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it would be really funny to go """undercover""" on the official mons forums and just like start posting casually, joining in on discussions etc under the same name / names i use here and see how long it takes for people to realize i'm an evil toxic tryhard who encourages not winning with low tier cringe mons
A new user is having gripes with the filter system, having joined 5 days ago. Notably the word "fairy", known for being a Pokemon type and also homophobic slur dating to the 1920s, is confirmed to be on the blacklist that sentences your post into the approval queue.
So far their posts seem to have made it though and I can see why they may have inevitably hit some other filtered words.
A new user is having gripes with the filter system, having joined 5 days ago. Notably the word "fairy", known for being a Pokemon type and also homophobic slur dating to the 1920s, is confirmed to be on the blacklist that sentences your post into the approval queue.
Unfortunately this thread is about the Official Pokemon Community Forums and not Smogon if you read beyond the title. Try asking in the Smogon Simple Questions Thread instead.
The website itself makes just as little sense with no real sense of following the idea of a Pokemon that matches your birthday date. Bulbasaur (#001) and Snorlax (#143) sure are great birthdays to have.
Also apparently there's an off by one error in the whole thing.
Now there haven't actually been too much discussion of the recent Z-A leaks/datamines to comment on topically, but this whole incident seems to have stemmed from MajorBrendan's infamous hatred of leakers and leak culture from this other thread from just late September: https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/20253/mega-evolutions-finalized/p1
The official Pokemon.com community forums have added yet another new type of post block called the "Toggle Block". This seems to have been added to Vanilla Forums just last month.
As seen here, it seems to add a parameter to URLs that can track toggles to be opened based on their names.
In practice, this feature is a close parallel to the spoiler/hide tag on Smogon/Xenforo. Despite the Pokemon forums also having a similar spoiler tag, this lets you write in custom text in the heading while their spoiler tag is always forced to show "SPOILER WARNING". The toggle block also has a smooth opening animation while the spoiler block just instantly displays the content inside.
The official Pokemon.com community forums have added yet another new type of post block called the "Toggle Block". This seems to have been added to Vanilla Forums just last month.
In practice, this feature is a close parallel to the spoiler/hide tag on Smogon/Xenforo. Despite the Pokemon forums also having a similar spoiler tag, this lets you write in custom text in the heading while their spoiler tag is always forced to show "SPOILER WARNING". The toggle block also has a smooth opening animation while the spoiler block just instantly displays the content inside.
The button colours can also be swapped, and custom text can be displayed.
In other official Pokemon.com community forums meta news, I came across a mysterious poll thread made by "testerbug78", a seemingly regular Member. However, poll posting privileges were taken away from regular users around July 2025.
Additionally, many of the "voters" on this "poll" are from accounts that haven't logged in since 2022, implying that the mods/admins/testers can rig their own poll results. https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/profile/Ben-the-III
Unfortunately soon after I bumped the thread, it was taken down/moved and now yields a permission problem.
Despite not being able to view the thread itself, I managed to figure out some things about it:
By pasting the thread URL into a post, we can see the content of the thread is "tester".
And by searching for "test" in the search results and filtering by polls, we can tell that this glitch thread is also of the Poll type, as well as a few other test accounts/polls posted in the meantime.
I hope this is a sign that the mods are working on bringing polls back and trying to stabilize them, as there was a common bug before where the poll options wouldn't initialize on threads and no one could vote or see them.
Meanwhile the Mega Malamar thread has reached over 1000 posts and I decided to actually open it. It seems to have devolved into roleplaying/battling by posts and has little to do with Malamar, which is probably for the better.
Here are some out of context snippets that make about as much sense in context:
truthfully, it's kind of wild seeing how different the social ecosystems are between two popular unrelated pokemon forums on the internet. it's the kind of thing that reminds me that the internet is both a lot smaller and a lot bigger than one might think
The page is populated with various charts and scorecards that provide analytics data on the individual user's contributions and engagement in your community, including:
Keep the following important notes in mind regarding analytics anonymization:
Anonymization is not retroactive. When enabled, data anonymization will occur from that point forward.
