Theia’s Guide to Using Smogon

Welcome to the Smogon forum! Here’s a quick guide on everything you need to know to get started!

Navigating to forums:

Smogon’s front page can seem daunting at first, with all of the categories and forums and subforums, so the key is knowing what’s what

Smogon’s Competitive Categories and Their Top Level Forums (and the Subforums of Those Forums):

Site Info

• Information and Resources: As the name implies, this houses Smogon’s information and resources, as well as a place for reports to be made to Smogon’s Senior Staff and PS’ Admins. This also includes the site’s rules, which you should take a minute to read.
• Announcements: Holds threads for announcing things like promotions, published articles, and tiering decisions.

Competitive Play

• Smogon Metagames: The hub for all things current gen. Each official tier is represented by its own top-level forum, some of which, like National Dex and Other Metagames, also contain subforums for various metagames within them.
• Ruins of Alph: Smogon Metagames, but for previous generations. You can also find subforums in a few of these, like LGPE in SM or BDSP in SS.
• Battle Stadium: The home of all things BSS and VGC
• Policy Review: The root policy review subforum contains discussion on tiering-related topics, like making changes to old generation metagames or adding or removing clauses. This forum has two subforums, Blind Voting, which is where voting takes place on suspect tests, and Tournament Policy, which is where rules and formats for tournaments are discussed. You need a badge to post in root Policy Review or in Tournament Policy, and to be granted access to Blind Voting after qualifying for a suspect test
• Tournaments: It’s tournaments
• Pokemon Showdown: Where discussion for things PS-related go, including suggestions in the Suggestions subforum and bugs in the Bug Reports thread

So now you know where everything is. How do you get to where you want to go?

If what you’re looking for is a top level forum, like the OU forum, you can simply click on it and you’re there. If what you’re looking for is a subforum, like the Anything Goes forum, you navigate to its top-level forum and it will be listed at the top of the forum.

Posting in threads:

To post in a thread, it’s as simple as navigating to the bottom of the thread, typing your response in the box at the bottom, and hitting “Post Reply”

To reply to someone else’s post, hit the reply button at the bottom of their post

Which will copy a quote tag with their message into your post that you can then comment under

You can also comment on a select part of a post by highlighting it and clicking the reply button that comes up

Walls

A lot of Smogon’s tours will ask that you schedule on walls or “via VMs” for the ease of the host seeing scheduling to make decisions about activity. Walls and VMs are the same thing, which can be confusing for newer players.

To navigate to someone’s wall, you can either search for them in the Users page at the top of the webpage

Or you can double click on their name in a post or thread

Now that you’re on their wall, all you have to do is write in the box at the top and hit “Post”

Because wall messages are most often used for scheduling, I’ll recommend here that you take a look at the scheduling guide for Smogon’s tournaments.