions, starting Dec 31, 2014 we will temporarily suspend the Seer Medal. You will maintain your current Seer Medal status, but new Portals submitted after Dec 31, 2014 will not be counted towards the Seer Medal. Portals submitted on Dec 31 and earlier will be counted.

I just got a portal approved which I submitted on March 21, 2015, which bumped my Seer Medal from 14 to 15! How is this possible?

This is additionally strange for another reason: I have 117 portal submissions between March 21 and the portal which last got approved, somewhen in the beginning of December. Thats's more than 3 months skipped.

I have 3 guesses here:

Niantic was lying and only removed the locked Medal from the scanner to remove incentives for players to submit new portals. After all their goal was to reduce the time on portal reviews.
You have to unlock the Bronze Seer Medal with portals submitted before 2015. Once unlocked you can increase the counter with any portals submitted and gain higher ranks of the Seer Medal.
The counter goes up, but no matter how high it gets it won't upgrade the medal. So now I got 14 from 2014 and 1 from 2015. If I get 35 more from 2015 I will have 50 but won't get Silver. If I get 36 more from 2014 I will have 51 and will get Silver.

Whatever it is, guess it will take some time until we really know, since I can only explain the portal submitted in March being processed by accident - and most everyone has no portals from 2015 yet approved.

ingress

Best Answer

I did receive a survey invitation from Niantic and just recently responded to it. From the looks of it, it seems that Niantic is going to put a new automated portal creation mechanism into the game which will get the portal information from their Fieldtrip application. Because it was a targeted survey I couldn't tell if they will additionally go on taking portal submissions from the players but the latest rumours were that they were going to employ a player voted portal approval system into the game.

My guess on the unanswered portal submissions is that they will eventually be processed by Niantic or put into the voting system.