Seeing any major brand launch a dedicated forum in this day and age is surreal to see. Since it seems apparent we're on our way to a post-reddit world, perhaps this is a sign of things to come? I,...
Seeing any major brand launch a dedicated forum in this day and age is surreal to see. Since it seems apparent we're on our way to a post-reddit world, perhaps this is a sign of things to come?
I, for one, wouldn't be against a return to the 2000's web status quo of forum communities.
If any brand can pull it off, it's pokemon. The online pokemon scene is an absolute mess, so this tells me that tpci want better control over brand appearance. They also know there's a demand for...
If any brand can pull it off, it's pokemon. The online pokemon scene is an absolute mess, so this tells me that tpci want better control over brand appearance. They also know there's a demand for it, as evidenced by communities such as smogon, etc. And it looks like they're willing to pay moderators to moderate a community forum to make this possible. Good for them.
The way that the "professor program" used to organize tournaments and weekly meetups through Facebook was a bit dodgy as well. I'm not sure if they do that anymore. I hope they changed that, too.
I miss forums. They are so much better for finding old data or long form discussion. Reddit/Twitter have their place, but too often information is shared there that becomes impossible to find
I miss forums. They are so much better for finding old data or long form discussion. Reddit/Twitter have their place, but too often information is shared there that becomes impossible to find
Yeah, Reddit's forum format is fine for at-the-moment discussions but isn't conducive to long-term discussions and dive-down topics within a thread since you can't keep a thread bumped by simply...
Yeah, Reddit's forum format is fine for at-the-moment discussions but isn't conducive to long-term discussions and dive-down topics within a thread since you can't keep a thread bumped by simply posting to it. In Reddit, you'd have to basically have those various threads put into a Wiki and hope to find it there. That or use a search engine to find it.
It makes a lot of sense for a game like Pokemon that has a substantial number of players/users who are underage. They can keep tighter control over official forums. This is why Minecraft pulled...
It makes a lot of sense for a game like Pokemon that has a substantial number of players/users who are underage. They can keep tighter control over official forums.
This is why Minecraft pulled out of official reddit posts - they don't see Reddit as being safe for underage users anymore because content moderation is currently undergoing an upheaval.
I've got great memories of my time spent in specific forums back in the day. I used to spend a ton of time on the phpBB Smashing Pumpkins official forum. I made a ton of friends there from all...
I've got great memories of my time spent in specific forums back in the day.
I used to spend a ton of time on the phpBB Smashing Pumpkins official forum. I made a ton of friends there from all over the world, some who I still check in on every now and again. There were actually a number of forum couples who ended up married, think they're all still together as well!
There was also a IRC chatroom that Kerry Brown, one of Billy's friends and his record engineer and producer at the time, would join and discuss how recording was going. He even stealth released a track called Astral Planes by posting a link in the IRC one morning when it was only me in there idling, while I was doing other things. So I got to post the link to the track on the forums after listening to it myself a couple times of course, before it was released on Twitter later that day.
One of my favourites parts of the forum was the off-topic section. A bunch of us set up a game club, like a book club, but for retro games. It would rotate, each member would suggest a game for a retro console (PS1 and N64 was as late as we went) and we'd all take a week to play the chosen game and then review it. We got some great discussion out of it and I played a bunch of games I never would've that I had a ton of fun with.
Forums, if you could find one that clicked, were amazing. I'm really vibing with Tildes because it gives me similar feelings.
Between this and Minecraft transitioning to their own dedicated forums, I'm assuming it's going to be a trend. Honestly, as annoying as it will be for me, I can understand why they'd want to move...