All user activity is still tracked, even if you choose to anonymize analytics data; it will simply no longer be tied to a user's user name or user ID. In other words, you'll still be able to report on engagement metrics but lose the specificity of knowing who is performing the activity.
Visits are a "fuzzy statistic" that can't ever be 100% accurate because we have no way of knowing whether a person is actively using their device. With that said, a visit is calculated when a user is "away from the site" for at least 20 minutes, meaning:
If the user closes the site, they will be considered away so the next time they browse to the site a new visit may be incremented.
If the user leaves the site open in their browser, they will be considered away if the site isn't their active tab. This is to account for users who may have a long post open for more than 20 minutes. If you leave your browser open over night, you likely won't trigger a new visit.
This methodology is a heuristic that attempts to balance accuracy against the reality that people often leave browser tabs open for hours or even days at a time.
Personally, I guess if they were going to analyze us anyway then I'm glad they're giving the option to opt out, but it's a really quiet way of doing it. And also I'm not sure if they're going to get that much out of it with all the spambots around, but oh well.
In other meta news, some test accounts have been posting Idea-type threads marked as Completed, which I believe you can't normally set as a regular user. The only difference seems to be that you can't upvote on the idea after it's completed. https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/20867/pokemon-is-best#latest
Official dialogue to rival Vietnamese Crystal.
This is the only "Completed" type idea that remains public, but I have catalogued some others that are gone now:
But the latest goingson of the forums just happened hours ago, with a guerilla force taking up their posting arms in a revolution against Flags, revolving around the return of Thur55555555555 (that is eleven 5s) and the flagers (sic) that have targeted him, which you may recall in this thread a few posts ago back in October.
(Midway during the process of writing this post, every single post covered has been Flagged including this OP which had not been flagged before. I will be trying to be consistent with the current state of affairs and going back over the threads to represent them properly, but it's safe to assume every post will have been flagged by the flagger, so keep an eye out for that detail.)
The full context to get to this point is spontaneous yet a lengthy tale, so I'll put it in a spoiler even while summed up:
Nothing much happened on page 6 and I would skip to 7, but this is TheNinjaBear's first comment in this thread, not to be confused with the other Ditto avatar. He made some other threads in support though, more on that later.
With the offense on flags and flagging counteroffense rising as we speak, it's hard to say how this situation will develop further, but I'm very curious to see how the mods respond to this very pointed feedback.
Do I think the mods will take action? Well, they did remove a lot of flags once before with TechHog so it's possible, but I don't think the flagger will get a real punishment or anything like that since (real) people barely get banned as is.
Will the mods actually nerf flagging in some way to dissuade abuse? I doubt it but I think this would all be solved with a report button instead of a public flag or whatever that also lowers points. I'm pretty sure a mod has posted to tell people to use reports wisely in the past, but I cannot find the post so take that with a grain of salt.
Does publicly flagging as opposed to reporting or disagreeing serve any real purpose? If the auto spam filter still kicks in after enough flags (I think it's 5), maybe. I think the intended point to this system is letting users take down spambots themselves, but nobody really seems aware enough of it to coordinate and do so, and the potential for abuse is pretty obvious. Fortunately if just 1 person is flagging it just comes across as petty.
Breaking update: Thur himself has posted an Idea in the feedback forum as well. For some reason you can't seem to vote on this idea within the thread but you still can on the forum/thread listings. I wonder if this is related to manual approval as Thur has had more than 201 flags per his last comment in the spoiler above.
Based on your spreadshot posting style I think you would fit in really well over at the official Pokemon forums.
The saga of flagrant flaggings has still reached no clear conclusion, with tensions still remaining high and accusations tormenting all that still dare to post in Pokemon Square.
(Admin111 doesn't seem to be anything special but their comment was deleted after this. Suspicions were raised about them being a Point farmer and/or the Flager.)
Although some believe the Mods have forsaken the people in this dire crisis, it seems they have still taken some action based on recent events in the infamous Birthday Pokemon thread.
Here we can observe that a comment by clasingla noting the presence of spambots was deleted after the earlier comment on November 30 (but preserved in a quote), as well as a spammer being called out and responding. It seems that jankoewyr managed to make at least 10 comments and accrued 18 spam (radioactive) flag reactions before finally being banned. I believe his choice of avatar was a Pidgey.
Meanwhile the main war room thread "The War Against The Flagers" has continued strongly, from the end of page 7 to the start of page 8 up until 12. People still yet @ to the Mods with all their heart and soul to find answers and retribution, yet are also standing strong by pressing Like and Agree on each other to maintain positive posting points.
MajorBrendan has somehow managed to evade suspicions by going incognito and I'm starting to doubt if it actually is him this time or someone else trying to stir up infighting upon the forums. Of course, every forum poster has the means and opportunity, so no one can truly be trusted, but who could have the motive to draw such reactions out and go out of their way to flag every post by post, thread by thread?
...I am not the flagger by the way; that I swear on the name of the Mods that know it and the honour of my Pokemon forums account dating to 2022. Not to mention my Pokemon Global Link account and all that.
And I could prove it by adding a LOL react to a flagged post if needed though I don't think anyone has proposed that in canon yet.
The war room may have died down from there on, but the battle for succession has only just begun. Lurkers all around are stepping in to have their say on the state of the forums.
Ultimately, another Idea thread by the forgotten legend Hey_PIKMIN aiming to abolish Flagging by 2026 raised some different viewpoints on how to tackle the issue, leading to an unofficial divide in presidential candidates aiming to lead the official Pokemon.com community forums towards the future as the year ends.
In this time of need, Candy0_o has taken it upon themselves to declare a new elective cycle, though their unofficial enforcement of the first-three-comment-party system has led to some controversy. Foreign forum interference by undercover flaggers is also quite the hot topic.
During this short leadup to the election, I plan to be collecting the presidential policies of each official and unofficial candidate in each of their campaign threads, and their stances on the needs of the people such as Gen 3 profile pictures and the future of flagging. I do not condone illegitimate voter fraud but I think it's important to stay aware of how foreign forums are faring.
The year is still 2025, for the time being. The day of the hero draws nearer, which will see the election of a new forums' president. Less than one day remains...
For reference, here are the current top 25 posters by points as referenced by https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/badges. This is basically reaction score plus achievement points. Not that there's anything to spend it on but getting 1000 points gets you a 5 star rank.
I plan to go over all the candidates who've at least posted a campaign thread, but starting off with the 3 additional "official" candidates as declared by Candy0_o, this one is easy because Voltareon hasn't yet posted a campaign or further statements since their initial post running with Decidueye for president and Zeraora as vice president. Still, as a 5-star class poster in the top 10 of ranks even while joining just 9 months ago in March 2025, I wouldn't count them out of the running just yet. Their main claim to fame is creating this Mega Malamar battle by post thread that is still very large for some reason.
Next up is the (unovan) Zorua who has a Jolteon avatar and mainly posts about liking Delphox. Despite all these contradictions, they're a forum veteran from August 2023, one of the first posters to reach a 5-star class and still remain #2 of points, and are now faithfully representing Delphox as president with Shaymin as VP, with an initial campaign promise about petitioning the mods to solve the issues of the common forumposter. Fortunately, they have posted a campaign thread with a fair bit of discussion so I have some more to talk about going forward.
Despite being an Idea-type thread, this has only received the initial 1 vote so far. Probably because most of the forum populace being candidates themselves makes it hard to glean votes, though I'm also part of the problem in terms of not voting. But I suppose it's better to lean impartial when it comes to giving each candidate a fair overview.
Delphox seems to be open to installing TheNinjaBear as vice president but he seems to be opening his own campaign, more on that later.
