Hello all, as you can tell, I’ve not been very active on the site as of recently. I’ve been quite busy lately with my classes, but I still come around every once in a while. In general, I think the site as a whole is handling itself smoothly and really is one of the premier Pokemon websites out there. It's come a long way since the 2010s, especially after we were able to dispose of the pork rind filled, Red Bull chugging husk that was our friend Fizz and seamlessly replace him with a competent paid actor (as a side note, we’re short on cash and accepting donations to pay for said actor). However, a few weeks ago, I was talking to some friends from the site (who are similarly not as active as they used to be) and the topic of this very internet forum, the Pokebase, came up. We recalled some of our fondest memories, how we all met. General things like that, you get it. At some point we brought up why we left the site, and it all boiled down to one thing: there are a few things with the site that we cannot stand. Below is a small compilation of some of the issues we had with the site. I can guarantee you that, once these issues are resolved, the lot of us will all come rushing back to this site, as well as many others, both new users who will surely stick around for years to come, and long-missed veterans of years passed.
Most popular tags: I’ve complained about this in the past before. Either make use of it or remove it. I don’t want to bother explaining it here because it’s already been explained many times in other posts (including this, this, and this). Please read them if you don’t know what I’m talking about; I’m sure we’ll see eye-to-eye.
Useful meta posts: This is EXTREMELY outdated. There are a multitude of posts (the posting of which should not have been entrusted to FIZZ of all people) that just seem outright unnecessary, and the site could operate fine without having them there. If you want, PM, we will gladly curate a list of the posts we’d like added to this small sidebar. We could also just remove it entirely. No point in calling these posts “useful” if that’s not what they’re doing.
Search bar: Wholly unnecessary, frankly. We have a perfectly good tag system that encompasses the keywords and phrases most people will be looking for in the search bar in the first place, and (although I don’t foresee this happening) if heaven forbid you need to search something that isn’t a tag, Google is right there. “Pokemondb.net”, quotes included, and then your search term, not that hard.
View counts: I’m pretty sure that view counts on questions aren’t accurate. Nobody knows what it means, either. Is it individual people, or total times the question has been viewed? In either case, nobody cares. Just shut up, nobody cares. Nobody gives a damn! Not one! Not a single Damn to be given about the stupid view counts. Jeez. This and, by extension, the “most viewed questions” tab should be removed.
Tags: Actually, the tag system is awful too. Again, these aren’t serving their supposed purpose. A keyword system is vastly inferior to a search bar, in any case, since you can just look up any single keyword you want without limiting yourself to a select few. To have both is just redundant. These are just annoying most of the time. Can’t we just get rid of these horrendous pieces of trash? God. Who even cares about them? That’s right! Nobody! Nobody cares about tags! Just get rid of them already.
Deleting wall posts: I’ve never understood why you can do this. You can easily just say something, leave it up long enough for a person to see it, and then delete it without anybody having proof. This includes saying rude things to other users, then deleting them so mods have no proof, or sharing NSFW, and, again, deleting it before mods can see. You could argue that sometimes people share things only meant for the user whose wall they’re posting on, but this is literally a public site. Don’t post private things on a public website. If that’s your only option, then tough. There is absolutely no reason you should ever need to delete a wall post.
Ads: Come on PM. You’re really that greedy, that you’re profiting off of the site? I used to trust you but now I see that you’re only in it for the money. I don’t care about how many times I’ve clicked on the b… eautiful women. You shouldn’t be making money off of my weakness, you creep. I’ll see you in court.
Music player: This isn’t something I want removed, but we should be able to add music to our user pages like on Myspace and what have you. How cool would it be to visit Mewderator’s profile and hear Gotye’s hit “Somebody That I Used To Know”, or “Teenagers” by My Chemical Romance on PM’s? It’d be super cool! Please add this. I think everybody can agree that it would really help create a better atmosphere for the site, and, looking at the current userbase, I really think we could use a better atmosphere. I asked a few site veterans, including KRLW890, PX, An Asocial Moth, Thunder Clapper, and TY, and the majority answer was that they would love to see this feature on the site and they wouldn’t have any problems with it whatsoever!
Moveset questions: First we have to wait for Moveset Bot to ask them, then we have to wait for people to put their horrible answers on them. None of the movesets are even good. About 90% of them are completely unviable and abuse current trends in the metagame in order to create flashy and good looking, but ultimately horrible movesets.