Between this and Minecraft transitioning to their own dedicated forums, I'm assuming it's going to be a trend. Honestly, as annoying as it will be for me, I can understand why they'd want to move in this direction. It's just easier for them to manage and control if it's under their roof, plus they're not subject to the whims of jackass CEOs who can just upend everything at the drop of a hat... or at least they're only subject to the whims of a single in-house CEO and not some third party. They're able to get in front of any potential issues and can shut down any brewing controversies or customer-led uprisings. It's pretty much a return to the internet pre-Google Reader/pre-Digg/pre-Reddit, which is both good and bad. Hopefully we can get tools that let us just aggregate all this stuff ourselves or create our own self-hosted forums that can just pull from everybody else's forums (something like RSS I guess).
Most game developers do actually have an official forums of some kind, though it's often more an insurance policy against reddit, twitter, fandom or whoever going off the deep end than anything...
Most game developers do actually have an official forums of some kind, though it's often more an insurance policy against reddit, twitter, fandom or whoever going off the deep end than anything they make an active effort to promote.
The interface is HORRID. I hate everything about it, no redeeming qualities whatsoever. That said I'm thrilled to see a major brand launching a self-ran forum and I hope we see more and more of...
The interface is HORRID. I hate everything about it, no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
That said I'm thrilled to see a major brand launching a self-ran forum and I hope we see more and more of it. I'm so tired of subreddits, Discord servers, etc.
I mean if Discord were to resemble something of the "old internet", it'd be IRC. It's just different, not worse. It's so apples and oranges that it's hard to even begin to make a direct comparison...
I mean if Discord were to resemble something of the "old internet", it'd be IRC. It's just different, not worse. It's so apples and oranges that it's hard to even begin to make a direct comparison for general use.
Now, often the context is information storage, and in that aspect, yes, Discord is much worse than a forum or something like Reddit.
I'm pretty sure Discord is directly inspired by IRC. It has a display setting on dekstop called compact mode that mimics the IRC formatting, and I think it even used to mention IRC in the official...
I'm pretty sure Discord is directly inspired by IRC. It has a display setting on dekstop called compact mode that mimics the IRC formatting, and I think it even used to mention IRC in the official description somewhere.
Either way, there's no comparing discord and forums. One is for real-time chat, the other isn't. They're completely different formats.
Oh I'll absolutely agree that it does some things better than others - but when I see huge mega channels choked with bots and roles, it just makes me think "this could have been done so much...
Oh I'll absolutely agree that it does some things better than others - but when I see huge mega channels choked with bots and roles, it just makes me think "this could have been done so much easier with a forum."
I checked to see whether it feels like it is based on Discourse, and I'm surprised it is not. While not necessarily trivial to reskin, I cannot imagine especially a large forum this day and age -...
I checked to see whether it feels like it is based on Discourse, and I'm surprised it is not. While not necessarily trivial to reskin, I cannot imagine especially a large forum this day and age - a place where threads would massively benefit from tags - would not want to start with Discourse as its base.
Interesting, I personally dislike the Discourse interface. It's been a few years since I've participated on a Discourse forum though, maybe I should look at it again. What do you feel it does...
Interesting, I personally dislike the Discourse interface. It's been a few years since I've participated on a Discourse forum though, maybe I should look at it again. What do you feel it does particularly well?
The biggest win for me is their very central focus on tags instead of subforums. While they can superficially work the same - and many places used some tags as readily displayed links akin to...
The biggest win for me is their very central focus on tags instead of subforums. While they can superficially work the same - and many places used some tags as readily displayed links akin to subforums - they nontheless put the focus on a thread having "aspects" over "being in a specific place". A thread can be both a support call and about a specific product, instead of having to forcibly be placed in either the product forum or the support one.
And since users can filter any combination of tags this can then be customized.
Though I will say that from running an instance years ago, customizing it is not a trivial endeavour, so I guess that limits its potantial use.
Looks like they have been up for a few months - and are just getting to advertising it now? Interesting to see in this day and age when everyone else is getting rid of theirs.
Looks like they have been up for a few months - and are just getting to advertising it now? Interesting to see in this day and age when everyone else is getting rid of theirs.