The rival campaigners are getting quite critical in their debate openers already, asking if these campaign promises can truly be kept.
Admitting to a lack of power to change is one thing, but the historical return of the Edit button is a fair appeal to tradition when it comes to praying for the Mods for change.
Commoner forum user Thur has some scathing critiques of the nobility and may be abstaining from voting altogether due to a lack of faith in the whole system.
Candy0_o is all but breaking kayfabe here to drag the competition down.
Following that is Hades0918 (despite the name he doesn't seem to have any interest in the roguelike or Spidops) who seems to embody the "by any means necessary" and "the end justifies the means" mentality. As a poster he's a relatively recent regular yet a rising star in his own right, having joined in only September 10th 2025, yet has over 4500 posts (making him the #2 poster of posts) and is top 3 in terms of points. According to my research, 100 days have spanned since September 10th, so overall that puts him at a 45.55 post/day average and counting.
They try to make me sound like a villain, but that's not it at all
I'm just dedicated, devoted to help make the Forums a better place!
So please, if you want a better Forums, vote President Snow!
In my opinion, he makes some big promises in terms of trying to enact forumwide reforms to remove the Flagging system altogether and give everyone what they want, but also provides some actual character to his presidential candidates. The people of the forums are rightfully suspect of these overpromises.
The next and last "official" candidate is Candy0_o running with the party of Fuecoco and Mimikyu, and the unaware Fuecoco is already making a statement in the role as President before the elections have even started. In terms of posting performance they joined in August 2024, have over 1000 posts and a 4-star rank, and were involved in the last presidential election trend.
So far their campaign seems to be revolving around meeting the needs of the new users ignored by society and questioning other presidents in their own campaign threads for overpromising.
In response, a renegade Porygon2 candidate has hijacked the thread for themselves, and for once has the forum avatar to match it.
Porygon2 seems to be the smartest and most malevolent candidate of them all yet, at least going off their statements and scaling appropriately. In addition they cite outside experience on Scratch which I cannot personally verify, and have produced a mysterious empty table at the bottom of their post. As a poster the Catcat represents the average forum user more closely with only ~100 posts and 3 stars to show for it.
As a poster of similar renown and Normal-type representation, TheNinjaBear represents Ditto for president, and as such they are prone to spawning multiple threads on the topic of presidency, naturally duplicating like a Ditto.
I'm not sure if there's actually a pun there unless he just means to reference Donald Trump's slogan, which may be the closest effort to a real-life political campaign so far.
There's another Ditto for President thread in the SV -> teambuilding section, and here Porygon2 makes an appearance for some high-level back and forth debating.
I guess I can respect that they're physically pressing Ctrl+V and sometimes hitting V instead of purely phoneposting or asking an AI to type all those 67s. How low the bar has fallen for even hypothetical Posts.
Eremas has been replying to some of these threads and is historically a wild card poster of questionable intent, changing his avatar often and most recently to a Smoochum.
In terms of political leaning, he has posted "Eepy Joe" on his profile and it also shows on the top of his page.
While not an "official" candidate, Tacolaser and president Grookey have put in a lot of effort into their campaign and engaging with other campaigns and I want to shout that out here. Though their campaign thread is long as well so it will also be a direct quote.
As you may or may not know, there has been a Pokemon presidential election going on. With so many choices candidates, you may be wondering what sets me apart from them.
As such, I plan to use this post to explain why you should vote for me, what I'm going to do once I'm elected, and most importantly, how I'm going to do it.
Firstly, everyone needs to understand that President Snow may not have their best interests at heart. She literally named herself after the villain in a popular dystopian book series. She has also hinted at being willing to ruthlessly pursue her ambitions. Here are some quotes from @Hades0918.
"And she can say how she'll do it
<em><strong>Snow points at Cerludge (Obdidian)</strong></em>
Whatever means necessary."
