Title says it all. I understand that the chat is where you can go for battles or trades but it has a notable inconvenience. That is, not everyone is on the same time zone. This makes it difficult to keep track of your own messages as when you leave a message looking for a battle or trade, someone else might be having a conversation and the message left will be gone
What I'm suggesting is something similar to the current areas of the database. One user would just leave a thread of asking for a battle, then someone would just comment or answer if he or she is interested. To avoid it from being too clogged up, before any post can be posted, the user MUST indicate for how long he or she will leave it open and will automatically close after the designated amount of time has passed. The purpose of this designated time would be for the user to show for how long he or she is available. To keep it from clogging the database too much, after maybe twenty four or forty eight hours after the thread closed, the post will then be automatically deleted.
For a trade thread, I think it would be better for it to be slightly different from above. The amount of time for the trade thread to be open cannot be specified but will always last for twenty four hours before automatically closing. Once it closes, the user can choose to open it again if he or she still hasn't gotten a trade. If an automatically closed thread is unopened after another twenty four hours, then it will automatically be deleted
The main advantage of this suggestion is unlike the chat where you can't be notified if someone mentioned you, is that you will be notified if someone is actually interested since it would be in the same style as the other pokebase sections, meaning it will have a 'my updates' area'
That being said, the rules of this suggested section must be strict. I think the tags would do fine for what I have in mind. Before any thread can be posted, the user must specify if it would be on showdown or the game cartridge, what generation and what ruleset. The ruleset would be including any of smogon's tiers or if the person doesn't want that, he or she should put 'custom' as the ruleset and specify the ruleset that person desires to play on. If the user only desires to trade, then the tags should indicate the generation and trade. A thread cannot be posted if it does not have the complete set of tags. Here's an example thread for battle
Title - Looking for gen 7 battle
Message - Hello, looking for a battle for the next three hours with no legendaries
Tags - 3ds battle gen7 custom
For trade
Title - Looking for Arceus
Tags - gen6 trade
If the message of a battle thread does not specify the rules of a custom ruleset, then it will be closed. For battle threads, I think four tags would do and for trades, only two since you would only need the generation
If this does get implemented, I also have one more request but I highly doubt it will be approved. That is, if both parties agree to it in a battle, they can talk crap to each other and try to tilt the other but this would require a profanity filter, one which would require manual disabling to see the crap talk