I dug around a bit, and found posts dating to well over a year ago. Looks like they've been at it for a while, but are just now publicizing it. Must mean they're confident in having a larger...
I dug around a bit, and found posts dating to well over a year ago. Looks like they've been at it for a while, but are just now publicizing it. Must mean they're confident in having a larger userbase come in, and now's a perfect time to court new users.
"Did you know that Vaporeon..." But joking aside, if your choice is a forum that you can control and choose to moderate, or a subreddit you don't really control at all, it makes sense from a...
"Did you know that Vaporeon..."
But joking aside, if your choice is a forum that you can control and choose to moderate, or a subreddit you don't really control at all, it makes sense from a damage control perspective to shell out to protect your brand.
Exactly. This Reddit stumble is a golden opportunity for brands to create and control the forum dedicated to their products. Why would you want a third-party having control over the discussion of...
Exactly. This Reddit stumble is a golden opportunity for brands to create and control the forum dedicated to their products. Why would you want a third-party having control over the discussion of your brand?
For a forum dedicated to a specific product or brand, I can see this being a bad thing. When the moderators of a forum are paid by the brand, open discussion is going to suffer. But for things...
For a forum dedicated to a specific product or brand, I can see this being a bad thing. When the moderators of a forum are paid by the brand, open discussion is going to suffer. But for things like hobbies and niche interests, I would love to see the re-emergence of small, specific forums. That could be the silver lining to the whole reddit fiasco.
Minecraft announced that they no longer consider Reddit an appropriate avenue for official communications and will discontinue their involvement with /r/Minecraft. Reddit played a large part in...
Minecraft announced that they no longer consider Reddit an appropriate avenue for official communications and will discontinue their involvement with /r/Minecraft. Reddit played a large part in Minecraft's popularity in the first place, and the developers have been hanging out there since the early days.
It's also one of Reddit's larger subreddits, at over seven million subscribers.
Only if topics like "Which Pokemon is the hottest" and "I am immeasurably attracted to Gardevoir" aren't what they're going for. It's all about engagement, right?...
Only if topics like "Which Pokemon is the hottest" and "I am immeasurably attracted to Gardevoir" aren't what they're going for. It's all about engagement, right?
I'm not really sure this is going to catch on. This has existed for a while now (>1 year I think?). The vBulletin-esque forum niche is kinda already there in Pokemon, though. Smogon's forums are...
I'm not really sure this is going to catch on. This has existed for a while now (>1 year I think?). The vBulletin-esque forum niche is kinda already there in Pokemon, though. Smogon's forums are still pretty healthy, for instance. Of course, Smogon skews towards competitive play, but most active forums of games do, because, well, there tends not to be that much to talk about on an ongoing basis otherwise.
I'd assume the biggest demographic would be kids or more casual fans. I remember visiting the Pokémon site a lot as a kid despite it never really changing, and I also remember signing up for a...
I'd assume the biggest demographic would be kids or more casual fans. I remember visiting the Pokémon site a lot as a kid despite it never really changing, and I also remember signing up for a Nintendo message board as my first foray into the internet.
It actually seems like a pretty good option for introducing kids to the larger internet. Parents won't have to worry as much about their kids stumbling upon something inappropriate there since it's directly run and moderated by Pokémon.
After some cursory poking around I think it's bespoke. There's nothing detected by Wappalyzer and the HTML/CSS has no telltale signs of any identifiable software. Forums are pretty straightforward...
After some cursory poking around I think it's bespoke. There's nothing detected by Wappalyzer and the HTML/CSS has no telltale signs of any identifiable software.
Forums are pretty straightforward to implement so this isn't surprising.
Seeing any major brand launch a dedicated forum in this day and age is surreal to see. Since it seems apparent we're on our way to a post-reddit world, perhaps this is a sign of things to come?
I, for one, wouldn't be against a return to the 2000's web status quo of forum communities.
