Smogon 2012 in a Nutshell

Vader defies the rule of birthday threads and posts a birthday thread, for himself. He then proceeds to draw comics for his own amusement. For some reason, every year seems to start like this.

Haunter adds the "Spambot Infraction" so mods can immediately ban spam accounts with enough infraction points. This is generally regarded as the only useful thing he's done as admin.

The Smog #18 is released; within it, Rising_Dusk gets interrogated and Oglemi introduces readers to a NU metagame. This issue begins the nominations for the Smog Awards.

Haunter implements the Community Contributor badge to reward users who are community examples and assist the site in ways not recognized by regular badges. The result leads to months of bickering and bloodshed, but it's not a "we like you" badge.

mingot adds YouTube tags to the forums; badgeholders rejoice with lackluster video spamming. To this day people still put the full YouTube URL into the tags.

Aldaron asks if the "." in -.- represents a nose or a mouth. Mouth wins in the poll, but only by a nose.

az gets fed up with +,*,** being used to recognize staff; he goes on to post a convincing argument that gets the + minused; now no mod needs to worry about someone including the + in their name.

Articuno64 adds BBCode to the SCMS so regular forum users don't have to take a programming class to understand some of the code on the analysis pages.

CAP completes the Grass / Ghost Essence Pokémon, Necturna, with the ability to learn Sketch once. The moveset discussion is largely based off what people don't want to waste the one Sketch move on.

Pokémon Black 2 & White 2 are announced not much is known at the start and the money grubbing seems to be in full force again, but it is universally agreed to be "better than a Grey Version".

Snunch wins Smogon Tournament #8. A user who was thought to be a joke in 2011, in the end he Snunch into the finals and won.

The Smog #19 is released; in its pages is a list of 10 fabulous Pokémon that turns Layell into Gayell. Komodo writes an article on forgotten strategies. A Tyranitar is reported laughing that the Endure/Reversal strategy was so forgotten even this article forgot about it.

Desolate comes out of nowhere and simultaneously revives The Well. The last person who was in The Well fails to realize how long they have been in there and really needs a shower.

Tiering Contributor scandal causes massive uprising. The value of the badge fluctuates on the world market and causes the appearance of forged badges to those who can pay the Pokémon Dollars.

Articuno64 steps down from admin; it turns out it's not an elaborate April Fools' Prank.

Alpha Ruiners win Smogon Premier League #3 and avoid placing second place for three years in a row, as well as avoiding the required name change to become the Beta Ruiners.

Theorymon posts a thread that he's been working on for years regarding the site layout on the Inside Scoop forum. Badgeholders are crushed under its massive size, and rescue teams are brought in to save some users from posting "tl;dr". An interesting concept, and it solidified Theorymon's username.

az learns that moderators can close threads by double-clicking the page icon. It doesn't make much of a difference, since it's a rule mods must make a funny post when closing a thread.

Rodan ventures onto ChatRoulette in the only thread of 2012 to make Smogon's Greatest Hits. His sequel to the original isn't as well received. The community is still waiting for when he ventures into the world of Russian Roulette.

Synre creates Orange Islands and TCG forums. OI quickly becomes a hub for in-game tier lists and chatter about the side games. The TCG forums is used so people can win more prizes at the live events held by Nintendo.

The Smog #20 is released. In this issue are some of the most dangerous Pokémon are ranked as if they existed in the real world, Pokémon Biology debuts, and many users are awarded the Mock Smog Awards.

Iconic petitions to re-introduce suspect testing; it's ignored for weeks, but eventually gets traction.

DougJustDoug and mingot banish all avatar restrictions there is a hope that users will remain reasonable in avatar size. This doesn't happen and giant RBY sprites and gigantic desktop backgrounds fill avatar spaces across the forums. Smogon is thrown into the Dark Ages until order is restored.

Birkal and tennisace buy Butterfree, Koffing, and Rotom in The Speed Gamers' Pokémon Marathon. In total, The Speed Gamers raised $59,324.36 and all of the Smogon community enjoyed their week-long marathon.

Regulars of the VGC tournaments step down from staff positions at Smogon to form Nugget Bridge, a community dedicated to the live tournament scene. Dozz posts a photo of himself flipping the birds to a webcam to represent his feelings of tier bashers' VGC treatment, and as a result creates one of Smogon's best memes.

