Opinions on the forums
I really like the forums. This place is amazing compared to certain other sites, it feels so free of toxicity and negativity. However, it has problems. Like not having a delete button for posts (though I guess edit is good enough, but for some reason it has a timer), and lots of bugs and glitches. Sometimes comments are invisible and a discussion keeps saying there's a new comment that you can't see until another comment is made, and I don't know if they fixed this next one but you could kinda delete comments on questions if they're on the second page and you accept them as an answer. And more things I forgot. But it's still pretty good and very enjoyable, it's been one of the best experiences I've ever had on the internet and I hope it stays this fun. Other sites leave me feeling awful, make me scroll for much longer than I should, and doing lots of bad things like supporting crime, and recommending negative content and brainrot (brainrot as in content farms, disgusting clickbait, and the like). But this one makes me feel happy and other positive things. It has actually/usually good discussions between real human people. And it's about my favourite thing ever, so I can participate in conversations and answer questions without fearing if I'm completely wrong or misunderstanding something, because I know a lot about the franchise and have played most of the games for years. I know most of the lore ("most of" is usually not a lot when it comes to lore, but we're talking about Pokémon. Trying to understand everything is just not possible or you'll end up insane). This place is nice.
Comments
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It feels like a bit of a throwback to earlier days of the internet for me. There was a time when every fandom had their own official forums. It had a sense of community, new users or even non-members could find all of the information and previous discussion on the forum publicly available, and it was a way to directly contact and provide feedback to the creators or developers of a franchise, or at least, forum staff could hopefully pass it along.
At some point that changed, perhaps because corporations became too afraid of controversy on their "official" forums. Discussion shifted to Reddit, Twitter or, perhaps most frustratingly, hidden away on a Discord server.
The information is not as readily available, you often get other fandoms or random people wondering into discussion from other parts of the site and causing problems, and it just feels a lot more alienating, disconnected and lacks a clear sense of community and identity that a dedicated forum provides.
Things aren't perfect, and you still get disagreements, arguments, misunderstandings and, inevitably, spam. And being a franchise for children, you do occasionally get someone blundering in and asking strange or obvious questions with variable standards of grammar. But for the most part people still try to be helpful.
I wish we didn't have forum ranks, post counts and badges, purely because people will be inclined to post excessively just to bump their ranks and perceived status. In my opinion, you should be judged by the quality of the content of your posts, not how many internet points you have.
A delete button and some further added functionality and housekeeping would be nice.
But generally, the forums are quite welcoming and civil. No political squabbling that plagues so many other online communities. At least, not since the influx last year. We keep getting the same "what's your favourite X", "what's the best X" or "1000 lions vs all Pokémon" repeat threads from time to time, but other than that, not too many complaints.
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i like the people, because they go friendly with each other and we can nice and ok talk about pokemon. Thank you guys
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With so much complaining, poor moderation, lack of feedback and a game so hated like TCG Live, wasn't aware people love this forum that much wow I'm honestly surprised 😮
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The forums themselves aren't very good (just ok in my opinion, I don't understand why an edit button took nearly a year of asking and deleting your posts isn't an option and a few other confusing things), but the community here is nice. There are only few toxic people, and AI or the like accounts aren't common. There's pretty much no drama, frustrating posts are rare, everyone is usually nice to each other, everything just feels so calm and welcoming, as opposed to rewarding laziness, pointless drama, and toxicity like most social media sites do. Maybe this is partially because of the people who approve posts, but I don't know. Maybe it has helped.
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