Welcome to Vol. 3, issue 47 of Johto Times! Last month, we launched our community forum, giving Johto Times readers a space to share their thoughts and feelings on Pokémon and our newsletter. For this issue, we’ve put together an interview with the forum team to give an insight into its development. We also have a recap of the latest Pokémon news.

We plan to leave our original home on Substack in December and begin sharing our words exclusively on our website with Volume 4 in January 2026. For our readers who enjoy Johto Times from their inbox, there is no need to worry and you will still receive emails as usual. Feel free to bookmark our website to stay up to date in any case.

We are also actively using Bluesky if you would like an additional way of keeping in touch with us!

Mega Zeraora was revealed this week, making its debut in the upcoming Pokémon Legends Z-A DLC: Mega Dimension

POKÉMON LEGENDS: Z-A

• A brand-new Mega-Evolved Pokémon was announced yesterday for the upcoming Pokémon Legends Z-A DLC Mega Dimension. Mega Zeraora will be making its debut in this expanded story on December 10th, 2025.

Source: Pokémon

POKÉMON TCG POCKET

• A new Mega Pidgeot ex Drop Event launched on November 18th, 2025, adding five new Promo-B cards, including Petilil, Froakie, Luxray, Pidgey, and Mega Pidgeot ex. New missions for the Drop Event reward the player with Promo-B packs, as well as exchange tickets that can be traded for additional Promo-B packs containing the Drop Event promotional cards. This event runs until November 28th, 2025.

Source: In-game news

GENERAL

• Pokémon has announced a new tabletop board game, Pokémon GOITA, which will be released in Japan for ¥2,970 on December 18th, 2025. A free mobile app for the game is also in development and will be released in December.

Source: Pokémon

Feature: Interview with the Johto Times Forum Team

In August 2025, we launched the Johto Times website, which allowed us more flexibility to display the content how we wanted and create a home for ourselves away from a third-party service. But what is a Pokémon fansite without a community forum? Once the work on the website was completed, this was our focus. Renan, who developed our website, joins me to discuss the approach we took with our message board.

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Darren:

First of all Renan, thank you for taking the time to chat with me again to discuss Johto Times! Last time, we were joined by Irene to discuss the development of the Johto Times website, but this time I thought it would be good to share some insight into the forum’s development. For those who didn’t read that piece, can you please introduce yourself to our readers?

Renan:

Hello again! I’m Renan, a Brazilian software engineer based in Italy. Last time we talked a bit about some of our past projects, but I forgot to mention that I’ve been a Pokémon fan since I was about 5 or 6 years old! It’s something that has always been a presence in my life.

Darren:

I think we should start with why we decided to create a forum for Johto Times. Ever since the website started to take shape, I knew I wanted us to have our own little space to engage with our community in. I read a lot of messages from people who were tired of what social media had become and wanted alternatives. Given the fact that the majority of our audience grew up on forums, I thought it was worth us hosting one for ourselves.

I was apprehensive about it at first. I knew that forums are archaic in nature, and social media had all but killed them off. However, when you consider that a newsletter is also a pretty dated form of communication (that has done fairly well for Johto Times), I believed it was worth giving it a chance!

Renan:

Johto Times is all about preserving websites from the “old-fashioned” Internet era, so a newsletter and a forum fit perfectly well with the premise. A lot of us are tired of the noise of social media so it’s nice to have a smaller community in which to hang out. I was (well, still am) a little concerned about the moderation aspect, but it seems like we have attracted users who are respectful.

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An early screenshot of the Johto Times Community Forum, in September 2025

Darren:

When it came to choosing forum software, I knew we had to go for something that looked and felt like a traditional forum which many people used and loved during the late 90s and early 2000s, yet had modern features to ensure it was fit for the audience of today. I was surprised to see vBulletin and MyBB were still around, but they just didn’t appeal to me. Originally I wanted to go for Discourse, which is fantastic and would have been a luxury option, but hosting that simply wasn’t going to be possible.

Someone even suggested Discord as an option, given its “forum” options, but this was never going to be a consideration. To set up home on someone else’s turf goes against having our own space, which we have been pushing for. It absolutely had to be a traditional forum!

Eventually we settled with Flarum, which was probably the next best thing after Discourse. I recall we dismissed it at one point and tried to go ahead with Discourse, but came back to it later once we realised that pipe dream had disappeared. I think we made the right call, though.

Renan:

Discourse would have been nice, but the deployment aspect was a bit too much effort for what would be a relatively small community. I was surprised to see there aren’t many modern open-source forum solutions… After some research we settled on Flarum, which seems to be a popular choice among other small communities.

Flarum’s philosophy is to have a minimal and simple core, complemented by a variety of plug-ins. We didn’t want to go overboard with the plug-ins, so for now we are sticking with a few popular ones that helped achieve the look and essential features that you wanted. We know that it still lacks a few niceties, but they are planning a Flarum 2.0 release in the near(?) future and we decided to wait and see what that brings before going all in on customization.