"If you wish it, President Snow and Vice President Obsidian will get it
They will do anything to get it
<em><strong>Anything</strong></em>"
If that isn't ominous, I don't know what is.
As for my own policies, one of the major things I plan to do is try to get the mods to give us new avatars. Not everyone's favorite Pokemon is from the first two generations, and the Forums should reflect that. Naturally, we probably won't get every single Pokemon at once, but gen 3 is a good place to start.
Additionally, the flag system needs to be reworked. We need it to keep the Forums safe, but recently, it's causing been more harm than good because some people choose to report for no real reason. Getting reported should not cause you to lose points, and it definitely shouldn't cause you to get badges. I'm not kidding. If you go to your profile, next to the statistics for how many times you've been agreed and liked and whatnot, you can see how many times you've been flagged. Why? Being flagged a bunch of times does not make for good bragging rights.
I will instate both of the above policies by trying to talk to the mods. However, just one Grookey may not be enough to change things. That's why Grookeys live in groups. If I'm elected, I will create a team (I'm not sure what it will be called yet. The Forums League? The Pokegang? Thinking of a name will be our first order of business.) that will help me establish our goals.
However, you may have noticed that everything I've said so far is similar to what other candidates are doing. As such, I want to bring something entirely unique to the table: a system for catching and battling Pokemon run entirely on the Forum by regular users. The ideas aren't crystal clear at the moment and will need testing. So far, the plan is as follows:
Everyone gets one unevolved (non-legendary, non-mythical) Pokemon of their choice. They can battle that Pokemon against other trainers using a greatly simplified version of the official battle rules. After the battle, the victorious Pokemon will gain a few levels, become more powerful, and maybe evolve. Once that Pokemon is at max level, the trainer may choose to catch a legendary or mythical which is slightly more powerful than an ordinary Pokemon.
With all of this in mind, I hope that some of you will vote for President Grookey.
In terms of uniqueness, I can respect the Pokemon ownership angle appealing to the current trends of D&D and battling by posts, and also the idea of enacting a potential league/gang/government in power. So far he's reached 2 Likes on his post and even 2 Disagrees on a heckler which is more than I can say for most others.
Last but not least, despite not posting as a candidate in the initial survey, clasingla ended up posting a campaign thread representing Espurr, running off a Whitney-like philosophy of getting into something because everyone else was into it too. As both the #1 ranked poster of all time by points, and also the Poster with the most Posts on the forum.
And I just checked, so here's the top 10 posters sorted by posts. I like how the private profile posters still have their info hidden even though they're still sorted in order, and also your post count is on every post you make anyway.
Also, the vice president is a Minun and they have already received a preemptive vote-by-post.
Thur makes a good point about exact wording here in terms of begging and trying. It may not be a sure thing but it's humbling to admit to.
In another unpredicted turn of events, Eremas has also put down a preemptive public vote for Espurr. It may be premature to propose, but it seems like clasingla's popularity with the people may lead to a prosperous presidency to come.
Personally, I'm still not sure who to vote for and I may abstain when the time comes, but we'll see what happens. I was hoping a candidate would propose taking action against the flagger, but it seems that the popular sentiment is just going for some kind of reforms of the system instead and either having faith in the Mods to see a karmic justice through, or resigned to blame themself or Mods for an unjust misfortune by Posting.
Perhaps the Flagger may still yet deign to reveal themselves from the shadows before the election ends, as the true destined leader working undercover as an army Major, swearing absolute loyalty to the celestriad of Mods above Mods known as The Pokemon Companies, and seeking to liberate the world from the trashy villains known as the Leak Culture, Data Miners, Pirates, and all matter of dissidents to big Nintendo alike, ushering in the world order to return to Ash, or so they say.
...I might be reading too deep into the official Pokemon forums, but sometimes inspiration strikes when you least expect it and you have to make the iron hot by striking, even if the material doesn't quite work in context anymore.
Overall if the mods do acknowledge the vocal outcry and/or take any relevant action to improve forum quality of life then I'll be pleasantly surprised.
