I joined mid 2000s, and lost my accounts and rejoined later
This placed used to be very active. I mostly stayed in the Pokemon guild sections, then known a the time as Clans where we would eat with each other. I also did a lot wifi battling here
I eventually branched out to misc, and tried to be a cool witty try hard since that was the culture here. It was at that time I started having my Runin with the mod them, I've probably been infected over 100 times between 2009 like 2013 lol
I've also entered a few misc contest, and remember when that one used hacked the are so he was allowed to be rude to everyone, and even the mods for fear he would do it again. I think it name was Fatal, or Final or something like that
I also remember when someone did a massive trolling here and former team tee hee which iirc Joe eventually banned the phrase from here since it got so bad and that person made tons of alts and trolled for years
Eventually around 2012/3 I was doing dms with a friend here on our pages and I posted some lewd anime gif or something and ended up getting banned for 6 months. At the time you weren't allowed to make alt accounts here (you probably still aren't, idk) so I eventually started posting on Gamefaqs. It wasn't as comfy as posting here, but with me being banned so long I started to prefer it
Once my ban lifted I tried to get back into posted here and that's when MLP was really big so I would post macros (aka old memes) in the general Chat thread which they eventually banned the use off. From there the forum kinda just slowly started dying off. Places like Reddit and Facebook groups aren't as personal but its a lot easier to find a topic of something you like
The issue with with place, was due to the rules at the time, it really limited what you could post. All new Pokemon section threads had to approved by the mod team end and they always tried to make general tabs for stuff. Often if you made a topic, it was closed and you were told to post somewhere else
Compared to Reddit or gamefaqs where you could post whatever you wanted at anytime, even in Pokemon sections of them site. This board also had a strict no self promotion policy at a time where YouTube was becoming big nsf people like posting their own findings and stuff
A lot of people claim forums just naturally died, and that's kinda Tru, but this place didn't really help with how slow it was to get with the times, you couldn't even gif of over like 500kb in your sig without the threat of it getting banned even tho everyone had high speed internet around 2012
This was actually one of the bigger Pokemon forums, and it's death was probably unpreventable but it totally could havebeen slowed down. Either way I'm still glad this place was party of my Childhood, it was my first forte into comp battling and I did meet some cool people here that I still talk too on other sites sometimes like discord and myanimelist