Topic: Rules

[SirBlaziken]

To be honest, this place practically romanticizes personality disorders so don't let yours hold you back, the name master.

Not from what i've seen, no it doesn't. He shouldn't let them hold him back, however the site doesn't really romanticize personality disorders, otherwise I need that new pair of glasses more than I thought.

[sylar]

I always feel a little awkward when people use mental illness as an excuse for being rowdy but I suppose that's my own internalised ableism or what have you. I have ASD and a few personality disorders that made me pretty goddamn terrible around here for years. Like Liz said I'd break rules like it was my job; I still talk to mods now who outright go "yeah man you were one of the worst members for a long time" and I can't take offence to it because yeah I was a mess. I think the thing is I grew up? And also people learned how to deal with me. I have an odd way of joking around and I'm generally pretty abrasive and I guess "intimidating" but the thing is like...

Even though I am a massive autist and I do have hella personality disorders and generally I am still A Big Mess, I still try to be accommodating so I'm easier to deal with? I don't expect everyone to have a degree in Dealing With The Mentally Ill Jerks Online. I dunno what I'm trying to say here I am tired.

Just try? To work with people? Using mental illness as a reason to break rules is all fine and good but honestly you'd have an easier time not using it as a reason to be weird about everything. Work with people and have people work with you so we know how to make things easier for you and you don't frustrate people and end up getting a bad rep.

Like, it's a Pokemon forum. We have dealt with more autistic kids than the average bear, let's be real here. We can do it and it is made 100x easier for everyone if instead of going "HEY IVE GOT AUTISM SO I CANT DO THESE THINGS DEAL WITH IT" you go "hey I've got autism but I'm willing to try and work on my issues if you're willing to be patient in knowing I'm trying"

Because people don't like talking to brick walls. That's how some people appear. That's where awkwardness stems from. You know.

And like I'm not saying STOP BEING MENTALLY ILL SO YOU CAN MAKE FRIENDS (although sadly that's how the world works it seems) because God knows I'm still a mess with the big Mental Illness Flare Ups here but again people just seem to know me well enough to go "ah there's that sylar being a sperg again! He will tire himself out eventually " and that's all it takes I guess?

Idk... Just... Work with people is my main point. Instead of using it as an excuse to be frustrating.

[Turner]

Not from what i've seen, no it doesn't. He shouldn't let them hold him back, however the site doesn't really romanticize personality disorders, otherwise I need that new pair of glasses more than I thought.

You only joined in 2011, so it was way before your time. You missed the AS | Fad and everything else that brought with it when people got bored and decided Aspergers was just too mainstream and moved on to bigger, better things to have wrong with them and went ahead and glorified those too, milking the sympathy cow for all it was worth.

[lets all go out for some frosty chocolate milkshakes]

Well I've learned something here today. I bet the forums would have been a blast back in 2006 if the Autism spectrum was the trendy thing, people would have been bragging about being at a higher quotient than everyone else.

everyone has that Awkward Teenage Phase where you try to be something Cool and Unique, it takes the whole of the 20s to shrug it off at least for most people. also Aspergers was only cool cos it was like "cool smart people autism", just being a straight up autist back then was Bad cos being acutally autistic was Weird and Not Cool and Err I Dunno This Wont Get Me Much Followers On DeviantArt

They should definitely read and understand the rules but it's indicative of a bigger problem here that we're not going to solve by hammering the rules into people. I'd go as far as to say this site needs to radically change as a priority if we want to stop this happening. This wouldn't be as big of a deal if the site and community was bigger and stronger.

how do you go about changing this, logistically though? this is the Unspoken Problem im hedging around.

Not from what i've seen, no it doesn't. He shouldn't let them hold him back, however the site doesn't really romanticize personality disorders, otherwise I need that new pair of glasses more than I thought.

lmao same, compared to some places this place is p easygoing, if a bit weird sometimes? apparently im a newcomer too cos i missed out all the Earlier stuff it seems and a few years ago i got p het up a bout a few things but these days????? eh

idk if former-day puk was anything like this but i was raised on forums similar to SA's Helldump and it was good to shock me out of my more Embarassing habits but it kinda "lived too long in NYC"'d me up a bit? where u end up a bit of a dick for a good while and just yell "hey im WALKIN here!!!" to everyone who even dares walk within 20 yards of you and then sulk in front of anime over why you have no friends for some reason cos you keep being nasty to them all.

and sometimes its just nice to be on a forum where you can actually be a bit of a huge dork y'know?????