I also want to cover this thread as another impromptu area of public debate, with yet another new user bemoaning the lack of Gen 3+ profile pictures.
Team Ditto seems to have fingers in many pies and hands in many pots, cozying up to all candidates.
Spoilers for the official Pokemon forums but Thur seems to have taken back their candidacy and participation in the system altogether and edited their earlier comment out, though the quote still remains.
The year is 2025. Time marches on, and the age of a new Game draws nearer. On the outside, the Pokemon Forums remain standing strong beyond the dark ages of 2023. But on the inside, the story is not as serene as it seems, as the forums are engulfed in a newer, darker age of posting...
Breaking news from election day: The Mods have indirectly acknowledged the campaigns against their rule and have responded in kind with divine providence, annihilating Hades's original campaign thread just a few hours ago. It seems that they do not approve of the plans to overthrow the Flag systems.
It doesn't seem like any of the other campaign threads have been affected, but an election thread either hasn't been put up yet today or has been deleted before I could notice, though I doubt the latter has happened without any other signs of discussion.
The only information I have on the scene of the crime are the site notifications that still remain, showing that the other official candidates and mostly Team Ditto/NinjaBear were on the scene as recently as an hour before the post was deleted.
I believe I might have some idea of what happened at 2AM (responding to the initial inquiry in the thread) but I don't want to state it as fact, and also I think Voltareon's was about the Hunger Games as seen later. As for the rest I have no idea what happened to get the mods involved.
Despite incurring the punishment of the Mods, Hades has seen fit to continue onward with a replacement campaign thread.
It remains to be seen if and how the proposed election may carry on from here. But perhaps the true path to victory will be uncovered by the gathering of those who seek the real meaning of Christmas, or so they say. If the holidays pass with no further incidents before the new year, I'll just take this time to say thanks for your reading over this year of this little writing/documentation exercise as the official Pokemon.com community forums enter another year of existence that probably no one expected to go on this long for.
... ... ...
Certain records relating to the MODNOVA Project have been approved for Clearance A. Publicly Released Information (up to and including 1-star class Posters and Guests).
On the second day of Election Week, no elections have actually taken place yet, but in their stead the Mods have silently elected to make another move, annihilating the long-standing "What's your Birthday Pokemon?" thread, carving out a new history and tearing a long-standing shadow out from the official Pokemon.com community forums, leaving only an clear azure sky trailing behind the oppressing heights it once occupied, or so they say.
For more context, you can read this earlier post for an example of thread activity, but to sum it up, this one thread (started May 10, 2024) managed to consistently attract spambots for some reason, lasting over a year with no clear purpose other than posting birthdays and sometimes spawning other birthday-related threads, reaching at least over 578,853 views* by the last recorded count and infamously the thread with the most views in Pokemon Forums history. But now that record will only be a memory.
Time and time again, the people have begged for the Mods to put a stop to the madness, and so this may actually mark a major turning point in terms of petitioning the Mods successfully in recent times, or at least a hint of things to come.
Interestingly, it seems that last thread activity was bumped by Thur just around half an hour ago (at least from when I started writing, now it's more like a full hour), with another likely bot posting earlier in the day. Perhaps he had pinged an online mod at an opportune time.
I don't know what the theory behind this thread is other than brazenly farming reactions, but it doesn't seem like he's getting to 10, no less 100. The Gen 3 profile picture idea above incidentally did get to 10 votes, though.
it has recently come to my attention that there is an official pokemon forums website. since smogon is now redundant, i hope the admins seriously consider deleting this website and migrating over to the new forum.
what do you all think? do you think smogon.com should be deleted or are you a fake fan of the pokemon series?
I got banned from it for an unspecified reason around when it launched in 2023 and there's no means of overturning it or inquiring as to the reason.
Therefore, due to the fact that The Pokémon Company is not even remotely adequate at having any level of transparency with their moderation, I think we should stay here.
