Gym Updates: New for August

[bulbasnore]

Welcome to PokéGym v.3.5.2*

We have some new features online for August!

The PokéGym Gallery

Linked at the top of ever page, the Gallery is PokéGym's graphical realm. We've always had a lot of fine information on the Gym, but now that info can more easily include grapics -- both pictures and scans. We're starting off gently to assess the bandwidth impact, but we already have a number of features online:

• Article Images Gallery - for easy uploading and linking of photos/scans to go with your Gym Articles. MHZ has written a how-to on using this portion of the gallery with your articles.
• Fake Card - for those of you with extensive and popular fake card series, a place to put your work on public view, get ratings and comments. PM a gallery mod if you think your work is strong enough to go here.
• Event Photos - for photos from large Pokemon events and major tourneys. We already have over 200 photos from worlds for you to rate, discuss and look through. This is a great place to try out the Gallery's e-card features! Just look under the Image Tools menu to get started with e-cards. For the moment, uploads are restricted; if you have a major contribution to make, please PM a gallery moderator.
• Card Reference - in the Compendium Section we are starting to work towards standard scans of every set for your reference. There will be ways to cross-reference between sets and other fun things coming in the future for this area. If you'd like to help out with card scans, you can get a copy of our scan standards by PM from a gallery moderator.
• Error Card Museum - has begun with the kind contribution of Nick15's collection. Nick15 is a PokeGym v2 mod and long-time fake card artist and website author. Discussion of these errors is already begun and you can join in!
• Avatar Contest - coming Sept 6, this category gives us a handy way to standardize and tally votes on the Avatars. Watch for an announcement soon detailing the rules of the first contest!
• More - our plans for the gallery don't stop there. Keep stopping in and checking out what's new.

Archetype and Standard Strategies Forum

A sub-forum headlining the Deck Help and Strategy forum topics, this new area is for submitted articles summarizing and detailing strategy for big-time decks. For those that love strategy, this section is great. However, it also adds a couple things for the fixees/fixers the Deck Help forum:

1. As articles accumulate through the work of dedicated players, deck-fixees/fixers will soon just be able to comply with Deck forum strategy guidelines by stating 'Standard ______ Strategy', ________ references an article in the Strategies subforum.
2. New players reading the fixes will have a place to go and learn about strategies without having to ask for further explanation (or risk of being thought a newb) in the main Deck forum.

In part inspired by the excellent work of Venusaur and Mudkip detailing their Worlds 2005 decks and kicked off by the award winning article on Dragtrode by Alex H & Ryan V of Team R, this section is now open for discussion. Ryan & Alex have added a T2 Dark Steelix article and have others in the works.

With these high standards, the new forum has a lot to live up to... as such the Deck Forum mods will only post articles reflecting experience and passion for the deck & strategy under review. We're looking for good reference material, yes, but we want to present articles that go beyond material we see in some 'Card of the day' type posts ... no formulaic run-throughs that contain obvious mistakes or omit major points because the reviewer is not familiar.

If you're interested in submitting and not intimidated, check the format/content of Ryan & Alex' first two articles. We do like to see the use of good formatting and want to see the title/author/modified/latest-set block. Mods can help with editing and the articles are subject to editing by the mods. Post your draft article in the Article Submissions forum and PM one of the Deck Forum Mods (Daddiursa, AncientAbsol or me) to let us know about your contrib.

Coming Soon

PokéGym Staff are working hard to bring other features to the site. We want to say, though, that the biggest feature of this site will always be you and the community that you create around the board. As such, the want to take this time to thank you for all the contributions you've made over the years and lately to the community here.

--the PokéGym Management
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*PokéGym has had 3 major incarnations:

• v1 Psylum's PokéGym ~ Early 1999 - Early 2001
• v2 Wizard's PokéGym ~ 2001 - August 2003
• v3 Current PokéGym ~ August 2003-Present

I guess I'd date v3.5 from around January 2005 when we added the Home page and brought the Compendium into the vBulletin content tree. Version 3.5.1 represents to me some behind the scenes technology changes in Spring 2005 and v.3.5.2 would be the opening of the gallery this month. Well, maybe one of the several people on staff who have been there since the beginning and knows more than I do will write an article about the history of the Gym someday and then we'll link in some of the archived material we have from the prior Gyms.