I always feel a little awkward when people use mental illness as an excuse for being rowdy but I suppose that's my own internalised ableism or what have you. I have ASD and a few personality disorders that made me pretty goddamn terrible around here for years. Like Liz said I'd break rules like it was my job; I still talk to mods now who outright go "yeah man you were one of the worst members for a long time" and I can't take offence to it because yeah I was a mess. I think the thing is I grew up? And also people learned how to deal with me. I have an odd way of joking around and I'm generally pretty abrasive and I guess "intimidating" but the thing is like...

Even though I am a massive autist and I do have hella personality disorders and generally I am still A Big Mess, I still try to be accommodating so I'm easier to deal with? I don't expect everyone to have a degree in Dealing With The Mentally Ill Jerks Online. I dunno what I'm trying to say here I am tired.

Just try? To work with people? Using mental illness as a reason to break rules is all fine and good but honestly you'd have an easier time not using it as a reason to be weird about everything. Work with people and have people work with you so we know how to make things easier for you and you don't frustrate people and end up getting a bad rep.

i know this was directed more at The Name Master but the tricky step for some is understanding why and how the steps from "mental disorder out of control and screwing things up" to "getting it in a headlock and under some form of control and it not being an excuse". im sure ive rambled about it elsewhere but theres a whole bunch of stuff re: The Current Sad State Of Autism Care esp. regarding latent adult autism self-advocacy sadly which means a lot of people got left in the dark, specially since a lot of it is learning the Invisible Rules of social interaction that no-one overtly tells each other

like im not disagreeing with u tho, its No Excuse For Actions entirely and given im Fightin Hard against it to end up as part of the Effort (given up with most other lines of work that require you to be a lot more Socially Savvy to survive, given i got a lot of the autismo/dysautonomia/spazmo problems i might as well work with my own kind) so i can be Living Proof to people unconfident in themselves and their future that giving up is not an option cos how im a spazmo yet i made it n all etc etc yada yada

but yeh sometimes some people need a small step onto the bits between "dont yell at me im disabled!!!!!!" and "my disability does not define me //flexes strongly//", its a tricky one cos like in mental health problems it always takes people a while to "get it" and start to fight back against it.

not everyone does and ive known people who will frustratingly threaten to literally kill themselves if they dont get social support so they can kink it up all day long and tweet about it (still get Caremad thinking about them even now) but the Social Skills Machine sorts out those who won't listen rather than dunno how to listen eventually

*stands with a large board in front of number 10 downing street* PUK ANIME PUK ANIME PUK ANIME PUK ANI


in all seriousness, what about the kind of points system you sometimes see on forums thats like... 1 point for breaking the three word rule, dual posting that escalates etc and then u get to like 10 points for a 48 hour ban, 20 for a week long ban, 30 for a month, 40 a year and 50 lifetime (i think we'd shrink that down someone committing that many offences probably shouldn't be about past the 30 point idk)


i also remember back when i was Wee And Worse At Reading Comprehension (i literally had no idea abt the three word rule like?? three word rule??? i should be able to make posts with three words then??? but no it was four words) and the thing that really helped was when iceduck dropped me a wee correcting message and because he'd initiated and it was private and amicable i felt like i was able to go 'what does that actually mean???' and get some clarification.  i think there's something to be said for everyone kind of being split a little like good cop bad cop so like u have a few people being harsh and showing u how it's done and another few being welcoming and indulgent bc in my case that was really helpful for integrating me.

//joins u with placard// PUK ANIME PUK ANIME


ideologically this is kind of the thing im sorta badly trying to express, mods/people sometimes dropping a line in some way and going "yo i dont wanna be a dick but ____________, so watch out" when people keep Slipping Up and kinda trying to Sperg!explain why. its happened to me before when regular users have even gone "yo uh......" to which ive anime bowed and gone all GOMEN NASAI cos if ur an autist you kind of need a bit of Help in that regard sometimes. i kinda wanna do that thing maybe but i feel a little Arrogant telling other people stuff like that

ofc you'll have the troublemakers and the people who Wont Listen but they'll eventually decide this aint the place for them and ditch. a couple of proven transphobes dont post here anymore which is Good.

a sorta Points System might be a thing? kind of a Softer version of the Watched percentage maybe? as a kind of Profile Visible Reminder not to Double Post or whatever and it'd be a Warning to not engage depending on the type of w/e they had.  with some sort of Apt Theme to the clientele of the forum. i.e. 3-5 posting "uh ohs" and when u fail it u have to wear the Posting Diapers all visible on ur profile. everyone point at the posting baby.