If any brand can pull it off, it's pokemon. The online pokemon scene is an absolute mess, so this tells me that tpci want better control over brand appearance. They also know there's a demand for it, as evidenced by communities such as smogon, etc. And it looks like they're willing to pay moderators to moderate a community forum to make this possible. Good for them.
The way that the "professor program" used to organize tournaments and weekly meetups through Facebook was a bit dodgy as well. I'm not sure if they do that anymore. I hope they changed that, too.
I think Minecraft could pull off having their own forums, also.
It still exists. Previously under the Curse umbrella, now part of Mobafire, who also seem to have taken over what's left of MTGSalvation.
I miss forums. They are so much better for finding old data or long form discussion. Reddit/Twitter have their place, but too often information is shared there that becomes impossible to find
Yeah, Reddit's forum format is fine for at-the-moment discussions but isn't conducive to long-term discussions and dive-down topics within a thread since you can't keep a thread bumped by simply posting to it. In Reddit, you'd have to basically have those various threads put into a Wiki and hope to find it there. That or use a search engine to find it.
It makes a lot of sense for a game like Pokemon that has a substantial number of players/users who are underage. They can keep tighter control over official forums.
This is why Minecraft pulled out of official reddit posts - they don't see Reddit as being safe for underage users anymore because content moderation is currently undergoing an upheaval.
I've got great memories of my time spent in specific forums back in the day.
I used to spend a ton of time on the phpBB Smashing Pumpkins official forum. I made a ton of friends there from all over the world, some who I still check in on every now and again. There were actually a number of forum couples who ended up married, think they're all still together as well!
There was also a IRC chatroom that Kerry Brown, one of Billy's friends and his record engineer and producer at the time, would join and discuss how recording was going. He even stealth released a track called Astral Planes by posting a link in the IRC one morning when it was only me in there idling, while I was doing other things. So I got to post the link to the track on the forums after listening to it myself a couple times of course, before it was released on Twitter later that day.
One of my favourites parts of the forum was the off-topic section. A bunch of us set up a game club, like a book club, but for retro games. It would rotate, each member would suggest a game for a retro console (PS1 and N64 was as late as we went) and we'd all take a week to play the chosen game and then review it. We got some great discussion out of it and I played a bunch of games I never would've that I had a ton of fun with.
Forums, if you could find one that clicked, were amazing. I'm really vibing with Tildes because it gives me similar feelings.
Between this and Minecraft transitioning to their own dedicated forums, I'm assuming it's going to be a trend. Honestly, as annoying as it will be for me, I can understand why they'd want to move in this direction. It's just easier for them to manage and control if it's under their roof, plus they're not subject to the whims of jackass CEOs who can just upend everything at the drop of a hat... or at least they're only subject to the whims of a single in-house CEO and not some third party. They're able to get in front of any potential issues and can shut down any brewing controversies or customer-led uprisings. It's pretty much a return to the internet pre-Google Reader/pre-Digg/pre-Reddit, which is both good and bad. Hopefully we can get tools that let us just aggregate all this stuff ourselves or create our own self-hosted forums that can just pull from everybody else's forums (something like RSS I guess).
Most game developers do actually have an official forums of some kind, though it's often more an insurance policy against reddit, twitter, fandom or whoever going off the deep end than anything they make an active effort to promote.
The interface is HORRID. I hate everything about it, no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
That said I'm thrilled to see a major brand launching a self-ran forum and I hope we see more and more of it. I'm so tired of subreddits, Discord servers, etc.
A discord server is just a forum with a worse interface, change my mind.
I mean if Discord were to resemble something of the "old internet", it'd be IRC. It's just different, not worse. It's so apples and oranges that it's hard to even begin to make a direct comparison for general use.
Now, often the context is information storage, and in that aspect, yes, Discord is much worse than a forum or something like Reddit.
I'm pretty sure Discord is directly inspired by IRC. It has a display setting on dekstop called compact mode that mimics the IRC formatting, and I think it even used to mention IRC in the official description somewhere.
