I think everyone here's gone over the important stuff, but the main issue here is to avoid making generalised rules. You always have to look at the specifics of the situation to ensure that applying the aforementioned generalised rule makes the desired outcome.

I'm not sure if there's any extra specifics in your pokemon story that would make me change my mind, but I don't think it's possible to have a wrong opinion on a pokemon-related issue.

It is possible to have a wrong opinion on things like religion, life, rights of children, how to treat other people etc, but it depends on the exact situation.

One thing I couldn't help but think about Miasmon was that it was pretty much in a releaseable state, but the fanbase started requesting more features unnecessarily. I mean, people complained about a not-awesome storyline, but it's a catch-em-all monster game, it doesn't NEED a storyline other than "go out and catch them all". A storyline could really wait for Miasmon 2, after the characters are established.

The same with animating all of the Miasmon monsters - the pixel graphics look fine, animated-moving-superpretty-lotsofwork Miasmon monsters could really wait for Miasmon 2... after the series was established. And having pixel monsters in 1 replaced with animated monsters in 2 would give an "everything old is new again" impression.

I trust your decision and am happy with whatever you decide to do. Any implied suggestions I made are bad and should be ignored.

Looks cool. When you have some spare time, and feel up to it, please post some more art.

I thought there were a fair few positive things in this update, or at least for us, the fans, there's a lot to look forward to.

Just speaking very generally, I look forward to hearing about your progress on all of the things you mentioned.

Pseudo has consistently mentioned in more recent posts that he is no longer impressed by huge wordy essay posts. He prefers succinct, concise, to-the-point posts now. If you are discussing or reviewing something, I agree, elaboration is important, but when you consider that the majority of Pseudo's posts nowadays are about personal feelings and frustrations, of which he wants support without advice or judgement, a minimum word length is actually detrimental. It prevents people from being able to write simple but strong messages such as "Good luck" or "I support you", which in turn changes the atmosphere of the site subtly into something colder and more clinical.

Altemeus, you said in your post... "before 50 posts down the line".... that's part of the issue. We don't get topics 50 posts long. We're lucky to get 5 posts in a topic, over the course of a week.

The issue is that the kind of thoughtful, intelligent, sensitive people who make constuctive posts are scared away from posting at all because they fear criticism via either FLIGS or other users lecturing them on wasting people's time. You and I agree that no one would ever actually do this to a constructive poster, but it's a PERSPECTION issue... when you consider people who visit this site who have low self-esteem and a low opinion of themselves anyway, it's hard enough to post without the constant reminder and the risk of breaking a rule.

Useless comments such as "That's just stupid" with no further explanation will easily be weeded out by moderation and a 'report abuse' button. We have more moderators than just Pseudo. Lack of moderators is no longer an issue. And as you said in your post, by developing an automated system that weeds out people who say "that's just stupid", you also weed out people who would simply say "I support you", or "Good luck", or "I love you". You can't develop a perfect system that turns a troll into a thoughtful intellectual. A system is only as good as the people who use it.

Look, in the end it depends what your objectives are. Do you want a website which is social and friendly, or do you want a debate website based around rating posts? In this case, my suspicion is that Pseudo is no longer interested in endless debates - while he used to participate in them strongly, he doesn't even read them now - he's more interested in a more social, relaxed forum.

It's pretty much the same reason Facebook doesn't have an "unlike" feature. Systems that encourage people to be judgemental of each other scares off the sensitive, quiet people, and creates an environment where alpha males thrive.

I'd also love to see the "50 character minimum for posts" removed. My tip is that that minor rule is actually stopping some people from making positive, supporting posts, and strange as it sounds, it's removal would contribute to a more postiive atmosphere for the site.

In a similar fashion, I'd love to see the long, long list of rules cut down and summarised essentially to "don't be a jerk". To me, that's the only rule that matters.

Thanks for the update. Looking forward to hearing about your success.

I think this site does actually encourage sexism (and also ageism) to a degree. The main thing is how when you sign up, putting in your age and gender is MANDATORY, and then at the top of every single post or comment you make, the site shows your age and gender.

The main thing about sexism is the whole "treating people differently due to their sex". Having the gender and age on the post makes it difficult to judge the post on its own MERITS. Instead you're aware the whole way through reading the post that it was (for example) written by an age: 15 gender: male, and this encourages people to interpret the post based on that additional information, either giving it more or less weight based on these additional factors that weren't present in the post itself.

I'm also going to ignore the elephant in the room, which has been the news/blog posts on the front page over the past few months. *nonchalant whistle*

Back when I was in school, I used to call Japanese people Japs.

"Japs" is a racist derogatory term. But for the life of me I couldn't think how! So I'd use the word and then when people accused me of being racist, I'd respond that Japs is merely an abbreviation of Japanese in the same way that Aussie is an abbreviation of Australian, and Aussie's not considered a racist term, so why would Jap? And also I personally LIKE Japanese people, and I'm not using the word with malice! My INTENT was never to be racist, so therefore I wasn't being racist! What I eventually learned later (too late, but nevermind) is that interpretation is more important than intent as far as two people talking goes. Doesn't really matter what I intend when I talk if the other person interprets it differently to how I expected.

The only reason I bring this up is to clarify what I meant earlier when I said your posts are written like advice posts. I am aware that this is never your intent, and you do specifically say, often, that you don't want advice unless specifically asked for.

But the way your posts are written... It's raw, unfiltered emotion, and (at least for me, and I'm assuming the same thing for other posters) it resonates somewhere inside me. The prose makes me feel almost like I can understand the pain and frustration sentiments behind the post. It's here that your post gets reinterpreted into an advice post: When we combine empathy for a person with the ability to help (people assume that because they have less trouble with particular things than you, that they can help in some fashion, regardless of whether it's true or not), you have all the emotional ingredients for responding with an advice post. And then people respond with the best advice they can give, whether it's tough love, or posting a link to some website or whatever. I know for me it's so extraordinarily difficult to read one of these and not respond in some fashion; It's just unfortunate that there's never anything useful I can do by responding.