(inb4 the "its u, beth. ur the bad posting baby!" and me all going "hey give over! its neurologi-....uh i mean yeh of course!!! its totes me haha uh")

[The name master]

They eventually leave cos to them everyone keeps yelling at them for no reason" and im worried The Name Master is gonna go this way.

Maybe I might.... I wouldn't have to rate terrible nicknames anymore....

PS: When you talk to me in a post and use my name, please just call me name master. It's like doctor who, nobody calls him the doctor when saying his name to him they just call him doctor.

[Turner]

how do you go about changing this, logistically though? this is the Unspoken Problem im hedging around.

This is precisely the elephant-in-the-room million dollar question and yes, it will keep coming up until something is done about it. I've tried to gather people to discuss this a few times with mixed results. I've tried speaking to Joeno and made very little progress. In the past year or two we managed to get the content's comment section open to community moderation; me and Del elected ourselves to do this. Before us, the content mods had basically given up on allowing comments altogether as there was too much spam, so a captcha was put in place so people could actually comment again.

Aside from this, I don't think there has been any other major change in the last 2 years; if there has - we haven't been told about it.

This forum's activity problem reminds me of the global warming issue in that the warning signs are constantly appearing with increased frequency yet people either just assume that it'll all blow over if they ignore it or they convince themselves that nothing has really changed and so nothing should be done.

The forum community here is strong and willing, but it's power is limited and its growth is dependent on the content of the main site. The most the forum can do is to expand and make inroads into other areas of the internet, but we can't make official PKMN.NET tumblrs, subreddits, twitters or Twitch accounts because it goes against the site rules (I believe there's already an inactive official twitter anyway).

I'm sure if we were to set up unofficial accounts and proved we could be responsible with them, we could convince Joeno to make them official; but why the hell would we do that, really? Being an LPer or YouTuber worth watching takes a lot of effort and skill. It isn't easy and you can easily make some money out of it, nobody in their right mind would hand it over to PKMN.NET as an entity after building up an audience and their viewers wouldn't be too happy about it either. If you have the skill to be an LPer worth watching with a decent audience, you wouldn't jeopardize your future by handing your successful channel over to someone else for nothing.

This site needs to be completely re-hauled and restructured so that the community actually drives the content of the site instead of generating it FOR the site. If you have a great guide on EV training, are you really going to post it on a website that looks fresh out of 2007, is awful to navigate on a mobile or tablet and nobody will read anyway because the navigation is so clumsy? Or are you going to post it on Reddit where you have a likelihood it will end up on a well-visted subreddit's wiki, viewed by thousands, maintained by others and referenced all over related subreddits in future threads where you can be quickly and properly credited for your work directly to your Reddit account?

Joeno has said before that if users want the site to change then they should do the work creating the content, but who's site is this really?

Either:

1) Update the main site completely so that it actually makes some sense in 2015; rethink the layout, make it encouraging to use on mobiles and tablets, get rid of these old school philosophies on only using home-grown content. Elect a handful of active individuals to approve inbound content and let the community generate the rest, get a familiar, well-documented CMS in place so the moderators don't need to think about what's happening in the background; make the job easy for them so they will stay active and can juggle it around their work/school life (This is why I suggested Wordpress a few months ago). Set boundaries on what content we are and aren't going to bother with; there are plenty of RESTful Pokedex APIs out there; do we really need users to waste time manually scraping together datasheets of stats and hold items just so it officially belongs to whoever is in charge of PKMN.NET?

Or:

2) Get active and start maintaining and updating this site yourself. Take charge of this site again and do with it whatever suits your vision of a 21st Century Pokemon website. Whether you turn it into something completely different or merge it with a facebook community and keep it as just a social media presence is your choice. If you're bored and want to shut it down because it's too expensive, too much work or takes up too much of your time then release the domain and pass the responsibility on to someone else who can build something out of the ashes.

We're going to keep going around in circles and coming back to this issue until the forum slows to a crawl and becomes inactive enough that Joeno decides to retire it. If that is the plan, then at least let us know so we know not to waste our time thinking about strategies to revive the site and can prepare ourselves for the big closure. The community is not going to be able to come up with a miracle solution to this inactivity; we're not Reddit, 4chan, tumblr or any other site completely driven by users, we're just posters on a forum.

[Clairefable]

^

Once again Turner has managed to articulate exactly what I've been wanting to say.

The general feeling is that no one can really be bothered. Many (if not most) formerly prominent members of staff are all but anonymous these days. That isn't a criticism; people grow up and grow away. That's life. But if the people who wield any sort of power to change anything aren't interested anymore then what chance do the rest of us have?

The thing that this place has/had going for it over other similar sites was/are the forums. Forget about the content. Do away with it. Keep the boards, and give the community more freedom to post and share content from elsewhere. (like Smogon or Reddit or whatever; not advertising "other" sites obviously). This need to have everything done "in house" by a select group is, in my opinion, a massive part of the problem. It might have been okay years ago when people were still at school and whatnot and had infinite free time to do these things but it simply isn't practical anymore. People see a website with minimal content and move on without even looking at the forums. And why would they?

These boards are the only thing keeping this site alive and as someone who's spend a good decade (at least!) here I'd be sad to see them go. But to be honest watching it slowly die like this is even more sad. It's time to either put it out of it's misery or give it a kick up the arse.

[Lord Raven]

And make the name rater thing a sub board that allows users to rate the nicknames without getting too crazy.  Keep cards, make more of an incentive to get cards but make them less clique-ish.

[Joeno]

This site needs to be completely re-hauled and restructured so that the community actually drives the content of the site instead of generating it FOR the site.

Can you explain what you mean by this? Content of the site is what goes up on the site, it seems like semantics.

For what it's worth, most of the tools are there, but nobody has ever really come to me with a reasonable attempt to learn how things work and what to do.

Or are you going to post it on Reddit where you have a likelihood it will end up on a well-visted subreddit's wiki, viewed by thousands, maintained by others and referenced all over related subreddits in future threads where you can be quickly and properly credited for your work directly to your Reddit account?

But with that argument, there's no point putting anything on the site in the first place, so why go on about content on here?

Joeno has said before that if users want the site to change then they should do the work creating the content, but who's site is this really?

A complicated mix of me (paying for/keeping things running/tech work) and other admins (such as Typhlosion) who don't want to put the time in.

Elect a handful of active individuals to approve inbound content and let the community generate the rest, get a familiar, well-documented CMS in place so the moderators don't need to think about what's happening in the background;

Get me the right people (and excuse me for having doubts about some due to past experiences) and this is a matter of me changing some numbers around.

The CMS is all handwritten (and the database near-impossible to port) and support most of these things already. Otherwise I can edit them in, I'd be happy to.

And Wordpress? Biggest security hole on the internet at the moment. Absolute, complete no way to that, ever.

do we really need users to waste time manually scraping together datasheets of stats and hold items just so it officially belongs to whoever is in charge of PKMN.NET?

I enjoy doing this stuff, and have been doing most of it, more on that in a bit.

Forget about the content. Do away with it.

Never going to happen. If we were to do that, we might as well close up shop. Why come here for just forums when there's plenty of others out there? Without the Name Rater (and I acknowledge that needs to be taken care of) we probably wouldn't have gotten any new members for years. This is probably going to sound pathetic to most of you, but I'd also feel I'd be betraying everyone who'd put the work into the site, not to mention throwing away their work. At best, it'd be the situation you're saying now - having it archived for people to do whatever they want to do with it.

For me then - to be honest, first of all, when these topics come up and the arguments occur about sometimes the flimsier things, and the tendency of the discussion usually feels like "throw away everything you've done and worked on", my instinct is to close the forums. It's a hassle to keep up, most of what comes out of it is a problem and when I need to deal with it, it's mostly a headache. I'd hand it over, but I can't say that's an option. I am, at least, considering having a stripped down forums mostly to serve the site bits that need it. After all, there are plenty of other places online to talk about these things, most more active than others.

For content, I'm not the right person to be writing it for various reasons. I've been meaning to give the pages an overhaul, but there hasn't been time. Nobody else has stepped up - those who have, usually didn't get very far before giving up. Still, it's there, no point in removing it and all that.

