Interview with The PokéMasters
The PokéMasters was a highly successful Pokémon fan website which began in 1998, and Johto Times is proud to share this interview with Lady Vulpix, who runs the website today, to discuss its history.
The PokéMasters (TPM) was a Pokémon fan website that launched on or before November 16th, 1998 and was one of – if not the – most popular Pokémon fan website of the late 90s and early 2000s. The website featured lots of great information about the Pokémon franchise and its products, with a Message Board which opened to the public on March 24th, 2000. We are delighted to be interviewing Lady Vulpix, who was one of the forum admins back then and continues to lead the PokéMasters website and forum community to this day.
It’s great to be conducting this interview with you, Lady Vulpix! Please introduce yourself and your community: The PokéMasters!
Lady Vulpix:
Hi all. I'm Gabi a.k.a. Lady Vulpix. I'm from Argentina and I teach at university and work as a programmer. I have a wide variety of interests, but it was mostly my love for writing, video games and making friends that led me to The PokéMasters. There are many Pokémon communities around, but The PokéMasters (TPM) has felt like my home on the Internet for decades, and it is the people in the TPM community that make it what it is. It is a place for people to get together and share the things they love.
In the early days, when the website had fresh news everyday and the forums were buzzing with activity, there were all kinds of Pokémon related discussions, polls, fanfiction and roleplaying games, but there were also conversations about multiple other topics, from computer issues to politics and members' lives. There were also some fights and spam which we could not quite agree on how to deal with, but we have all grown since then – both personally and as a group – and now, almost 24 years later, you can still see people come back again and again to have some fun with their old friends, and sometimes make new ones.
As one of the oldest members – in more ways than one – watching so many people grow from children or teenagers to full-fledged adults has been a fascinating journey, and the fact that we all still share bonds with each other is just priceless.
You have been a Pokémon fan from the very beginning! What are your earliest memories of Pokémon that led to you becoming a fan?
Lady Vulpix:
My earliest Pokémon memories are about just hearing the word get thrown around and seeing some Pikachu merchandising which did not mean much to me. Then I started watching the anime and the first season got me interested – the anime did not take long to disappoint me, but I loved the idea of a world filled with creatures with all those different abilities, and I immediately saw potential for writing new stories. Then I played Pokémon Red and, as glitchy as it was, I loved the type weakness/resistance mechanics, and figuring out the best moves for each opponent, as well as helping my Pokémon grow... I was never able to stick to just six; I kept rotating them, and it has been this way for every Pokémon game I have played ever since.
You joined the community on October 1st, 2000. How did you originally discover the website and its community?
Lady Vulpix:
When I played Pokémon Gold, which fixed some of the glitches –- and introduced new ones The Apricorn balls were so fun to use, especially the Level Balls, which are still my favorites. - I was hooked. There were still a few mechanics I didn't quite understand, so I looked for information online and that is how I found TPM. My first few posts were questions about how breeding worked, what was the best level for an Oddish to evolve and what were the differences between Vileplume and Bellossom. I also posted on a "GS in general" discussion which an admin kept closing for reasons I still ignore.
Then the Polls, Clubs & Games forum was created, and with it came Adoption Centers. Indraugnir created the Dragon's Guild which, coinciding with me joining a literary workshop called The Dragons, instantly caught my attention. From these emerged a complex roleplaying game named Dragon Tamers, which spanned a whole subforum and went on for 15 years – I still keep some of the best posts in http://dragonsguild.com.ar – and this forum caught most of my online activity during the next few years, which led to me becoming a mod in 2002.
The original website was a huge resource of Pokémon information for visitors to explore, such as game guides, codes, fanart, fanfiction, details on the anime and the latest Pokémon products, and the very latest Pokémon news. The Cardex was surprisingly detailed in the early sets and even featured a price guide. What were your favourite pieces of content from TPM?
Lady Vulpix:
My favorite pieces of content were the type chart and the damage calculator, which I used both for planning my in-game battles and for writing up believable battles in my roleplaying posts. I also remember reading announcements about Pokémon who were coming up in the next generation. Kecleon caused a lot of commotion and suddenly most people on the forums wanted to adopt one.
TPM was one of four Pokémon websites that formed a partnership known as the Anti-Spammer Alliance, along with Pokémon Abode, Bulbasaur's Mysterious Garden (Bulbagarden), and Universal Pokémon Network. What was the policy of tackling spam on The PokéMasters?
Lady Vulpix:
Fighting spam was a big issue back then, since not only did we not have automatic spambot detection and we were frequently flooded by bots, but also because many members believed that having a high post count would give them more recognition and make them more important, so they kept posting meaningless one-word posts for the sake of "postcount++". To make things worse, there was no consensus among the staff about what constituted spam, and some mods and admin would delete posts and issue warnings just because the posts were short, even if they were on-topic and contributed to the discussion – or game – in question.
There was a time when a 10-word rule was instated, and every post with less than 10 words was considered spam. At that point I wrote a filler sentence and added it to all my short posts so that I wouldn't get a warning, and also to show that the rule made no sense. It wasn't until 2005, after reviving the forums from one of its biggest absences, that all forum staff got together in an AIM chat and had a long discussion which led to the creation of the TPM General Rules, which are still in effect and can be found on the forums' main page.
The original website ran between November 1998 until June 2002. It had a rocky time during its early years, with the website and forums experiencing downtime due to server transfers, changing forum software, and eventually closure. It continued to stumble on through a second website, which closed in 2005. Could you give us a bit of insight into what happened back then?
Lady Vulpix:
I'm afraid I don't know all the details. I remember the first big forum move from UBB to vBulletin in early 2001, which caused everything to be offline for a few days and when the move was done all information from the last 30 days was lost... including not only posts and threads but also all accounts created during that period. Some created new accounts, but we lost some members because of it, many people were frustrated because of their lost post count and others – myself included – were frustrated by the loss of the content we produced. That was when I started archiving the posts I wanted it to keep the most, which eventually led to the creation of the Dragon's Guild archive – although I can't take all the credit for that; both Indraugnir and AntiAsh Superstar created their own archives before mine went online.
Then in 2002 we moved to EZBoard due to cost issues. That was even messier because nothing was imported from vBulletin, and we all had to create new accounts, which many members did not. We eventually switched back to vBulletin, but some of the lost members did not return. Then in 2005 there was a big crash, both the website and the forums went down and Kevin was nowhere to be found. At that time all remaining members started looking for alternatives, and we managed to find a free alternative – phpBB – which allowed the forums to return, but the website stayed down.
On October 4th, 2008, it was announced on TPM’s forums that the website would be revived, and within the year, the website was back up and functional, albeit with less content than previous versions. Tell us more about what happened during this time!
Lady Vulpix:
The TPM community came together for a massive revival effort which started in 2008 and culminated in 2009 with the relaunch of The PokéMasters Website. Jeff and Telume put in an incredible amount of hard work, and many others contributed our own efforts, both coordinating, suggesting ideas, creating assets and writing articles, and in some cases donating money. However, the forums were facing a big issue at that time: all admins were gone and registration had been left closed since the latest spambot invasion, so no new members were coming in, bugs could not be fixed and the forums started dying. I was lucky enough to find Kevin's email, so I contacted him and told him what was going on. He made me an admin, helped me fix the bugs and promised to keep paying for the hosting and to be there if we needed him.
It's heart-warming to hear how members of the community, and the original webmaster, were still keen to keep TPM alive. How did you feel about taking on such a lead role on a website you had been a part of for so many years?
Lady Vulpix:
It was a huge honor. It came by surprise, and I still remember learning about it when Kevin called me "you little admin, you". It was also a big responsibility, but by then I had seen enough of how admins did their job to have an idea of what the position entailed, what I wanted to do and what mistakes I wanted to avoid. The first thing I needed to do was reopen registration, which I did immediately. Then I went over the "admin wish list", which was a thread where members posted the things they hoped an admin would do and completed all the tasks one by one.
