A minor note about the Vanilla Forums rich text editor is that they added a new option to embed links in a Button format, in addition to the existing URL/Rich Link/Card formats.
More info on that here:
https://success.vanillaforums.com/kb/articles/615-rich-editor#links-embeds
Here's how the 4 styles look for comparison:
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.
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/20550/tester
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.
testerbug78 has 10 posts (8 threads and 2 comments), but the only public threads were this and one other thread that displays a completely different and unique error on click, with only one view to show for it.
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/20935/do-you-like-ashs-butterfree-the-best-why#latest
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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.
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us...pletely-annihilate-everyone-and-everything/p1
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/20905/they-might-ban-me-for-this#latest
Also, the mods have finally unstickied/unannouncemented some of their question threads.
They've also been posting threads of the same vein in the competitive/Play! Pokemon forums to slightly less attention.
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/categories/general-pokémon-discussion
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us...mportant-skill-for-competitive-success#latest
And one of the answers is a mod plant themselves.
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21075/mega-raichu-y-fanart-made-by-me#latest
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/21064/do-you-prefer-in-person-or-online-events#latest
Surprisingly this thread was not about event distributions.
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us...most-underrated-in-competitive-formats#latest
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/16181/im-lonely#latest
I feel like the direction of this thread pretty much sums up the pokemon forums culture in a nutshell.
Despite the historic loss of the eating pokemon thread, some new cornerstones of the forums have emerged lately, like the many varied stories, or a forum mafia attempt that did not end up happening yet.
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us...bout-doing-a-pokemon-social-deduction-game/p1
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/20086/i-have-the-answer-to-mega-malamar/p1
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:
