(request) DELETE SMOGON NOW [decision pending]

[doipy hooves]

BREAKING NEWS BULLETINS
The year is 2026. After a quiet period in the war on flags, the flagger struck back in late 2025, targeting new user PokeMom with over 100 or 200 flags within 2 days of their joining. Here is a recreation of the crime scene from December 31:

warning: flags

Since then, PokeMom has went on to host their own independent elections through means of creating a separate Idea thread for each candidate, in which Hades's President Snow won with 5 votes.

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us...president-if-there-were-pokemon-presidents/p1

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21703/president-snow-and-vice-president-obsidian/p1

As madness reigns in the Forums, the human element of this war drives its participants to devise unholy weapons of math destruction, featuring Iron Fist Punching Glove Elemental Punches Gardevoir.

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us...made-the-best-strategy-youll-ever-find#latest

Meanwhile, the Pokemon Unite forums have completely fallen apart due to the recent change of removing the F2P coins system in place of a newer, worse grind in the name of License Journeys:

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21566/are-we-really-being-heard#latest

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21325/this-new-license-journey-is-bad/p1

On the mods' behalf, their actions up to now have involved making and ignoring questionable threads alike:

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us...out-leeks-about-future-games-clasingla#latest

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21768/test-idea-please-ignor#latest

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us...-you-most-hoping-to-see-in-pokemon-in-2026/p1

But just after removing the two new independent Pokemon eating threads:
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21764/they-were-removed/p1

A fourth Pokemon eating/food fight thread has entered the arena undercover:
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21765/a-random-question/p1

While more and more begging has spawned on Mod_Nova's profile post (now with 2 Flags, 8 Agrees, and 1 LOL):

spoilers for the rest of the post below

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/profile/Mod_Nova

And after a new surge of flags led to Thur5555555555 hitting over 800 flags (and also others like TechHog gaining a bunch of reaction score for some reason):

And also more tagging of the mods on behalf of President Snow:
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21706/president-snow-announcement-end-the-flags/p1

And about 10 more pages of spam in the war against flagers that all got flagged:
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21240/the-war-against-the-flagers/p20

On January 6th, a Mod finally responded to the flagging problem directly in the middle of one of these many random flagging threads, perhaps because Mod_Ginger was profile posted themselves.

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/profile/33267/Mod_Ginger

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21242/flags-are-a-problem/p4

We understand that it can be frustrating to feel like your post was flagged unfairly or incorrectly by another user. That experience can feel discouraging, especially when you are trying to engage in good faith. Your concerns are being heard, and they’re not being dismissed.

At the same time, the flag system remains an important tool for helping surface potential issues to the moderation team. Flags do not automatically result in action being taken. Instead, they act as a signal that something may need a closer look.

Every report is reviewed carefully by our moderation team, with context and intent taken into account. No user is actioned solely because a post was flagged, and no action is taken unless the content is determined to be in violation of the community rules. Our goal is always to ensure that moderation decisions are fair, consistent, and based on the rules - not on volume of reports or disagreements between users. Repeatedly tagging moderators, commenting on moderator profiles, or calling out other users over flagging does not speed up reviews and can contribute to unnecessary tension. If you believe your post was flagged in error, the appropriate next step is to allow the moderation team to review it rather than escalating publicly.

We appreciate everyone who continues to engage thoughtfully and respectfully, and we’re committed to maintaining a space where discussions can happen openly while still upholding community standards. Thank you for sharing your feedback and for being part of the conversation.

My first impression is that from my understanding of the vanilla forums, the other flags are not equivalent to reports, and also this response doesn't really address the issue of mass-flagging a whole thread or user's post history. You would think someone adding 800 flags would be more of a hindrance to the moderation team or a violation of the rules than getting tagged and after a month of silence and years of similar precedent, I think escalating publicly was better than the alternative of nothing here, especially since in the past Noah Lapras Forum was able to tag mods to lock Zhula's threads because of a disagreement and he was commended for it.

That's just my two cents, but the people of the official Pokemon Forums are not satisfied either.

The main victim Thur himself had much to say in response as well before the thread was locked entirely, which I will also quote here:

Thank you for finally responding and while the majority of what you said is true I have a two questions.
1. You stated that, “Every report is reviewed carefully by our moderation team.” Please elaborate. You see I have been given eight hundred and fifty five flags but I would assume that if the statement quoted above was factual that slowly, over time evaluated flags which had been proven to have no true basis for flagging aside from a vendetta of sorts would be removed. This method would theoretically ensure that the damage (Two points removed per flag) done via these flags would be undone. Now, some of my first flags which I believe to have no basis were given along time ago in mass quantities but even after all of this time I still have all of my original flags. Now we must admit that every now and then a flag will be given without true basis whether it be from a few mis-taps or on purpose is not necessary so logically I should have at least had a few flags removed out of my eight hundred and fifty five. So what is the current format for flags? You said I could specify what flags I believe were given unfairly and I would say the majority. If you could remove some of those it would be noticed and appreciated.

2. Is there any means of removing or temporarily suspending the users who overuse the privilege of flags? Because if users who overuse flags which often are proven to have no basis were given a warning and then a minor penalty and then if they kept up this behavior banned then the problem would be fixed and you moderators would not have to be tagged as you have been.

One thing to conclude my message. If in a few weeks (You have two) we have not seen a change in the current state of affairs or the moderator team is still taking this subject lightly as I believe you did we will double our efforts. When I say double I mean double I mean double I mean going from every other day tagging 5 mods and five members of TPCi to daily tagging every member of the moderator team we can find as well as every member of the TPCi we can find as well.

Please look into this and take it seriously if you do not we will have to assume you are bots or do not have the authority to act in our behalf and so we will continue to try getting the attention of a real person with the authority to enact the removal of spam and abuse flags.

Also if report flags our kept that will still allow people who are acting up to be recognized and assessed by the team in charge of moderation.

So now we're here where everyone is gathered around the new thread about the admin response to the flags, prepared to take up their tagging arms against the flagging menace once more. After the mods finally responded to the plights of their people, it seems they've inadvertently confirmed a method of positive reinforcement for themselves here.

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21779/an-admin-responded-to-the-flag-problem/p1

I'm not satisfied

I'm grateful that they acknowledged us

I really am

But all they did was explain the purpose of flags and kindly tell us to stop bothering them

They also said that if we think any of our flags are unjust then tell them which ones and they'll look into it

So you expect me to go through all 165 of my flags to give you the majority of them?

Maybe I do deserve some of them, but only 4 or 5

The rest of them I did nothing to get

You expect @Thur55555555555 to go through all 800+ of their flags to give y'all almost all of them?

Another issue I have is the fact that we've been telling them about this since the moment it started and they ignored us

It took them a month and five days to finally say something

If they would have looked into it when this whole thing started I guarantee you they could have found the culprit and ended the whole thing

But they ignored us and now it's gotten worse

I'm sorry, but what they said didn't actually acknowledge the problem

They just tried to make us be quiet

I'm not stopping my fight

I won't stop until the flagger is found and stopped and all my undeserved flags are gone

Prepare for more tags, mods, because I'm not done

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21779/an-admin-responded-to-the-flag-problem/p2

The mass taggings are now continuing on other fronts:
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21246/remove-flags-due-to-overuse-of-them/p2

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21246/remove-flags-due-to-overuse-of-them/p3

Now that I have y'all's attention, let me explain why flags are a problem

They are being used for no reason

If you go into my profile and look at my flags, almost all of them are pointless

And let us not forget the realest victim

@Thur55555555555 with over EIGHT HUNDRED flags

For what?

No reason

Let's not forget @PokeMom244 who wasn't even here for two days and received 200+ flags

They hadn't even made a single post that could be considered bad yet (and still haven't)

There are many more people that have been unjustly flagged, but those are the main two that I will be using to make a point

You say to go through our flags and tell y'all which are unfair

So you expect @Thur55555555555 to go through more than 800 flags to give y'all almost all of them?

The thing is, we've been asking for help since December 1st

Sooner than that but that date is when we actually started putting effort into it

What did y'all do for that whole month?

Ignore us

Now, the problem is out of hand and you're annoyed and decide to respond

Y'all give a useless answer

I'm sorry, but it's true

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the fact y'all looked

But it took too long for y'all to do and you didn't even do anything

Y'all expected us to just stop when you responded

I'll be honest

I would have

If what y'all said was useful

You didn't help us in any way shape or form and didn't acknowledge the fact that flag abuse is an issue

Why would we stop?

