Just a bit more Favorite Pokémon Picker. After the last update, Torch commented suggesting the ability to choose whether to use male or female as the default gender when gender differences are not included. This sounded like a neat simple thing, and would address something that'd been kind of bugging me too about treating the male as the default, so I started doing it... and then immediately proceeded to run into a series of headaches with the implementation of it.

First it was how it interacted with the shareable lists (in order for your list to be shared correctly, we need the shareable list URL to include the default gender setting... and not just the default gender setting, but also the included forms and major only settings, since otherwise it wouldn't know whether gender differences were included separately); then I realized the results would be counterintuitive if you had the default female setting on and then went on to change the included gender differences setting; then I got preoccupied with trying to implement all that in a sufficiently tidy way for the generic open-source picker script (which I really have been meaning to update).

At any rate, the default gender setting has now been added, and the way it works is as follows:

• When you have picked female as the default gender, and a given Pokémon's gender difference is not included, the 'main' item that represents the species as a whole is displayed as female instead of male. It still represents the species as a whole, will be labeled with just the name of the species, and has the same shortcode as if the default gender were male.
• Regardless of which is set as the default gender, if a given Pokémon's gender difference is included, then the male and female form will show up as separate entries, with what would otherwise have been the default species entry now representing specifically the male form, similar to how it has always worked. However, because it seemed appropriate to the same spirit and had been bugging me personally, both will now be labeled with their gender: where previously, if you included all gender differences you'd see male Butterfree labeled as just "Butterfree" while the female Butterfree was labeled as "Female Butterfree", they will now be explicitly labeled "Male Butterfree" and "Female Butterfree", specifically when they are both included as separate items. (This should apply both to the image alt/title texts and to the written labels on the shareable favorite list page.)
• When you have picked female as the default gender on a non-untouched state and then change other settings in such a way as to add some gender differences to the Pokémon pool, you will be prompted for whether you want the current placement of the species to apply to the male or female. In other words, if you for instance already had the species entry for Butterfree (which is being displayed as female) on your favorite list, and then add gender differences which would make that entry represent the male Butterfree, the prompt allows you to swap it out for the female Butterfree, so that you will end up with female Butterfree in that spot on the favorite list while the male gets treated as a newly added form (otherwise, the Butterfree on the favorite list turns male, and the female is newly added). If the default gender is set to male, then it always works like it used to: the default Butterfree becomes the male, and the female is added as a new form.
• Similarly, when you have picked female as the default gender on a non-untouched state and then change other settings in such a way as to remove some gender differences from the Pokémon pool, you will be prompted for whether you want the generic species entry for those Pokémon to replace the male or female. For instance, if you already had female Butterfree on your favorite list and male Butterfree in your currently evaluating batch, then the prompt lets you choose whether you end up with the single generic displayed-female Butterfree entry on your favorite list or in your evaluating batch. If male is the default gender, this will always work like it used to work – the female Butterfree disappears and the male stays.

This isn't 100% ideal – there's still a certain asymmetry between the genders, but it would've been hell to make it completely symmetrical while still remaining backwards-compatible. I have been waffling on whether I should always give the prompts when you add or remove gender differences from the pool, rather than just when the default gender is female, but I really prefer to minimize that sort of thing, and the main purpose of the prompt is to make it very explicit what's happening if you do choose to have it modify your state to swap the male and female around, which there's basically no reason for you to do if you've got male as the default.

Anyway, this all came with a couple of other changes:

• As I mentioned, the default gender setting necessitated sharing the values of more settings with your favorite list link. That was probably a good idea anyway, since it allows it to be unambiguous exactly what forms you were including, rather than trying to guess based on your list (it will still try to guess as backup if there's no explicit shared setting).
• Since there were getting to be a lot of settings, I figured I'd try to organize them a little better. The picker's options are now split into three sets, "Display options", "Pokémon filters" and "Alternate forms", which should hopefully make it easier to find the setting you're looking for at a glance.
• Finally, I noticed I had the female partner Eevee from Let's Go listed as a Gen VIII form, but by now it's officially just been made into a regular gender difference for all Eevee, and being Gen VIII was inconsistent with how gender differences are otherwise always treated as introduced with the base Pokémon and would have required sharing even more settings with the favorite list just to determine which Eevee to display in case Eevee was on the list. All in all, I just figured I might as well treat it like other gender differences at this point and labeled it as Gen I instead.

Hopefully this all works smoothly as it should. Let me know if you have any issues, as always.

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And I'm not done!

A couple more Favorite Pokémon Picker options have been added, since I'm on a roll. First, another very common feature request: you can now individually include or exclude regular Pokémon, legendaries, mythicals, Ultra Beasts, or Paradox Pokémon. Let me know if I accidentally miscategorized anything; I did this manually, and according to how they're categorized on Bulbapedia because I gather that's based on whatever the official word on that Pokémon is (even if I personally think it's kind of dumb to call something like Type: Null a legendary Pokémon). Koraidon and Miraidon count as legendaries and thus not as Paradox Pokémon because it seemed inane to implement the ability for a Pokémon to be multiple categories just for those two.

Secondly, something brought up by Risan in the guestbook today that struck me as reasonably straightforward to do and intuitive: you can now choose whether a form's generation is treated as being when the form was introduced or when the base Pokémon was introduced. Right now, gender differences will still count as being when the base Pokémon was introduced regardless, rather than having a whole pile of them in Gen IV, both because I have a hard time imagining a situation where you'd truly want them to all show up under Gen IV and to let the default setting behave the same as it used to, but if someone wants to e-mail me and argue I should change that, feel free.

Also, the alternate mega forms of Tatsugiri and Magearna are now classed as both Mega Evolutions and aesthetic variants, so that you need to have both enabled for them to show up; I'd forgotten that was a thing I could do with the form classifications.

Unrelatedly, I have also been making some accessibility-related tweaks, most noticeably darkening the link color for Butterfree style. Let me know if anything's weird.

And finally, because this is the sixth update in a short time, I figured it was a bit of a shame that these frequent updates are pushing the previous, still very recent updates off the front page, so I tweaked it to a hybrid of the old-TCoD approach of including the latest month of updates and the new one of including the latest three: now it'll include at least three updates, but if there are more than that in the current month, it'll show everything since the beginning of the month.

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How about that update streak, huh?

The Favorite Pokémon Picker now has an option to include shiny Pokémon as separate Pokémon. This has been a common feature request, mainly stopped by the technical aspect of how doubling the number of Pokémon would be problematic for the shortcodes used in the shareable list links. I have now made a change to the shortcode parsing, so that if xx is a given Pokémon, the shiny version of it is identified by .xx, and added a setting to include them as separate entries.

This is separate from the existing shiny mode, which simply involves displaying every Pokémon as shiny – the old shiny mode is still what you'll want to use if you want to find your favorite shinies, while the new mode is for if you want to be able to pick Charizard and Shiny Charizard independently, sort of as if they were two different Pokémon. Most people will probably not want to turn this on, but I've had enough requests for this over the years to know some people really wanted this.

Once again, let me know if anything's not working as it should!

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