Hey everyone! I wanted to make some public statements regarding what the staff team is/was doing with the moveset threads on PokeBase, so that everybody is on the same page.
There are a few topics I will cover. If you have a watchful eye, then not much of this will be new to you. However, you might find the section at the end about helping out to be interesting.
'Standardising' the moveset threads
I think everybody in the community is aware of this now (and some may not even remember a time before we did it!), but over the past few years, the staff have been slowly editing each moveset thread to use a consistent format that makes them feel a little bit more formal. As part of that process, we have:
- changed every title to cleanly read, 'What is a good moveset for ____?'
- changed the description of each thread to fit a common standard written by us, which includes instructions and a link to the moveset rules thread.
- created the
msq tag to group all moveset questions together, and added a tag for each fully-evolved Pokemon on its thread.
- done similar things for the in-game team threads.
For those who didn't know, many of the moveset threads were posted in 2010 and 2011, when PokeBase was much smaller and nobody knew the posts would become as prominent as they are today. The threads served as more of a back-and-forth between a few active users at the time. As they well and truly outgrew that purpose, the threads needed some changes -- we're 99% finished with that now, which is good.
Updating these threads was something I'd been doing on and off since 2017, but Hellfire Taco finished them all off in a couple of days earlier this year (and also corrected a spelling error I'd pasted into a couple hundred threads -- whoops!). So I wanted to give him a shout for doing that, and say thanks to everybody else who picked up my slack.
You might come across a few lingering errors with the threads, such as copy-pasted names we forgot to change or broken links. If you find these, flag them or link them to somebody who can edit them.
Increasing content standards on the moveset threads
What to do about the oldest responses to the moveset threads is a conversation that's gone on for years. We've agreed for a long time that the really dated stuff -- like answers that don't contain a set, and just critique the set that used to be in the question -- should be taken down. But there are also many old movesets that don't abide by our modern rules list, e.g. don't have full moveset details.
After umming and ahhing for years about what to do with posts like these, I eventually agreed that it's for the better if we start to 'audit' the older moveset threads and bring them in line with the most recent ones. Thoughout this year, we have been:
- hiding any moveset that does not follow our modern moveset guidelines, especially those that miss details like items, EVs and natures. (EDIT: Personally, I am going to be lenient with posts that have two movesets in one. Unfortunately, there is a lot of good content that breaks this rule. We will still enforce the rule for new submissions.)
- editing movesets to include such details where they are easy to infer, or the optimal strategy is very obvious.
- fixing ugly formatting, bad spacing, grammar mistakes and broken images on old moveset answers.
- changing the structure of actual set details to be Showdown-importable (or something close to it) for readability.
- removing movesets posted as comments, and off-topic spam (e.g. "Garchomp is so cool!") that exists in comments.
- adding some indication of the intended generation and battle format for each set (when it's possible to tell).
Completing this process for all of the threads is obviously quite the task, but we think it's worth bothering with for a lot of reasons.
- The moveset threads are easily the most popular posts on our platform, as they do well on search engines. Having very strict requirements for the content on them leaves a better impression and is more helpful for those readers.
- If we want the moveset threads to be taken seriously as references for competitive strategy, then requiring all moveset details and presenting things nicely is a bare minimum requirement.
- The old moveset threads have a problem where aged posts of middling quality have accrued lots of votes, and therefore cannot be moved from their spot atop the list of answers. Our 'audit' is removing a lot of these; and while a 'sort by' feature is the only real solution, this is better than nothing.
- Removing old content puts more eyes on recent sets, which can only be a good thing.
I'm actually pretty happy with the results of some of the threads we've gone through. There's some genuinely worthwhile content on those threads, and hopefully these changes will bring that to light. It would still be very good if we had a feature that sorts answers by date, but what we're doing in the meantime is helping a lot in my opinion, and should be tenable for some years to come. (We've also got contingencies in place for later if we decide to create brand-new threads, and close the old ones with all the original answers on them.)
How you can help (if you want to)
A few people have asked questions and figured out what we've been doing behind the scenes. They wanted to become involved, and I imagine there'll be more of you like that after reading this post. So here's what you can do:
- Give out flags if/when you see threads with answer/s that don't follow modern guidelines. If there are multiple problematic posts on the same thread, then you can flag the actual thread instead of the individual posts, and we'll know what to do. (This avoids the issue of the hourly flag limit.)
- If you have editing powers, then you can help tidy up any posts you see, including moveset answers. If you can improve the presentation of any post, then go ahead and change it. If you know about competitive play, then you may add missing natures, etc. where you see fit.
- If you don't have editing powers, then you can still leave flags on posts that you think could be written/formatted more cleanly, or leave suggestions for missing details in comments.
- If you're experienced in competitive play, then please VOTE in moveset threads. Give up-votes to answers that are well-written, include explanation, and show an awareness of the metagame. Give down-votes to answers that don't have a realistic use in competitive play, or have bad and unexplained ideas. (I have probably given over a hundred votes in the process of cleaning these threads.)
- If you're experienced in competitive play, then your input on the moveset threads is valuable. Something as simple as posting the standard set for Clefable in OU means the thread does a better job recording the metagame. If you'd care to include an explanation of what makes the set effective (e.g. the Pokemon it's good against, what Pokemon work well with it, etc.), even better. Obviously, you should write that yourself.
Feel free to tell us yours thoughts about this and what else you think is worth looking into to improve content on PokeBase. Thanks for reading!