And then y'all closed the main post we were asking for help in

We're not going down that easily

We're not going anywhere until our needs are met

It remains to be seen how and when the Mods may next respond to this renewed threat backed by the newly founded presidency, and/or how the flagger themselves will respond other than flagging, but needless to say this battle of revolution may prove to be their greatest challenge in moderation of the year so far. At the least, all of the flagging and the counterposting and an actual public response is more than I expected by far.

EDIT:
Also, I just realized that the act of tagging all the moderators is very reminiscent of No one beats the bug's last acts.

https://www.smogon.com/forums/threa...-fans-only-no-moderators.3661231/post-8431385

 

[chroma_2903]

"it was me barry! i flagged all your posts on the official pokemon forums! remember when you posted that roleplay thread and it got removed? i was the one who got the post taken down because it was embarrasing as fuck! i did you a favor!"

 

[YannisGames]

Hello I want to delete my account pls,
because i don't use it anymore.

 

[doipy hooves]

Hello I want to delete my account pls,
because i don't use it anymore.

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. (getting a sense of deja vu here...)

Since I've taken the bait, I'm going to try to make the most of this reply and just release some raw observations I've been kind of blocked on refining without much to deduce from them. All I can say is that something is rotten in the state of the official Pokemon.com community forums. Following up from last update, the Mods have full-on removed a few flag protest threads (most of the ones in the last post will yield Permission Problems now) along with their formerly public responses, directly messaging victims to tell them to knock it off or face suspension. I do have records of some of these threads as they were posted, but in the interest of avoiding any definite statements when all screenshots of text can and should be questioned in this age, I'm going to link to some posts that still remain up about the situation for context and leave the rest in a spoiler for your own judgment. Not that I'm saying any of this thread is untrustworthy, but I always try to cite proper sources for a reason and most of the current situation with the mods and anonymous reactions is not conducive to that.

Overall this seems to have marked an abrupt end to the flagger saga completely shutting down the coup after being acknowledged, but a new reaction score conspiracy has risen from the ashes in its stead, majorly propping up inactive users like TechHog for some unknown reason.

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21822/pokemon-is-sometimes-evil#latest

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/profile/Mod_Ginger

Hades on Mod_Ginger's profile

Don't ban me for bothering you, but I want to explain our side of the flag issue

Near the end of September of last year, @Thur55555555555 got attacked by an unknown flagger

Shortly after that, they left

I was attacked too, but I didn't get it that bad

A few days after @Thur55555555555 left, the flagging stopped

Well, on December 1st @Thur55555555555 came back

And with them, the flagger

However, the flagger was much more aggressive this time

In just a few days of @Thur55555555555 return they gave them over 200 flags

They haven't stopped, either

@Thur55555555555 now has over 800 flags

I have 188

@Joeybear7 has well over 200

@PokeMom244 received over 200 in just two days of being here, and they still haven't done anything wrong

We asked for y'all's help, tagging @Mod_Nova and some other mods, as well as TPCi people

We got ignored

The more y'all ignored us, the louder we became

We reached the point where every other day we were tagging y'all

We weren't trying to be disruptive or cause problems

We wanted our voices to be heard

We finally get acknowledged by you, but you didn't even help us

You explained the purpose of flags and told us to stop

We didn't stop because you were still ignoring the problem

So you shut down the main post we were communicating on

When we moved to a different post, you shut that one down too and threatened to ban us if we kept it up

I don't understand why you want us to be quiet so badly

We are simply asking you to help us fix a problem that have been effecting us for more than a month and you won't let our voices be heard

You act like we're causing problems, but we're not

We aren't forcing people to join us, or accusing others of being the flagger, or even flagging you mods

We are simply using the available resources to peacefully demand change

You told us to address the problem in the proper way, but didn't tell us what that is

All I'm here to do is ask that you point me in the right direction so that I can get a fix to the problem

Thank you for your time

Flag Archives, now deleted

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us...ed-out-to-me-concerning-the-flag-issue#latest

(Thur changed his avatar to a Charizard here for some reason.)

Thur was reportedly PMed by a moderator, which I can't verify but there is a messaging feature on the forums that regular users can't use and I would believe this behaviour to be in line for the Mods.

