Meta-PokéBase Q&A
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There's been many posts before this one about the RMT, and there'll probably be more in the future. This isn't anything very new, but it's still something I feel really needs to be addressed.

Take a look at the unanswered tab on RMT. There are 190 pages of unrated teams. 190 x 20 = about 3800 unanswered questions. How many of these are going to be answered? Almost none! Some posts don't get attention, they simply slip under and drown in the multitudes of other unanswered questions. You can just forget about anyone answering your thread if it isn't answered in a month.

The main point I'm getting at is that something has got to be done about those teams from 2011 - 2017, and maybe even more recently than that. The metagame changes, Pokemon fall out of favour, things like Politoed that infest older questions are now obsolete and outclassed. Sure, these teams could help someone if it's something like OU or Ubers, but A) the chances of anyone finding a genuinely good team they decide to use are very low, and B) who cares about old gen formats like Gen 5 RU? They're practically useless, and they just clog up the section.

It looks like posts many years back were far more lax, and that led to gimmicky, stupid, awful theme teams that won't help a single person. Who cares about this, for example? Or this, this, this, or hell, any of these*?

So many threads don't specify a tier, so they're even more useless. So many have horrendous grammar, syntax, and formatting. So many are godawful abominations that somehow pass for teams that no one in their right mind should be using, and as such they clog RMT. Do we really need to keep these around? Can we not just remove them entirely?

*I realize some of these could very well be useful, but not the vast majority. Most of trachy's, for instance, have no answers and are probably hopelessly outclassed by other decks by now.


So can we please crack down on some of these older threads? Editors and Moderators can hide them, and if non-staff users want to help out, they can flag posts. I probably haven't been very specific about what I think should be hidden, so let me make it clearer:

  • Most gimmick / themed teams. I realize not all of these are bad, and there will be exceptions (weather, Trick Room, etc.). By gimmicks and themes I mean things like "Please rate my all-orange team" or "Feel the fury of Fighting types! My team can only use Pokemon with fists." (You would be surprised at just how many of these exist) with no tier/format specified.

  • Very old unanswered threads for formats no one cares about anymore. No one's playing Gen 4 NU, so there's no point to those threads, especially if they have no answers. If the asker is inactive, that wraps the whole package up neatly as a "hey no one plays this anymore so this is pointless now".

  • Old threads with absolutely AWFUL formatting/team choices. If you have a team with Pokemon like Double Kick Umbreon, and it can't be easily imported into Showdown, is it really helping anyone? No, it most certainly is not.

It should be pretty clear that I'd like the go-ahead from mods to target old, unanswered threads to clear up the RMT, as the section's been a hot mess for quite a while. If anything else is unclear, or you disagree with something, I'm happy to explain my reasoning.

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Definitely a good idea. The RMT's such a mess, with all those unanswered questions and gimmicky teams. +1
I agree with the following:
* Gimmick teams should be banned (including repurposed in-game teams, teams of favourites, etc).
* Teams with an unspecified battle format should be banned.
Some other thoughts:
* 90% of teams that are absolutely awful fit either of the above two categories (or both), so I don't see a need to make a vague rule about how your team has to be at least "this good".
* Those unanswered questions don't appear in navigation ever, so I personally don't see how they're that much of a bother. I'd rather talk about how we can make future submissions less awful.
* I would not like to set the precedent of removing posts purely because they have no answers. If we remove a post, it should break a rule.
* To be honest, I already remove some particularly bad submissions to RMT even if they don't break any of the rules on the rules list.
* I'd still like to see everything from the following thread implemented, maybe with the wording of the rules changed a bit to be more precise: https://pokemondb.net/pokebase/meta/70375
100% agree with this post, RMT is pretty messy rn
@Fizz thanks for the feedback. However, why don't you want to set the "precedent of removing posts purely because they have no answers"? Don't the multitudes of unanswered, outdated questions make RMT more cluttered? I would at the very least like to remove those that are extremely old, I can see why we wouldn't remove new recent unanswered threads.
More cluttered in what way? The unanswered list puts newer questions first, so old unanswered questions shouldn't pull attention from recent ones.
That, and because I don't like the optics of having a rule that lets us arbitrarily remove a post because nobody responded to it. That's beyond anybody's control, and I simply don't believe it presents a real problem.
Removing all old unanswered questions would also mean a) getting rid of good quality posts and b) spending a very long time opening threads and clicking 'hide'. Again, I just don't see what's in it for anybody.
Ok, that does make sense. I was only thinking about the sheer volume of old unanswered questions, not how many that are or aren't seen.

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