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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.