Our biggest fear is regarding the emails sent during registration. Since we are sending emails from our own freshly registered domain, they might be caught by spam filters. Please reach out to us if you have any troubles there!

Darren:

Yes,, please do! The thought of someone who wants to engage in the community and is unable to do so due to a failed email keeps me up at night! Well, okay, not really, but it would be extremely sad if we lost members that way. I really hope we can minimise that risk going forward!

Anyone who has had problems signing up should reach out to us directly.

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Darren:

Just like our website, we wanted the forum to be responsive and legible, not overly designed, and run well on both mobile devices and desktop. However, it also had to look and feel like a Pokémon forum. I remember us trying a few options, such as backgrounds, and it just didn’t feel right. Eventually we managed to work out how to change the headers and include some images in there, which I think was a nice alternative.

Renan:

It’s a tricky balance. We want to make the forum unique, without sacrificing usability and legibility. I like how it looks with the custom banners. It took me a bit of tinkering to find the appropriate CSS rules to modify, but once I figured those out, you had great ideas of images and icons.

Darren:

Thanks! Due to the difficulties of adding a background that worked, we had to have something that made it feel like a Pokémon forum. For now, it has to be done through banners. What I made was fairly straightforward and simple, using existing sprites and tiles from the video games and extending them to suit different display resolutions.

Since we are called Johto Times, I emphasised this by using sprites and backgrounds from the original Pokémon Gold, Silver, and Crystal titles. I remember that you had to go away for work for a week, and I was super eager to do something for the forum, so I spent hours coming up with tons of different ideas. I even opened up my Pokémon Gold, Silver, and Crystal cartridges and tried to get pictures of the plastic textures to use as banners!

Ultimately, I decided to go with one image that depicted each of the three games, but I still have a ton ready to go in the future if we ever decide to switch things up a little!

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Some of the banners which didn’t make it to the forum; perhaps you’ll see them in the future

Darren:

It's been a few weeks since we launched the forum, and while we do have a nice number of users, and some regular faces making a return, activity has dropped off significantly. Currently, I am worried that we may have already peaked. Could this really be it already? I would certainly hope not, and refuse to believe it! Convincing people to use a forum in 2025 was always going to be a challenge; I knew this and communicated it throughout the forum’s development.

But getting the forum functional and looking the part is also a challenge for us. Flarum is pretty simple by design, and to make it stand out you have to apply add-ons created by the Flarum community. Many of these are wonderful, and there’s a very talented community who work really hard, but sadly a lot of these add-ons have been abandoned, or may not be compatible.

Another challenge was setting rules which weren’t overwhelming, but were clear and reflected our values. I spent a lot of time discussing these rules even before the forum was created, and while I personally think I did a good job, I do believe that our community will help to shape those in the months and years ahead.

Renan:

All things considered, I think you did a great job promoting the forum and it got much more activity than I was anticipating. But it is a challenging proposition, in the world of smartphones and social media, to convince people to stick around… But we might see people looking for places like this as they get burnt out on TikToks; who knows?

From the technical side, it was also a fun challenge for me to get it working. To be honest, it was easier than I expected. It helps that we started from Flarum as a base, unlike the main website which was built from the ground up.

Darren:

I guess I'm worried that I wasted your time. After reading so many people wanting to return to forums, I hope that they will stand by what they have said and prove that there is still an appetite out there for them. However, it’s also up to us to make sure that space is welcoming and engaging enough for them to stick around. It’s a lot of work to promote something like this in 2025, compared to, say, 2002.

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Darren:

My main focus is to really push the forum as hard as possible and try to grow our community. I want to rise to the challenge of growing our forum to become a close-knit group of people who feel like they can share their thoughts and feelings about Pokémon in a safe and welcoming environment.

I have a few ideas of how to keep people coming back to the forum, such as a series of AMAs (Ask Me Anything) with special guests, and perhaps a few add-ons to enhance the experience for users. I would also love to host some contests for fanworks.

Renan:

I agree that is the way to go. AMAs and contests provide an interactivity not possible on the website and they drive a sense of community much more than social media.

We will continue to explore improvements that can be made on the forum, particularly in terms of usability and accessibility. Keep in mind there are some issues that are limitations of Flarum and could take a lot of work to fix, so these might not be our priority now.

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The Johto Times Community Forum in November 2025

Darren:

Ultimately it's the early days of this new community. I would be interested to revisit this feature in a year and see where we are then. It may not take off; it may just be a fun thing we did for a few months, and activity dies out. However, I don’t regret trying, because I think it’s better to make our own homes, rather than set up camp on social media.

Renan:

I’m glad to see the forum up and alive after all this! Don’t hesitate to reach out if you encounter problems.

For the next few months, we will focus on migrating the newsletter out of Substack, which is another big challenge. Keep your eyes out for these updates to Johto Times!

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A huge thank you to Renan for his support with the forum and giving our readers and Pokémon fans a place where they can hang out and share their thoughts, feelings, and memories on Pokémon.

If you haven’t already done so, you can register to the forum by clicking here.