Either way, there's no comparing discord and forums. One is for real-time chat, the other isn't. They're completely different formats.
Oh I'll absolutely agree that it does some things better than others - but when I see huge mega channels choked with bots and roles, it just makes me think "this could have been done so much easier with a forum."
I checked to see whether it feels like it is based on Discourse, and I'm surprised it is not. While not necessarily trivial to reskin, I cannot imagine especially a large forum this day and age - a place where threads would massively benefit from tags - would not want to start with Discourse as its base.
Interesting, I personally dislike the Discourse interface. It's been a few years since I've participated on a Discourse forum though, maybe I should look at it again. What do you feel it does particularly well?
The biggest win for me is their very central focus on tags instead of subforums. While they can superficially work the same - and many places used some tags as readily displayed links akin to subforums - they nontheless put the focus on a thread having "aspects" over "being in a specific place". A thread can be both a support call and about a specific product, instead of having to forcibly be placed in either the product forum or the support one.
And since users can filter any combination of tags this can then be customized.
Though I will say that from running an instance years ago, customizing it is not a trivial endeavour, so I guess that limits its potantial use.
Looks like they have been up for a few months - and are just getting to advertising it now? Interesting to see in this day and age when everyone else is getting rid of theirs.
I dug around a bit, and found posts dating to well over a year ago. Looks like they've been at it for a while, but are just now publicizing it. Must mean they're confident in having a larger userbase come in, and now's a perfect time to court new users.
Unless they have an absolute army of human moderators, this seems ill-advised...
"Did you know that Vaporeon..."
But joking aside, if your choice is a forum that you can control and choose to moderate, or a subreddit you don't really control at all, it makes sense from a damage control perspective to shell out to protect your brand.
Exactly. This Reddit stumble is a golden opportunity for brands to create and control the forum dedicated to their products. Why would you want a third-party having control over the discussion of your brand?
I have to say, I also like this move as a user. Trolls hop around subreddits too easily.
For a forum dedicated to a specific product or brand, I can see this being a bad thing. When the moderators of a forum are paid by the brand, open discussion is going to suffer. But for things like hobbies and niche interests, I would love to see the re-emergence of small, specific forums. That could be the silver lining to the whole reddit fiasco.
Minecraft announced that they no longer consider Reddit an appropriate avenue for official communications and will discontinue their involvement with /r/Minecraft. Reddit played a large part in Minecraft's popularity in the first place, and the developers have been hanging out there since the early days.
It's also one of Reddit's larger subreddits, at over seven million subscribers.
Only if topics like "Which Pokemon is the hottest" and "I am immeasurably attracted to Gardevoir" aren't what they're going for. It's all about engagement, right?
https://kotaku.com/pokemon-official-forums-moderation-ban-rules-nintendo-1850605719
Who could have seen this coming?
I'm not really sure this is going to catch on. This has existed for a while now (>1 year I think?). The vBulletin-esque forum niche is kinda already there in Pokemon, though. Smogon's forums are still pretty healthy, for instance. Of course, Smogon skews towards competitive play, but most active forums of games do, because, well, there tends not to be that much to talk about on an ongoing basis otherwise.
I'd assume the biggest demographic would be kids or more casual fans. I remember visiting the Pokémon site a lot as a kid despite it never really changing, and I also remember signing up for a Nintendo message board as my first foray into the internet.
It actually seems like a pretty good option for introducing kids to the larger internet. Parents won't have to worry as much about their kids stumbling upon something inappropriate there since it's directly run and moderated by Pokémon.
Anyone know what forum software they are using?
Also, why does their header1 take up half my screen...
After some cursory poking around I think it's bespoke. There's nothing detected by Wappalyzer and the HTML/CSS has no telltale signs of any identifiable software.
Forums are pretty straightforward to implement so this isn't surprising.
Looks like Vanilla