The official Pokemon forums are now having their own forum gym challenge, which in practice is more like a thread for nominations where everyone takes a role of gym leader or something.
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/10788/should-we-do-a-forum-gym-challenge-thing/p1
The main reason I mention this is that this thread has been explicitly approved as a "fun idea" by a forum moderator, which I have previously criticized for being too uninvolved in the community.
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/comment/36517#Comment_36517
The other reason I mention this is that this also involves a vote for who has to be the champion, which is probably the most important election this year after the Smogoff People's Moderator.
Currently the main candidates are Josiah2580, UnovanZorua, and Ravenclawed1234. I will go over each of their campaign positions here.
Josiah2580:
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/10794/vote-for-me#latest
After his DnD attempts, short farewell, and unofficial return discussed in the last post, Josiah2580 has changed to a Porygon2 avatar and is pivoting to a new type of campaign. Due to being the first candidate to sign up, he secured a few early voters and is the only candidate to make their own thread to request votes, but lost impact quickly after other options became available.
UnovanZorua:
UnovanZorua is the second poster to sign up for the championship. I can confirm they are the current highest ranked poster on the forums in terms of points, which can be found on
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/badges for the top 25, or
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/activity which shows the top 10 posters of the week as well, with their feat of 500 points earning them 4 stars. However I cannot confirm any other details as their profile is currently private, but overall they come off as one of the more well written posters.
EDIT: Also I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but speaking of badges, the 4 badges that show under a user on their post used to show their highest value badges at least back in 2023, but now they just seem to show only the lowest ranking ones in some arbitrary order which has much less bragging worth.
Ravenclawed1234:
The final candidate is Ravenclawed1234. All I know of them is that they still have an old Unite avatar of Zeraora and I believe they have the earliest joindate of December 9 2022, since their user ID is 2951 while UnovanZorua's is 21081 probably joining sometime in 2023, and Josiah2580's is 35453, joining on February 7, 2024.
While voting began this morning, more details of the league settled in for a full house, and the vote thread was also used for debates/questions from the public at the same time.
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/10803/champion-voting/p1
Ravenclawed1234 sets an example to vote for another candidate.
The public begins asking important questions.
Ravenclawed1234 proposes a clean energy plan for the region and cites their veteran forum experience.
UnovanZorua highlights their knowledge of the main games and has a tough stance on crime.
Josiah5280 keeps it short and to the point with their 3 years of Pokemon playing and promises to be just while not holding back.
Counting all the votes so far including from candidates, early votes heavily favour UnovanZorua with a total of 1 vote for Ravenclawed1234, 6 for UnovanZorua, and 2 for Josiah5280.
(from the main thread)
Resilient30 is still a skeptic but seems to be engaging most with Ravenclawed1234.
Coming back to the actual moderators, notably Mod_Skrilla has gotten better at being less generic with their feedback, aside from bugs.
Here they are commenting positively on a Pokemon quiz thread:
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/10717/pokemon-themed-quiz
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/comment/36524#Comment_36524
And actually engaging with the topic of a thread and expressing an opinion:
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/10666/if-you-were-a-pokemon-which-one-would-you-be
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/comment/35921#Comment_35921
And responding to feedback about SV, though in a kind of generic way.
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/10626/pokemon-scarlet-and-violet-can-be-better
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/comment/35743#Comment_35743
Sometimes they still post irrelevant posts about TCG Live in non-TCG threads though but it's an improvement.
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/10643/nintendo-not-appearing-at-gamescom-2024
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/comment/35812#Comment_35812
They congratulated someone's achievement which they used imgur links to display, so I guess that's a more implicit approval of external links contrary to other mod behaviour.
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/10584/arceus-league
They also congratulated the OP of a thread from 2023 that just got bumped.
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/2477/post-your-decks-rate-decks/p1
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/10769/tera-raids-are-impossible
It is humbling to see how the average pokemon player views tera raids.
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/10776/why-can-t-i-play-my-switchcart#latest
Apparently there's a card called Switch Cart which threw me off in this context.
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us...er-pokemon-unfit-for-pokken-tournament#latest
Josiah2580 is up to more antics, fortunately not posting his phone number this time.
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/10770/do-you-have-spotify#latest
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us/discussion/10740/i-know-how-we-can-do-d-d#latest
As a last note, someone is asking the Pokemon forums for serious help with a Pokemon GO stalker, and the community has banded together to support them in the only way the Pokemon forums can, by telling them to call the police and/or do something else:
https://community.pokemon.com/en-us...ng-with-an-aggressive-pokemongo-player#latest