The fun part for me is in the tech work - getting things running and fixing things. I probably should do a layout overhaul at some point (but without a decent UX designer, it's difficult to get that right). Saying it's a 2007 layout... sort of doesn't match the feeling I get from every other site out there, but there's some changes we can make for mobile friendliness. I have to balance multiple needs there, though, so it's not as easily done.
Beyond that, this is a small portfolio piece for me, and something I want to expand. We have our own Pokedex because that's where a lot of the interest is for me, tracking data and expanding it. I've been working on a rewrite - years in the making because my time has been limited (and other events often make me not want to bother with it anymore), but it's something I want to work on. I'd continue working on that regardless of anything else that would happen, for my own entertainment, even if nobody else cared. For the same reason, the site isn't going to be taken down either. I enjoy the work too much and it's good practice for other projects and work. And it's also why I'm not just going to hand everything over to someone else - there's some pride involved here, and the feeling that if anything is going to happen, it has to be done well and fit in with what I want out of it.

Pushing more on that is useful though. For various reasons, I don't think a 'Name Rater' forum is going to do as well as the current anonymous setup we've got. Feel free to PM me suggestions for people who you think could do it - I'll handle it anonymously so nobody will learn for sure, but it should get it going again.

Beyond that, I'm willing to entertain plans on how to change things. More than just "We need to get people to have their own content", but actual steps to take, volunteers to do the work, and so on. It's always easier to say someone should do something than actually figuring out how to do it and where the time comes from.

[Clairefable]

Never going to happen. If we were to do that, we might as well close up shop. Why come here for just forums when there's plenty of others out there? Without the Name Rater (and I acknowledge that needs to be taken care of) we probably wouldn't have gotten any new members for years. This is probably going to sound pathetic to most of you, but I'd also feel I'd be betraying everyone who'd put the work into the site, not to mention throwing away their work. At best, it'd be the situation you're saying now - having it archived for people to do whatever they want to do with it.

For me then - to be honest, first of all, when these topics come up and the arguments occur about sometimes the flimsier things, and the tendency of the discussion usually feels like "throw away everything you've done and worked on", my instinct is to close the forums. It's a hassle to keep up, most of what comes out of it is a problem and when I need to deal with it, it's mostly a headache. I'd hand it over, but I can't say that's an option. I am, at least, considering having a stripped down forums mostly to serve the site bits that need it. After all, there are plenty of other places online to talk about these things, most more active than others.

That doesn't sound pathetic at all, and I suppose I never really thought about it from that point of view. I get what you're saying though, it's easy to forget that people have invested a lot of time and energy into what content we do have and I apologise if I sounded flippant. But what I'm getting at is if the content we do have is being neglected for whatever reason then is it adding anything? Perhaps rather than doing away with it altogether is it worth looking at perhaps "specialising" in a specific area of the fandom? For example, Smogon is best known for competitive battling. I suppose whatever this hypothetical field of expertise would be is up for debate. I'm just throwing ideas about at this point.

It seems obvious that everyone wants the same thing here; for the site to continue on and grow. What can we as a community to do help that?

[Joeno]

Thank you. It honestly helps to read that

As for what can be done - the problem is that we can't really hope to compete on content directly - we're too far behind and we'll never have people take a week or two off around a game's release to update content, as happens in other places. I believe it can help - a well positioned page that gives that bit more information can help get people in and give them a first place to check things, but it won't fundamentally change things.

The lead we had was 'community', but that doesn't necessarily come down to 'a better community' (which is vague and not something people will see straight away). It mostly manifests in interactive features. The name rater is one of them - and as I said, I'm willing to take ideas in PM, so we can put something in place there while still preserving the core anonimity. Other features could work as well - Ask Sentret never became as big, but could use some love. Cards could work, but that's something where I think we need to think of a bigger redesign to make that work. Having that be discoverable is tough, but it's the one unique edge we've got.

To expand on that, disregarding any comments on the site's layout being stuck in 2007, for technology we still are (or feel) ahead of most other sites, and that's something that can be used. It takes time to write things, but that can be made easier by knowing what to do, and some careful thinking can often make that easier. That still doesn't say what to do, though - but might give a direction on what I see as what to go for.

[Kpyna]

Cards could work, but that's something where I think we need to think of a bigger redesign to make that work. Having that be discoverable is tough, but it's the one unique edge we've got.