Trachy: Does anybody know who this guy is? The fool shows up like once every two months to post something on his wall and that’s it. What the hell? Who is this guy? How does he have so many points? I personally find it insulting, because every other user on this site worked hard for every single one of their damn points, and trachy just happens to have 68 THOUSAND for… posting on his wall every few months? What a joke. We don’t need this clown ruining our site. And he’s an editor, too? What the hell? I’ve never ONCE seen this dude do ANYTHING. And there he is, having editor for just posting on his wall every once in a while. Kind of strange, don’t you think? Get him out!
My updates: This feature has been basically useless since people stopped commenting on my posts. I don’t see the use for this anymore, because nobody interacts with my posts. It doesn’t do anything for me. Just get rid of it please.
The chat room: Seriously, if one thing needs to be removed on this site, it’s the damn chat room. The moderation for it is HORRIBLE and people don’t even talk about Pokemon. This is a Pokemon website, people. Talk about Pokemon. Seriously, I’d bet money that less than 3% of the conversation that happens there mentions Pokemon. Constant arguments, constant mistreatment of users, manipulation, rampant fanfiction, etc. In recent months people have divided themselves into three different groups and they’re all out for blood against each other. Seriously. It’s madness. Last week, one of the groups, they call themselves “The Carpetbombers,” sent an airstrike to the house of one of the top members of another group known as “Fizz Did Nothing Wrong.” The rest of their actions have been considerably less reasonable. The third group just roleplays as cowboys. The threat level there is near-zero, but nobody likes them and we really just need to permanently ban all of the members. For the moderators, the members include ~Smoothie~, cranpper, sumwun, and a few other users I can’t name off the top of my head. Please ban them as soon as you read this. Remove the damn chat room. It’d put a stop to all this madness.
Felix: Look, I’ll be honest, I don’t really even have a good reason for this one. I just want that asswipe gone. I know you’re reading this, Felix. You’re a degenerate, you know that? There’s something messed up in that tiny little pea brain of yours, THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOU. ROMAINE LETTUCE IS BETTER THAN ICEBERG MY ASS. Here's a link to his profile for ease of banning him, moderators.
Music player: Seriously, who even asked for this? Again, this is a POKEMON site, not the Billboard top 100, for GODS sake. I am so tired of going on somebody’s profile and hearing some overplayed, Walmartcore pop song for the 50th damn time. The amount of times I’ve checked the site on my phone on the bus or in class just for “Baby Pull Me Closer” by The Chainsmokers ft. Halsey to come blaring out of my speaker is too many to count, too– this is and has always been an asinine idea and frankly needs to go.
RMT: I do not have a Pokemon team. Why would I need ratings and assessments of my nonexistent team. Pointless.
Usernames: Usernames are how people are identified on the internet. But PokemonDB should be different. Specifically, here, they’ve caused a lot of trouble, I think. One issue relating to this is the frequent “hey Fizz, Hellfire Taco just told Felix to kill himself over lettuce. This is the third time this month. Get rid of him, please. He won’t stop.” and I really don’t appreciate that. How about you “hey Fizz” my fat donkey ass. Without usernames moderators would stop getting these asinine messages and you idiots wouldn't be able to get on my goddamn nerves anymore. I’d effectively be unidentifiable. A ghost in the machine, if you will. I’d make this site bend to my will and none of you would be able to do a damn thing about it. Another issue is people create inappropriate usernames and all we can do is ban them, but the username is still there for everybody to see. That’s also bad, or something.
Rules for the DIY plumbing section: As we all know, user “Felix” has recently pushed for the addition of a DIY plumbing section in this post. (only good thing he’s done for the site, quite honestly) PM finally got up off his lazy ass and added this one. While I firmly believe that we should keep this section dedicated to DIY plumbing, I think we should abolish all rules on it. This will draw multitudes of users to the site, most of whom want to freely exclaim slurs to those who do not know that duct tape should not actually be used on ducts. Slurs may be going too far, it’d be great if we could find a way to be extremely obscene towards these people without being bigoted (feel free to type suggestions for how best to do this below!).
Felix: I can not emphasize this strongly enough. I want him gone. I’ll do it myself if I need to.
Sinkhole: There has been a big sinkhole in the meta section for months and people keep falling into it. I haven’t seen SYL or Nebby in at least a year and I’m starting to get concerned this will begin to affect the amount of staff we have available. It’s also speculated this is where Astro went, but other users just claim that this is a crazy conspiracy. We have affectionately dubbed it “the hoel” but OSHA would not like this. Fun’s over, guys, it’s gotta go.
Pokedex pages: What the hell is the point of this just get rid of them. Who even plays Pokemon anymore. It is literally a game for children. Grow up.
Shown below is a screenshot of what the site looks like now, and directly after it, a mockup of what the site could look like with all of these changes implemented.