Since then, I have been doing whatever needs to be done to improve the forums and fix what's broken – and contacting Kevin when it's something beyond my access, like fixing the database or something in the code – and always working together with the rest of the staff, allowing input from all members, to make sure the changes I make will benefit the community. I did just a couple of harmless things for my own sake, like hiding my post count so that people would stop saying things like "how can you say you don't care about post counts when yours is so high?" or creating a Spanish version of the forums. Anyway, I really like being able to help other members and make the forums better for everyone.
The website and forums have remained online ever since, and it is one of the oldest Pokémon communities still in existence from that era. What has it been like to administrate a community over such a significant amount of time?
Lady Vulpix:
I have only been an admin since 2009, so I did not have the load of administering the forums during the wackier years. I did face a few crises like spambot floods and hackers. There was that one time when someone who was angry about being banned registered the expired email accounts of some moderators, stole their accounts and used them to delete multiple topics in their forums... He's got better since then. Other than that, and a few people sending me hate messages the first couple of months just because [I was] an admin, it's been great. I love helping other members of the community and helping the forums get better.
We all take the big decisions together and have fun coming up with new ideas and executing them. That April Fools prank when we became The PonyMasters and changed the entire look and feel of the forums, including every single asset and even some of the words, took a lot of work, but it was really fun. The switch from vB 3 to vB 4 was tough for me because it broke all the forum themes, and I was never able to finish migrating all of them, but I think the forums look fine right now.
TPM was one of the largest Pokémon websites of its time, and personally I think it was probably the most popular and active community I remember visiting as a kid. Many other websites from that era died after just a couple of years and failed to reach the numbers that TPM was able to achieve. Why do you think TPM was able to achieve such notability?
Lady Vulpix:
I think it was because of the community and the bonds between us. Over the years, many of the old members lost interest in Pokémon but TPM still meant a lot to everyone and they still wanted to be a part of it. Then there were fewer Pokémon-related topics and more topics about other subjects, as well as many nostalgia threads with people returning after many years of absence and reminiscing about the good old days.
In the last couple of years there's been a surge of new members due to Pokémon reaching a newer generation and some of them becoming curious about message boards. That has brought new life to TPM and I really appreciate it. Still, I believe what kept TPM alive through the most difficult years was the same thing that made it special in the first place: the strength of its community and our desire to remain together.
For a time, the website was affiliated with several other fan websites, such as Pokémon Aaah!, Pokémon Factory, Bulbagarden, and many others. Aside from TPM, what other Pokémon-focused websites do you remember visiting?
Lady Vulpix:
I joined both Bulbagarden and Serebii and had some good times on both forums, and both Joe and Archie are really nice. TPM has always been my main go-to website, but I try to drop by the other two forums every now and then. And I still get a lot of information from the Serebii website and Bulbapedia. Some people on each of the forums acted like the others were enemies, but most of us liked to work together and hang out at each other's forums. I also joined Tsuyoi's Lair in 2005, hosted by AntiAsh Superstar, which served as an alternate home for some of my favorite TPM threads while TPM was down. And I have retrieved some information from Smogon and other websites.
Pokémaster Kevin was the original founder of TPM, who was active within the community until its original closure in 2002. While it’s understandable that people lose interest and move on from projects, it seems that Kevin still supported the community during this period, and although he appears to have a hands-off approach, he continues to host the website to this day. What has it been like to work with Kevin?
Lady Vulpix:
It is a relief knowing that he still cares for the community he created, and that he has our back if we need him. He is rarely seen these days, but it is always great when he does show up.
In my experience, a community can be a challenge to maintain. While it’s important to encourage discussion and growth, large communities with many different voices can also mean conflict and disagreements. What has it been like to maintain a lead role within TPM?
Lady Vulpix:
At first it was a bit like herding cats, but it became a lot easier as the community and its members matured. Now we can all discuss our thoughts and ideas without fighting, knowing that we all want what's best for TPM, and we don't mind taking our time to reach an agreement that satisfies everyone, or at least one which everyone is willing to accept. One instance of the latter was the creation of the Mt. Moon forum, a forum that is exempted from the General Rules. I never saw the reason for that, nor did I ever believe it was a good idea, and I argued against it, but a number of members really wanted it, so in the end I agreed to create it.
There was a time when it sucked out too much activity from other forums and I had to move threads away from it and into the forums where they would fit best, but now that the Mt. Moon hype has passed and most people have understood that having rules does not mean having to watch their every step out of fear of getting banned, the rest of the forums have gone back to normal. What I found the hardest was trying to keep the forums active as people kept leaving, and I eventually realized I couldn't do it by myself. That was in 2015. I have been taking a more relaxed approach since then. I keep an eye on the forums but do not force myself to post or try to attract other members, I just let things flow, post when I feel like it and use my admin powers to help when it's needed. Same with the TPM Discord server, which I have been hosting since 2019.
The Unown Awards were a popular and recurring event, where members of TPM could nominate other members of the community to win one of twenty-eight awards based on each Unown character. Please tell us a bit more about that!
Lady Vulpix:
The Unown Awards were originally Pimuni's idea, and I think it was a brilliant one. They brought us all together to look back on what was achieved during the years and reward other members for the good things they have done. Some of us display our Unown Awards in our signatures, while others have web pages dedicated to them. The first edition, held by Pimuni in 2003, featured a list of predefined awards, and all members nominated and voted for the people we felt deserved them. This led to some issues with a few members not wanting the awards they were nominated for (particularly the Torment award) and Charizard04621 handing me her Zealous award for permanent safekeeping.
Three years later we started reminiscing about the event and decided it would be nice to hold them again. We got permission from Pimuni to hold our own Unown Awards, and they became an annual event, with alternating hosts and a new set of trophies every year, and with no predefined categories. Now we could nominate other members for a specific Unown by naming an achievement beginning with the corresponding letter or, in the case of ? and !, ending in the corresponding punctuation mark. It is no longer an annual event, but every now and then someone decides to host them again, and I love it every time – even the times when it is me who ends up hosting it and drawing all the trophies. I believe it was Jeff who hosted the most award ceremonies. I really appreciate all the hard work put into them by every host, and the participation of every member who has posted nominations.
Are there any Pokémon-related items you have kept safe throughout the years that are special to you?
Lady Vulpix:
Do my digital archives count? Because I have lots of them! I also have a few Pokémon toys, most of which were gifts from friends who did not know what my favorite Pokémon were but I love them anyway. I do have a Vaporeon plushie which I bought myself at a convention. And I still have my copies of Pokémon Black, Pokémon White 2 and the memory cards with Pokémon X and Pokémon Sun - and I play Pokémon Café ReMix a lot.
After almost twenty-five years of working with TPM, I am curious to hear what your highlights and memories of the community have been!
Lady Vulpix:
How long do we have? There is all that I mentioned before and so much more... I could spend hours reminiscing and still miss some good moments. What I personally loved the most was the Dragon Tamers game, but I also had a great time participating in the Fanfic forum, reading some awesome works and writing some original fiction, participating in the Fanfic Awards, writing articles for the eZine and interacting with the staff – especially mr_pikachu and Mist/PancaKe. I once joined an "alliance" of four writers who meant to write a fanfic together, but it did not last long. I participated in a few RPGs in the RPG forum proper, and was a co-GM of another RPG called Expedia in the Adopted and Captured Pokémon subforum. That one began at the EZBoard and went on for many years.
We also had some great times in AIM chats like MoOoOoOoOoOoOo and ummmm, the best of which were immortalized in the "Quotes from a Nuthouse" threads in the Miscellaneous Stuff forum. I also loved participating in the joint efforts which led to TPM's return in 2009. Playing Lingo with Zak and Aipom Of Doom was really fun – there was one time when Aipom Of Doom made a program to solve a game, then I made a faster one and showed it to him and then we agreed to never use those programs again because they took all the fun out of the game. I once assembled a picture with photos of many TPMers and got many comments about what a motley crew we were.
