A minor update: I have been making some tweaks and additions to the affiliation requirements. In particular:

• I now explicitly reserve the right to reject websites with obviously AI-generated content out of hand. I kind of hate to have to set rules about this at all, but it is what it is.
• I've updated the section on how affiliates get removed (and extracted it into its own subsection on the page). It used to say that I remove affiliates that haven't updated in three months, with exceptions for sites that have been revived after going a while between updates before. In practice, I hadn't actually enforced that theoretical limit in years; the hobbyist fansites that are running today are mostly run by busy adults for whom updates are normally a fair bit slower than back in the day (mine included!), and three months are no longer anything like an indication the site is dead and gone, besides that there are just much fewer Pokémon fansites out there and I'm happy to keep linking to some of the ones that exist and remain online with good stuff on them, even if they aren't being actively updated. So, in other words, if the implicit requirement of updating at minimum once every three months might have previously scared you away from applying to affiliate, that is now explicitly no longer a requirement.
• Instead, I have made explicit the real criteria that will make me remove an affiliate these days: going down or defunct altogether, or making some sort of dubious pivot towards advertising casinos or cryptocurrencies or AI-generated slop, etc. (you cannot imagine how much I hate to have to set rules about that, either).

I feel a lot better with the rules officially updated, at least – and if you're a real human running a passion project Pokémon fansite in 2026, by all means do apply for affiliation if you haven't! I used to be a bit of a hardass about it back in the day, but these days honestly I'm just really happy to see new Pokémon fansites at all.

Comment on this - View comments