Would it be possible to maybe tie in cards to the forums a bit more? Like I just read that and had the idea that maybe we could create another member group for people who have collected a certain amount or a certain group of cards. Like, let's not lie, the pokeballs are SUPER snazzy and I'm sure if we made it so people with a significant collection got Luxury Balls or something else cool below their name people on the forums would immediately start paying more attention to cards.

[Turner]

Can you explain what you mean by this? Content of the site is what goes up on the site, it seems like semantics.

What I mean by this is that there's a difference between a site that relies on its users by approving content that they submit (Comparable to being a freelance writer and submitting articles to a newspaper, think Slashdot) and a site that is actively built on users submitting content (Reddit, tumblr, 4chan etc.)

For what it's worth, most of the tools are there, but nobody has ever really come to me with a reasonable attempt to learn how things work and what to do.

Why would they? You're acting like the site that YOU made is someone else's responsibility to maintain. It's your job to engage users, not for the users to have to learn how you do things and take time out of their day to keep your website running. Are you going to be paying them for this?

But with that argument, there's no point putting anything on the site in the first place, so why go on about content on here?

You're absolutely right, which is why we need to rethink the content we have. What kinds of content should we have and what kind of content should we focus on in the future - if any. We're wasting our time regurgitating what other sites already have.

Get me the right people (and excuse me for having doubts about some due to past experiences) and this is a matter of me changing some numbers around.

The CMS is all handwritten (and the database near-impossible to port) and support most of these things already. Otherwise I can edit them in, I'd be happy to.

With all due respect to your coding skill, is your handwritten CMS something that people will actually want to use to publish content to the site after a hard day at work/schoo? Remember that these people will likely be younger than yourself and will have been brought up learning to use the internet using apps and sites that may be wildly different to what you have back there.

And Wordpress? Biggest security hole on the internet at the moment. Absolute, complete no way to that, ever.

Regardless of whether you use Wordpress or not, there are far bigger security holes on the internet than Wordpress; what you really mean is that Wordpress is the most widely used CMS with the potential to be a security risk in the event of mismanagement and even then, I would say Joomla is far worse in this regard.
At work we have 4 UNIX shared hosting servers hosting about 1000 sites each; all of which are only open for enterprise customers - no personal sites, mainly SMEs who pay clueless developers large amounts of money to deploy Wordpress/Bootstrap. Most of the time they get attacked is when they've used a vulnerable theme, extension or set file permissions wide open to the whole internet. Cleaning it up, working out what went wrong and securing them going forward is trivial and it happens a lot less than you'd think. Joomla and Magento on the other hand are endless uphill struggles that normally end up in a migration to Wordpress anyway. It's okay if you don't use Wordpress, but you can do a lot worse.

That was kind of a massive tangent.

Never going to happen. If we were to do that, we might as well close up shop. Why come here for just forums when there's plenty of others out there? Without the Name Rater (and I acknowledge that needs to be taken care of) we probably wouldn't have gotten any new members for years.

There are plenty of forums out there, but there are also plenty of sites out there better maintained, better organized and better updated. Communities are flexible, they can afford to be duplicates of each other. Every few years a new 4chan alternative comes along and gets mildly successful due to old 4chan members getting bored with their current community. Nobody is going to 'get bored' of getting their content from blocked, Bulbapedia or anywhere else unless that data stops being updated or becomes difficult to access. Content is content, you just show up to the one that is most accurate, most easy to use and most convinient. Communities can be different or the same and people will still check them out. People will be a part of different communities at the same time because they all offer something different that can't be replicated.

This is probably going to sound pathetic to most of you, but I'd also feel I'd be betraying everyone who'd put the work into the site, not to mention throwing away their work. At best, it'd be the situation you're saying now - having it archived for people to do whatever they want to do with it.

It's not pathetic, and I understand it but that way of thinking just leaves us stuck without being able to move forward. Our only options with existing content is

1) Be ruthless and ditch it all together.
2) Keep it in place and have old, outdated content for nostalgia purposes
3) Revitilise it and port it across somewhere else.

For me then - to be honest, first of all, when these topics come up and the arguments occur about sometimes the flimsier things, and the tendency of the discussion usually feels like "throw away everything you've done and worked on", my instinct is to close the forums. It's a hassle to keep up, most of what comes out of it is a problem and when I need to deal with it, it's mostly a headache. I'd hand it over, but I can't say that's an option. I am, at least, considering having a stripped down forums mostly to serve the site bits that need it. After all, there are plenty of other places online to talk about these things, most more active than others.