It is worth noting that OlderAngel11 has also made note of receiving divine providence from the Mods in October 2024 regarding the initial Pokemon eating threads:
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us...-start-a-new-what-starter-would-you-eliminate

Additionally, the latest false flag food thread mentioned above was removed.
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21765/a-random-question

I find this all kind of ironic after Mod_Ginger has asked an inane question about what food-themed Pokemon would fit on a Cafe Remix menu (to no response). Maybe the food fighters should try this thread next and see if they delete it.
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us...emon-fits-perfectly-in-cafe-remix-s-fall-menu

Ironically, an actual false flag threat has been vocalized in the Unite threads yet no action has been taken:
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21666/so-when-is-this-game-shutting-down/p2

To sum up the new uprising on the forums, the current poster rankings have been completely turned around, with TechHog accumulating points to become #1 on the leaderboard despite not having posted since last year.

It can be observed that TechHog has gained a multitude of reactions and reaction-related achievements just from December 2025 to January 2026, showing that someone (or somepeople) are going through his old posts and reacting them positively. Other inactive posters on the leaderboard like TheJeffers, OlderAngel11, and notably MajorBrendan can also be seen with similar gains in the same timespan.

UnovanZorua has taken note of this:

further posts in the visitor messages

Despite his profile being private, MajorBrendan also benefitted hugely from these gains, though also dropping back severely at a point around his former leaderboard status to ~800 points.

Based on the activity page over the last week, I was able to make some observations among these lines.
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/activity
Here's the state of the page on January 15, 6PM EST with MajorBrendan having 819 points gained in the week and at 1544 points total/top 10 on the leaderboard which you can see at the bottom of the same image.

Yet just half a day later on the 16th, MajorBrendan had started losing "points gained in the week" down to 769 while everyone else had gained:

Later, MajorBrendan would fall back down to ~842 points exactly as he is today, almost exactly cancelling out all ~700-800 points he had gained within a day. This remains a unique event compared to the rest of reaction points rising at a steady pace, and I can only imagine if there's some kind of alt account action that got caught, potential mod interference, reaction score/flagging countermeasures, or all of the above.

Meanwhile, Eremas has been posting some questionable implications about reaction score manipulation methods:
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21808/this-is-illegal#latest

(For context, his 'Answer' below was posted before Hades's post marked as a Best Answer and moved above.)

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/comment/108993/#Comment_108993

Here's some miscellaneous posts I couldn't really tie into the plot.

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/15375/pokemon-memes/p4
Well, this one could have been more timely if SonicBoomX was here and interested in a forum more his speed, that also supported image linking without having to manually hotlink via BBCode which he seems to be doing on phone with no access to the rich text editor/toolbar.

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us...t-to-talk-about-weird-life-experiences#latest

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21876/request-for-a-pokemon-emerald-remake#latest

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21883/the-most-notible-people-on-the-forums/p1

I am not giving the AI thread the dignity of being fully posted but it's foreboding to think AI could be trained on the official Pokemon.com forums as a trusted source.

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21961/i-can-039-t-comment-part-2/p1

Apparently NinjaBear can't communicate via comment anymore and is all going to approval (which on the forums, Comments are Replies, but evidently he can still post individual Threads/Posts). This seems to suggest that mods have made his approval filters more stricter after all the 67-type posting.

Unite players are continuing to devolve and are entering the bargaining phase of grief.
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21937/we-the-people-of-us#latest

(I'm not sure if "we the people of us" means the people of the United States or is just there to be redundant, but I want to use that phrase for myself now.)

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21828/a-message-to-hades#latest

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21815/a-post-to-talks-about-leaks/p1

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us...st-to-talk-about-non-farfetch-d-leek-s#latest

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21728/time-to-start-something-big/p5

 

[doipy hooves]

Rare mini double update, but it turns out that clasingla also made a whole thread about this 'mass reacting' issue recently that generally summarizes the situation up but ended up with a completely different conclusion in accusing DoubleCure that I don't necessarily agree with but it also led to what could be considered an over-reaction in return. clasingla also asks everyone to stop reacting to every single post, and in response said posters continue to post while chasing the highs of reacting to each other. Truly the official Pokemon.com community forums' posting culture has shifted to a darker, faster, direction when irony-free clasingla is one of the last voice of reasons for genuine effortposting and rewarding posts for quality rather than quantity. Perhaps TheJeffers was right all along and these forums should have eschewed from tracking these funny statistics all along. In any case, the Mods seem to be content with blessing, or rather cursing their users with paranoia and desperation through this wretched regime, which I suppose is still better off than being able to trade points in for actual value.

https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/22010/stop-with-the-mass-reacting#latest

Stop with the mass reacting