CAP completes the Fire / Poison Mantle Pokémon, Mollux. This adorable slug uses its normally poor typing to its advantage. It will soon be available in lava lamp form at your nearest PokeMart.

kingofkongs wins Smogon's VGC 2012 Tournament and later follows up with a top 8 placement at VGC Worlds. It is rumoured that at Worlds he bragged about being "the best player from the internet" when playing people not from Smogon.

The Competitor goes live; in the spirit of its tournament-centric nature, a tournament is held for who could make the first post.

ToF wins Smogon Tour Season 13. In his victory post he admits some of his luckiest matches and thanks everyone who helped him, as well as all his opponents. Everyone he faced unanimously agrees those matches were ToF.

A whole bunch of Smogonites do well in VGC Nationals. Another wave of warstories appears on the forums, along with a flood of pictures.

Smogon officially switches over to Pokemon Showdown! as its simulator of choice. Zarel celebrates by going out and getting groceries and then promptly returning to program more.

First #orangeislands movie night, which features a Pokémon movie or anime special, fittingly airs Pokémon: The First Movie. The weekly event creates running jokes, from Arceus' awful voice actor to macaroons laced with illegal substances.

BlueCookies wins VGC World Championship; the jokes of the threepeat are finally put to rest, only to be replaced with the awful "fourpeat". Sales of burgundy hoodies skyrocket.

Team USA West wins the World Cup of Pokémon VII. The chants of "West Is Best" still ring through many ears.

The Smog #21 is released; users are berated for using Charizard in Ubers and movesets which nobody should use are explained to the masses. The Orange Island Players decide to conquer the island of the Pokémon TCG game for the Gameboy Color.

Philip7086 conquers Smogon Frontier VI; since he now has so many tournament trophies, he uses this one to hold the pits of the cherries he eats.

Smogon Battling 101 and VGC Battling 202 combine forces to better help the new users. Their attempts to create a giant combination mech go unrealized.

Pokemon Showdown! surpasses Pokémon Online as the most popular Pokémon simulator on the Internet. Zarel celebrates by taking a five minute break before immediately returning to code double battles.

Oglemi asks where you can find the log of past name changes; Jellicent finds it while drunk.

In an effort to let more tournaments become decorated with banners and logos, as well as lowering Zracknel's blood pressure, the Art for Tournaments thread was launched in Smeargle's Studio.

The Orange League begins, where players are forced to restart their game cartridges to compete in sadistic challenges.

OU Suspect testing begins with a new outlook in the fifth generation. Garchomp returns to the OU stage, to the delight of millions. Flygon is found crying on a street corner in Mauville.

Furai is forcibly renamed to Furry; we're still not sure which admin did it.

Ubers Clause Suspect Testing nabs the spotlight. No, this didn't mean we wanted to ban Arceus. Rather, clauses such as OHKO clause and evasion clause are tested to see their effects on the Ubers game.

#smogon becomes non-affiliated from Smogon; try wrapping your brain around that one. Any AOPs and SOPs of #smogon receive alumni badges. The channel is thereafter referred to as the place IRC conversations go to die.

Smogcast 14 discusses BW2 OU and some of the recent tests. MikeDecIsHere and panelists IFM, Locopoke, and Lavos Spawn are forced to re-record, but despite the setback, the discussion is still lively.

Smogon gives away a copy of Black 2 & White 2; one was entered through an experience write-up that was submitted on the forums, and the other involved posting your username on the Smogon Facebook page. This unintentionally resulted in many friend requests from those bored enough to see which users wanted a free copy of the game.

Matthew starts up the Seasonal Ladder, a limited random battle mode based around a theme. The first one is Thanksgiving for November, involving as many birds and eating Pokémon as possible.

UU decides to retest Snow Warning due to many hail abusers now being absent from the tier. RU and NU get the short end of the stick with the retest, and policy is put in place to govern how bans will affect lower tiers.

Kyurem-B is voted to be legal in OU; everyone insists that this decision is not racist in any way.