Are you able to detail these plans at all? I don't blame you for wanting to close the forums or strip them back. The fact is, they're a shell of their former self and the most activity comes from the "I remember when I used to post here". I would rather see the place revitilised and have it evolve into something new and fresh than to have it completely closed down, but I'd rather have it closed than slowly die. I want some kind of progress or development, as do many others here.

We've got a legacy built on years of memories and a community who genuinely want something new. No emerging Pokemon website has that, so we're not just fighting against the inevitible here; there's definite potential, but I feel like any solution we come to is always going to be too little, too late if it isn't radically different.

Can I ask why you can't hand it over to someone else?

The fun part for me is in the tech work - getting things running and fixing things. I probably should do a layout overhaul at some point (but without a decent UX designer, it's difficult to get that right). Saying it's a 2007 layout... sort of doesn't match the feeling I get from every other site out there, but there's some changes we can make for mobile friendliness. I have to balance multiple needs there, though, so it's not as easily done.
Beyond that, this is a small portfolio piece for me, and something I want to expand. We have our own Pokedex because that's where a lot of the interest is for me, tracking data and expanding it.

It sounds to me like we may have a conflict in interests here.

I've seen videogame fansites with working forums pop up overnight days after a game is announced on places like Reddit and 4chan. These sites are normally deployed using some kind of new, experimental JavaScript framework on top of an LAMP stack hosted on AWS or something with the admin only having a marginal technical skills; but because it's new, flashy and built with web 2.0 design principles in mind, people flock to it and use it until something else comes along.

I'm not saying that this is a good idea at all for a number of reasons (Security and stability first and foremost), but this is basically our competition. The users of these sites don't care about the backend stuff; they see a flashy, minimally designed site with the bare minimum of content and functionality they need and flock to it because it's the first and looks the best.

Obviously if you were to do any of this, unless you wrote it all yourself it would remove the point of it being a portfolio.

If we're going to keep up with other sites, maybe we need to acknowledge that using this place as a portfolio versus keeping it modernised and active are two separate goals. Maybe we can split the site, keep this one and also work on a beta.pkmn.net for a new site until we're at a stage where it might be a good idea to merge the two sites into something new?

On top of this Joeno, I'd like to know what you think the future of this place is or what plans you have. If you share your vision for the site then maybe we can work with it.

[Joeno]

You're acting like the site that YOU made is someone else's responsibility to maintain. It's your job to engage users, not for the users to have to learn how you do things and take time out of their day to keep your website running.

You're saying these things need to happen. I don't feel that way. I'm speaking from your position that this should happen. I'm happy for things to stay the way they are.

With all due respect to your coding skill, is your handwritten CMS something that people will actually want to use to publish content to the site after a hard day at work/schoo?

Yes

Are you able to detail these plans at all?

None beyond possibly having only a handful of forums left, possibly mostly focus on site questions.

Can I ask why you can't hand it over to someone else?

Because I'm still involved, still doing the work, and don't want to lose that work.

I've seen videogame fansites with working forums pop up overnight days after a game is announced on places like Reddit and 4chan. These sites are normally deployed using some kind of new, experimental JavaScript framework on top of an LAMP stack hosted on AWS or something with the admin only having a marginal technical skills; but because it's new, flashy and built with web 2.0 design principles in mind, people flock to it and use it until something else comes along.

I'm not saying that this is a good idea at all for a number of reasons (Security and stability first and foremost), but this is basically our competition. The users of these sites don't care about the backend stuff; they see a flashy, minimally designed site with the bare minimum of content and functionality they need and flock to it because it's the first and looks the best.

So what would it do. It's all very nice to go 'flashy' and 'Javascript' and web 2.0, but what would you do with it?

It's really, really easy to say "This is wrong", but it would be far more constructive to give some actual ideas that can be worked with. I've not seen anything concrete from you, and that makes it really difficult to say anything about.

On top of this Joeno, I'd like to know what you think the future of this place is or what plans you have. If you share your vision for the site then maybe we can work with it.

At this point, for me a focus on more data-oriented content, making use of the large database we've got to give more specialized and searchable information. There's a lot of information that could be derived from that and it's the sort of thing that gets me motivated. Beyond that - it would depend on what else would be happening beyond me. But while it's just me, that's all you're likely to get.

[The Shrub Dragon]

im not letting this site be closed until we see the puk anime reach fruition