It has come to light that the original logo in 2004 was a Koffing with a Swastika instead of the normal crossbones thing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPG6vIN8Kx8
Video by cecilily - We need to talk about the Nazi past of Smogon
This is so outrageous it seems fake, but they adressed it last year and decided not to change the name which is peak 
It’s clearly changed since then with how strong of a queer presence is on that site. The video shows to me that Smogon is an example of something that started out as an edgelord hub actually doing something and changing for the better.
There’s a lot of Nazis in queer spaces, not really an argument
Flashbacks to last year at SF Castro Street Fair where a guy was wearing a jersey with 88 as the number, and SS lightning bolts all over like a sponsor logo
Okay fine but even then it’s nowhere near the edgelord cesspool it once was.
Letting Kingambit stay in OU is worse imo
I think, at a bare minimum they should change the name and logo, but maybe I’m a lib for that as it would probably just be performative, just seems indefensible to me to keep it
True but we also don’t want kids to unknowingly repeat Nazi dogwhistles. Maybe that’s why Smogon gets zero attention in official spaces, turns out Nintendo doesn’t want anything to do with a community whose name is a reference to gas chambers. I’m just mind-boggled that people don’t see this as that big of an issue.
“Yes my community is called SS88 but we are different and mature now and getting more popular than ever”
Yeah that sounds reasonable to me. There’s of course going to be heavy backlash from people who have grown attached to it but enough people will get over it.
Because it is peak white liberal performative nonsense to change the name. It’s exactly what every white city dwelling liberal does when they find out something has a dark past, they change the offensive part (or do an overreaction, an example could be made for the prime directive in star trek) then pretend everything is still all hunky dory while doing effectively nothing material.
Maybe I’ve just had too many encounters with liberals who just never really cared at all to begin with to say that.
I don’t think it’s white liberal nonsense to rename your site from a Nazi dogwhistle to literally anything else, it’d actually own up to the sites past instead of just brushing it under the rug and letting people unwittingly spread a horrible thing. The performative nonsense is having a Jewish ™ person say that the Nazi dogwhistle is not bad actually and that we have all changed, which is exactly what happened.
That’s literally what they did by not changing the name but doing an acknowledgement from one of the Jewish community leaders.
Yeah, the video mentions that multiple people are still around in leadership positions that were there during the time where that was a thing so you would probably hope to see some accountability from those individuals, In theory you could do that without changing the name and logo, but I feel like a lot of people will never look at it the same way after learning where it came from.
What happened more than likely is one of two things, early internet edginess, or the person paying for the site at the start did the thing that a lot of forum owners did back then “it’s my forum, and I can do what I want with it”.
I can’t find the energy to get worked up over this in either case, mostly because there’s bigger fish to fry in the grand scheme of things, and both cases were pretty common in early internet especially the latter which is where the unofficial rule 0 of forum posting comes from, don’t piss off the guy paying for it.