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 Current Status of Psypokes Network? 
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Psychic Trainer
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Joined: Sun Mar 06, 2016 3:21 pm
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What the hell is or isn't going on here? What can I do to contribute to help get things back to a fully operational status. I had a much older account that had way more posts from when I was a kid but I see this lack of activity and I want to help restore things, and possibly keep the up to date if possible. Is anyone of any of the site administrators or website operators still active and if so to what extent? Because these post dates are a mess and things seem really messed up.

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Sun Mar 06, 2016 3:26 pm
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Ace Trainer
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Joined: Thu Sep 05, 2013 9:28 am
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I get the sense that there are still members of the community who check in occasionally, but there just isn't any new content being added. Not only that, but despite Psypokes having a legacy of it's own, it just hasn't aged as well as other communities like Smogon or Serebii, in terms of its community.

I really do wish that Psypokes would see a revival, but unless something is done by its members to breed life and discussion, and frankly attention, back into the forums and content, Psypokes is just going to remain as it is now.

Maybe the best thing for now is to start relevant, substantive discussion, and to keep at it until more people come. I have no idea about any of the administrators, but what we need now is activity over organization.


Sun Mar 06, 2016 6:53 pm
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Psychic Trainer
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Well alright then. I would be willing to write up a ORAS Walkthrough and give Psypoke permission to post it in their Walkthrough section. If the Admins are willing to take that offer then I'll do it. But not till I hear from them first
(Hopefully this post will grab some attention) There is also the buzz about Sun and Moon coming out as well. I also think that the lack of new content is what's stopping people from wanting to join more because we are behind.

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Sun Mar 06, 2016 10:06 pm
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Psychic Trainer
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Joined: Fri Jan 10, 2014 1:23 pm
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I don't think there's just enough good members. That's all! What was this thing built for? I just found a random forum on the internet and only made a few friends.

I'm currently eating yogurt right now while reading this. I didn't know the date on the item I'm eating but W/E.

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Wed Aug 17, 2016 9:21 pm
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Ace Trainer
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Psypokes was one of the original online Pokémon communities, and actually hosted Serebii for a time. It started in 1999, in fact, but these forums weren't formed until August of 2004. I remember Psypokes being quite popular when I was younger, with regular trivia competitions and games, and what was a fairly comprehensive resource site and a good community, but since then it's lost it's niche. Serebii and Bulbapedia became more commonly used as news sites and information resources, and Smogon started dominating as a competitive and online community. As these sites drew people in and became more popular, Psypokes' community started to wither and fall away, until it's reached the state that it's in now.

I would still like to see a revival for Psypokes, but until some kind of niche can be found, I don't see it happening.


Mon Aug 22, 2016 8:42 pm
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Psychic Trainer
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I would have really loved to be in some popular communities. Instead I get unfairly banned off of serebii and bulbagarden, and psypokes is almost ending up the way pe2k did with the exception of dropping off the internet.

I really love using these forums for Pokemon and I should be able to, but in a community like this, it'll take a long time to receive any response from anybody.

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A mod talked to my son on bulbagarden and permabanned him unfairly. I told him he has nothing to worry about.
He has a mole on his right leg.


Mon Aug 22, 2016 8:55 pm
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THE POWER IS ON!
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Joined: Wed Aug 04, 2004 3:29 am
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The forums would probably be doing better if any of the staff felt like working on the main site, but nobody does anymore. Such is the fleeting nature of free time when you're in or approaching your 30's and have a job, personal life, other hobbies, etc.

I can usually work up enough effort to post the Youtube videos and quick summaries of all of the new reveals for Pokemon and such, but that's about it, and I've only even been doing that much because Jiggz, apropos of nothing, posted a site update once a couple months ago and I was like "WTF?" Shockingly, the reveals have been so frequent for Sun and Moon that the front news page almost makes the main site look active again. (The infamous Slowpoke ORAS Dec. 2014 update is nearly knocked off the front page now.)

The truly insane/sad thing is that Sun and Moon and Pokemon Go hype have been giving Psypoke absolutely insane hits all summer (like, nearly half a million pageviews per day), even compared to eras like HGSS where I had a full game walkthrough out on the games' English release date (I remember the sitewide counter averaging around 250-300k pageviews back then). But is that translating into community activity of any sort? Nope... no talkbacks on the main site updates. No interaction with all of those social media widgets under the updates. A couple posts a week here maybe. It's like 450,000 of those pageviews are Google bots or something.

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Mon Aug 22, 2016 11:57 pm
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Kiga wrote:
I remember Psypokes being quite popular when I was younger, with regular trivia competitions and games, and what was a fairly comprehensive resource site and a good community, but since then it's lost it's niche. Serebii and Bulbapedia became more commonly used as news sites and information resources, and Smogon started dominating as a competitive and online community.


Serebii was always more popular. Bulbagarden was too as soon as Bulbapedia became a thing nearly a decade ago at this point. (I remember being bitter back in the day, when Wikipedia arbitrarily decided that a) every Pokemon species didn't deserve its own Wikipedia article and b) Pokemon articles only needed a link to Bulbapedia articles instead of a giant list of a bunch of different fan sites - Bulbapedia really started to eat into everyone else's traffic around that point. lol)

I never really "got" what other people found so fascinating about Serebii's site, what actually attracted people there in the first place. To his credit he obviously has worked hard on it consistently and for a long time, but the site layout, especially the menu navigation, has always been cluttered IMO. Especially the way the content is presented as this massive list of things and then you actively click in on each page and get a lot of stuff on right-side menus that could have been easily consolidated with other pages, etc. It always felt like the definition of quantity over quality, but that's just my two cents and he's obviously doing a lot more right than we are at this point.