Infractions for individual posts are made visible to all users; everyone gawks at the bad posts that still are not receiving them. The Wi-Fi forum lights up like a Christmas tree and respectable older users panic to see if they have embarrassing infractions which are now completely visible to anyone bored enough to look.

The Smog #22 is released; this starts the new trend of monthly releases for The Smog, since everyone realized all work on articles is done in the last week anyway. (With the exception of this article, of course, which Birkal and Layell have been diligently working on for the entire year.) Highlights include a photo tour of the Smogon Minecraft server and a guide on using the move Protect, which in other magazines would count as the sex advice column.

Battle of the Week is shut down due to a controversy with yan[sogeking]; Bloo makes his first post in years.

CAP completes the Bug / Psychic Gold Standard Pokémon, Aurumoth. The bug was designed to test the concept of risk in competitive play so it was only natural to use a Bug-type. Aurumoth soon begins a rivalry with Volcarona as to which is the best Bug-type.

Ciele wins Smogon Grand Slam Tournament, and thus gets VM spammed with pages upon pages of "congrats" and "omg trophy". Ciele quickly realizes that every waking moment on PS!, some random will attempt to challenge him in a desperate attempt to take the trophy. Nobody remembers who McMeghan is.

Matthew creates his ten thousandth thread in Inside Scoop. Literally everyone is sick of him posting drunk. Within the ramblings, he manages to offend all of the Little Cup people.

The OHKO clause is retained in Ubers testing; every attack is already an OHKO, really.

a forum receives the serious tag, and is immediately used to justify posting pornography by malicious users. The tag saves the euthanasia debate thread from being killed early. Sadly, the debate over pornography does get euthanized due to complaints from Smogon's advertisement provider.

The Competitor features its 100th update, as the most updated piece of news information on tournaments. Some older users begroan this as they feel that constant news updates goes against the entire spirit of the Smogon community.

Official Smogon Tournament 9 begins; in addition to the trophy badge as the ultimate bragging right, the 1st place winner will receive a brand-new 3DS, with the 2nd place winner receiving a copy of BW2 and top four winning a t-shirt. Players come out of retirement and many hopefuls join to win the top spot.

With the January set of regionals fast approaching, the VGC players collectively fear they have been forgotten about with a lack of updated rules for the BW2 games. Luckily, the rules are promptly released to the public. The rules are largely similar and do not institute BW2's new Unova dex-only rule, as a previous Japan only tournament required.

Genesect is banned in the OU tier; the robot insect is reported to say that "This tier ain't big enough for two Bug/Steel sweepers!". Not even GameFaqs forums complain about this.

In the aftermath of Aurumoth's playtesting on the CAP server, DougJustDoug creates a giant post regarding the leadership of the Create a Pokémon Team Leaders. Doug's PhD-sized dissertation on the history of CAP outlines the recent problems and sets out to create a process to better moderate the leadership process.

The Smogon Facebook page reaches over 9000 fans; in an effort to avoid an inevitable DBZ joke from spamming the celebratory status updates, some users unfan the page. The joke still gets made and the level of fans is still over 9000.

Vader posts a thread about facial expressions in a forum. Some follow suit in what is mostly a desperate attempt to become the next forum smiley. Smogon's general response seems to be "hmm?".

JabbaTheGriffin gets his Super Mod title removed and then promptly returned in the shortest debate ever when chaos popped his hairy beard in and gave it back. The debate between calling the scandal JabbaGate or JabbaTheGate has lasted longer than the initial debate. JabbaTheGriffin is also recognized as the worst contributor in Smogon's history.

Oglemi makes his 10000th SCMS edit for the website, thus making him the user with the largest amount of edits on the site. His editor profile page is then promptly given its own server to accommodate the massive load times required to view the summary of every edit.

The Smogon Premier League 4 live auction takes place on IRC. Two netsplits occur during the process causing mass chaos and panic involving massive disconnects. The momentary confusion is quickly resolved but assassination contracts are currently being drawn up for the lost bids.

End of the world happens... or doesn't happen. More on this as it develops.

Evasion clause is not retained in the Ubers metagame, since anyone who is serious about setting up Double Team in the face of a Rayquaza isn't going to last long anyway.

The Smog #23 is released today, but you, dear reader, probably already realized that, didn't you?