The Oddish

Smog Editor loses comma

Setsuna has no idea where the second-most important punctuation mark has gone since its last use in Issue #27 causing mass confusion among readers and writers alike. "Without commas to break up sentences I have no idea how people are going to keep up with the pace of the articles or know if they meant "Dialga and Palkia" or referring to the spacetime-bending pair as a whole."

The comma just disappeared from the keyboards of anyone even loosely linked to Smogon's e-zine instead being replaced by its deceptively dissimilar cousin the apostrophe. "That's the most annoying thing about it—the symbol looks no different on my keyboard it's just in the wrong position when it appears on screen." Not everyone is worried about the disappearance however. An anonymous user contacting the Oddish through IRC reveled in the lack of commas. "Good riddance. I'm sick of The Smog reading like the script for that guy from Malcolm in the Middle. I don't have the time to read at the speed of a fourth-grader."

In its absence writers will be forced to come up with more creative ways of breaking up long sentences like interspersing them with small pictures or using the occasional period. As a last resort they might even have to learn how to appropriately use the semicolon if the comma doesn't turn up soon.

Badges scrapped for one giant badge

Smogon's long-standing system for recognizing contributions to the website and community is to be phased out for a single badge. Currently, users receive a badge corresponding to a significant contribution to the site, through research, art, cronyism, or threatening to DDoS Showdown!. It means people can sit back and do nothing after they've received their badge—and doesn't differentiate between someone who wrote a couple analyses from the guy who spell-checked the entire strategy dex. The new super-badge will start off small, and then grow as the user contributes more, until the badge becomes so large that they can't read the forum at all, let alone post on it. Whether this will exceed the avatar size limit remains uncertain, though if it does the more industrious members will soon become the most hated, unless the badge is in fact a funny gif or a picture of a drugged-up woman pole-dancing around a parking meter.

Understandably, there has been an outcry against the move, just like whenever anyone suggests anything here. shade, a forum's most recently appointed moderator, is vehement against it. "It's not fair on people who basically dick around on the forums, like myself. At least before I could shit out a few articles for the Smog, get my badge and sit back. Now that I have to be continually contributing, I'm screwed."

ADV revamps go completely unnoticed

The revisions to Smogon's ADV analyses have been largely ignored by the community, which is too busy jizzing itself over what is obviously Mewthree (but will just as obviously be named something else just to spite fans) in the wake of X&Y spoilers.

Analyses for ADV OU Pokémon underwent a revamp in order to make them more relevant to the current metagame, which has come to a complete standstill and as such made it the perfect time to overhaul them once and for all. In addition to removing mention of stupid things like Focus Punch Regice that people only use once they get bored of the real metagame, the style was brought more in line with the thorough (read: tl;dr) approach seen from DPP onwards, whose articles tend to have more words than their authors' dissertations.

Once Gen 3 has been completed, veterans with nothing better to do will surely focus more on RBY and GSC, conceivably reinventing the wheel too while they're at it, for all the things that they're going to be able to write that won't be about Snorlax. kd24, the main man behind the project, denied that he was doing it from sheer boredom or unemployment. "Well excuse me for wanting to drum up interest in games that lasted for more than 20 turns. I miss the days when Pokémon took forever to faint and battling was more about endurance than the quick wham-bam it is now."

User's sixth Smog article keeps getting pushed back

A regular contributor to The Smog has had his sixth article mothballed for the third issue running, fueling fears that the staff are conspiring against his attempts at earning his first badge.

The user, who requested anonymity despite it being obvious who they are, was told that their latest piece of work failed to meet the web-zine's standards, despite it having no trouble accepting articles that stretch a type-effectiveness chart into 500 words or adopt the same mentality Smogon does towards jokes: taking a good idea and sucking every last drop of novelty from it.

Anyone who gets six of their articles published in The Smog automatically earns a Contributor to Smogon Media badge, making it a straightforward way to earn one, compared to the nebulous process of getting mods or waiting until the new generation of Pokémon to carry out research.

Setsuna explained that he was fully aware of the situation. "We are aware of this discrepancy in obtaining badges and are working to ensure that getting a Smog Contributor badge is as much of a toss-up as it is for all the others."