Bulbapedia on the other hand were genius for getting in on the fan wiki thing only a couple years after Wikipedia blew up and became ubiquitous, and because so many people contribute to it, it's a lot easier to create quality content. Smogon as you said had a specific niche beyond being the Walmart and the Target of the Pokemon fandom. I also find it hilarious that people get so bitter over Smogon trying to "police" the metagame even though people are free to play Pokemon however the hell they want outside of Smogon's servers. lol Pokebeach found a niche like that too for being focused so heavily on the TCG, which was an aspect that goes ignored in a lot of Pokemon sites on the Internet. (Relevant because the TCG was one of the few things that got me excited to work on Psypoke in more recent years - I really wanted that library of card scans to be a reality...)

I would say our niche was trying to make the Psydex as good as we possibly could, but, eh, you can only do so many iterations of the same concept (i.e., a fan-created Pokedex).


Quote:
I really love using these forums for Pokemon and I should be able to, but in a community like this, it'll take a long time to receive any response from anybody.

Well, I did warn that it was dead here when you asked to be unbanned...

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Tue Aug 23, 2016 12:35 am
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Psychic Trainer
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Quote:
I really love using these forums for Pokemon and I should be able to, but in a community like this, it'll take a long time to receive any response from anybody.

Quote:
Well, I did warn that it was dead here when you asked to be unbanned...[/color]


No, I didn't just mean the psypokes forums in general. I meant every other Pokemon forum which was long active and had a ton of members and threads moving at once. Any time an issue arose on those forums, I would have been able to go to a mod to report the conflict and resolve it peacefully. I have seen none of this here lately.

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A mod talked to my son on bulbagarden and permabanned him unfairly. I told him he has nothing to worry about.
He has a mole on his right leg.


Tue Aug 23, 2016 3:01 am
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Ace Trainer
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I do understand that life comes first, but the answer probably would have been to find people who could take on the roles that were being left behind. Of course, I assume that you and the others who might be involved have considered this far more than I have, but I do think sizable issue is that people just didn't stay and post with any regularity, or in any meaningful way. There can only be so many variations on "Dream Teams" and "What Pokémon should I use?" before the reason to join such discussions disappears, and people look elsewhere for more interesting topics. Maybe it wouldn't hurt to adopt some discussion starters from other communities? Such as starting our own version of in-game tiers for games? We need people to discuss topics, and topics to draw people, so it feels very much like a Chicken vs Egg situation.

About Serebii, I don't actually know much about the early days of online Pokémon communities. Psypokes was the first community that I joined, back in 2004, but I was a little brat back then and ended up embarassing myself into leaving. So perhaps it was bias on my part that Psypokes was more popular then, but I don't know.

I can say that I do feel slightly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of dead discussion topics, and sometimes it feels like it may help to start from scratch, and to lock the older threads away in a 'vault' forum not unlike Lintaro's Lair. I would like to help if I could in any way, but I feel at a loss about what I could actually do.


Tue Aug 23, 2016 7:56 pm
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Pokemon Master
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Kiga wrote:
I can say that I do feel slightly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of dead discussion topics, and sometimes it feels like it may help to start from scratch, and to lock the older threads away in a 'vault' forum not unlike Lintaro's Lair. I would like to help if I could in any way, but I feel at a loss about what I could actually do.


This, what's here should be locked away and reboot the forums to a much smaller format, not to say this hasn't already been happening with some but all the old post clutter in the condensed subs keeping anything fresh from standing out, at least remove the 11 stickies in the main pokemon game sub.



The main site needs some love as well, just archiving some of the old or dead(Psypoke idol) and updating the quicklinks to the Dex, CardDex, Psylab, events etc.


Mon Aug 29, 2016 8:01 am
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Eleven stickies was me cutting down on the new all-purpose video game forum. When I first merged all of the game boards into one, there were like thirty different stickies. lol

I don't really see why having all of the old posts/boards is overwhelming though? If people really want to post here still, there's nothing stopping us from starting new topics or bumping old topics with relevant replies.

Updating the main site beyond making a news update (which has its own convenient admin panel-based form) is something I just can't/don't want to wrestle with personally. I said this before but a few years ago the others updated the infrastructure for the site so that using an FTP client was no longer an option, and instead you need an entire active copy of the main site sitting on your hard drive and adding new content mirrors whatever is sitting on the local copy. It was a mess that I didn't really understand. So if anything is happening where the main site is concerned, I guess that would be Jiggz or Serpentsounds's call.

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Tue Aug 30, 2016 7:29 pm
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Psychic Trainer
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Can I help clean the forum and make it a lot tidier? We don't have the option to delete posts.

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A mod talked to my son on bulbagarden and permabanned him unfairly. I told him he has nothing to worry about.
He has a mole on his right leg.


Thu Sep 01, 2016 8:39 pm
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Pokemon Master
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I still solely use Psypokes on my side. It has the best layout, I can actually find what I want to find, and it has the best pokedex in my opinion. As for Serebii, whenever I went here it was for the events, but now I only play Mystery Dungeon 1 and 2 until Sun & Moon comes out.

Btw, have you seen Serebii's updated forum rules? It's a **** mess; the first time I posted there I got two infractions lmao. I don't know why those forums are still working they are the worst. And the layout is so bad I can't find anything.

But I think for the activity to come back on our forums you need to simplify it a bit... there are too many sections and I don't feel like searching them to find new posts. I have a bunch of exciting new things to share but I feel like no one will find my posts. And yea, let us make new threads the other ones are too old, fresh stuff is neat. Also grab some new meat to moderate and write stuff around your website, the old ones probably won't ever come back.

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Sun Sep 04, 2016 1:45 pm
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