I also loved becoming Pokémon Hangman staff and created a tagboard for us all to communicate before we had Discord, and the Charmander Central club was great: that one was started by Mist, later known as PancaKe, and it was the first thread to award virtual plushies, which we all started collecting, but what I liked the most about it was the question of the day, which one of us would ask and then we would all answer it and start discussing it. The International Club had a question of the day as well. I learned some interesting things that way, like the differences between different countries' educational systems – I did mention we talk about everything on TPM, and I really love that.
The appointment of new moderators in 2020 felt like it had been a long time coming, and brought new life to the forums. And attending mr_pikachu and Becky's wedding in 2012! That was amazing, and it allowed many TPMers from around the world to meet in person for the first time! And then I visited England in 2015 and met Becki, who gave me a tour of the nerd side of London. That was awesome too.
We are both old timers who have been a part of the online Pokémon community from the earliest days, and as you have probably seen, a lot of our beloved websites and many of the old message boards no longer exist. Despite online archives existing to record some of it, many links are broken, images and art lost, and there are gaps that were never recorded. What are your feelings on the topic of preservation?
Lady Vulpix:
It would break my heart to see TPM disappear without a trace. I cannot back up the entire board and website, but I try to preserve at least the threads I use the most. Last year my Dragon Tamers archive went down without a warning, and I had to spend about a week exchanging emails with the hosting servers so that they would at least recreate the root folder so that I could upload all my content again.
It's a good thing I had a backup on my computer. I have backups of not only some forum threads and images, but also some old AIM chats in which important decisions were made, or which contain useful information. And after the website went down for the first time, I made my own type chart and damage calculator, which are still available for other members to use.
At the time of writing, the last news post on TPM’s website was on August 19th, 2016. Understandably, it is common that people get older and their commitments change. That being said, what do you think the future is for TPM?
Lady Vulpix:
In the near future, a forum restructuring to reorganize the Pokémon video game threads. Other than that, I honestly don't know. I am really bad at predicting the future. If I venture a guess, odds are it will not come true. All I can really say is that, whatever the future brings for TPM, I will be there to take part in it, and I hope we as a community can stay together for a long time to come.
With the greatest of respect, it does feel that the website and community have seen better days. It remains online as a monument to the past, and a rare insight into the early days of the Pokémon fan community. In your opinion, what do you think the legacy of The PokéMasters will be?
Lady Vulpix:
The memories, most of all. The way it has marked our lives, and all the connections we have made. For many of us, it was a space where we were free to be ourselves when there weren't many such spaces. Every now and then I come across someone online who remembers being on TPM ages ago and having a really good time. I do hope the forums remain online for many more years, but no matter what happens TPM will always remain an important part of our lives.
Lady Vulpix, as someone who visited the original website in the early 2000s as an enthusiastic fan trying to gather the latest Pokémon news, I want to say a personal thank you to yourself, Kevin, and everyone who helped and supported the website throughout the years. Do you have any final words you would like to share to our readers, and to anyone who visited TPM or were a part of its community?
Lady Vulpix:
I want to say... Thank you very much! Your contributions are what made TPM great, and it is the times when you stop by and drop a line or two which allows us all to feel the connection again. It is because we keep coming back that TPM is still alive, and you will always be welcome any time you want to post... And if you have trouble accessing your account, please reach out to me, I can help you with that. :) In any case, thanks for all the wonderful times we shared, and I hope to see you again soon.
And to Johto Times, thank you very much for conducting this interview, and for your continuous work gathering and sharing Pokémon-related information. :)
Thank you to Lady Vulpix for taking the time to answer my questions. Thanks must also go out to the original creator, Pokemaster Kevin, for creating the website. PokéMasters was probably the first Pokémon fan website I ever visited online, sometime around 2000 and 2001. I had so many great memories of visiting the website back then, and keeping up to date with the latest news from the world of Pokémon. I have some great memories of the community, so I am privileged to have put this interview together over 23 years after originally visiting!
Interview conducted on January 15th, 2024
Interview published on February 29th, 2024