I guess I'm what one would call one of S&M's "regulars", so if it's okay with you, I'd like to share my impressions of S&M, what my stay has been like, and what I think went wrong. (most likely with some annoying grammatical errors as well, heavy repeats of the same things etc etc etc)
Firstly, note that even though I've been a member of PC for 2 1/2 years, and that my interest for competitive pokemon got sparked up not very long after my join date (mainly due to battle logs), I barely posted anything in S&M until about a year ago.
Why is that, may you ask? Well, thing was, I never posted unless I saw a strict opportunity where I could correct someone on basis of not «following the rules», where they had made a typo in the nature of the mon etc etc, in other words, I made posts that, while they could not necessarily be corrected, barely contributed / helped out the user as well. Why did I do this? Because S&M was so GODDAMN intimidating. I saw how other new users were treated, for instance, Pokedra, and I had the impression that if I were to actually learn how to play this new game, S&M would be one of the worst places to begin simply because the impression I got was, that if you posted something wrong, you would get infracted, turn into yet another butt-monkey, and get discouraged from showing your “face” in that section ever again.
My solution to this dilemma? Read close to everything on smogon's strategydex, THEN challenge random people in the battle stadium to battles using borrowed teams from other users. These battles may not have been the “cream of the cream” (as you would say in norwegian), but at least they helped me build up some confidence that if I were to battle vs. other people on shoddy it might not go horribly horribly wrong.
This simple fact, that I realized that I actually stood a chance, was what made me finally overcome my fear for the S&M section and that made me what you could call an active member. (Not being kicked off the shoddy chat immediately after joining also did its part to giving me the feeling that I'd been accepted...) Now, this might not be the very obvious way to start. New users will either just post their team and hope for some (positive) criticism, or join the shoddy/po server using a team consisting of their favourite mons, battle someone, and leave regardless of the result.
I guess everything needs a starting point, but we cannot expect them to turn up with “Team Astral Projection v. 2.0”. Remember, it is after all quite unreasonable for us to expect new people to try to put their entire mind into this, especially considering that they might not necessarily know if they want to be doing this at all. Most things in life require effort, including building a good team for comp.pokes, but we seem to forget that even not very good teams most likely has thought and effort put into them.
S&M shouldn't be all about “insult or get insulted”, as previously implied, but that isn't even necessarily the case anymore. What I feel like it's like now is more like a case of “everything is getting ignored”. At the very least, when you are posting something and getting insulted, you might possibly take that as a personal motivation in order to improve yourself and put the insulter to shame. If no one cares or even notices, why the hell would anyone try to make a second RMT? We can't blame the lack of activity on the new posters, one quick glance at the first page reveals that we do actually have quite a bit of RMT's floating around, yet no one replies to them barring other new posters and DA. (Sometimes a regular pops in and tells them that the team isn't following the standard format as well ~__~ )
Of course, most of the RMT's are not going to be amazing. But if we don't help them to get better, they'll either take ages in order to gain the confidence to actually do something (like me), or they'll just leave because, well, they did their part, but no one bothered to follow it up. The description of the S&M forum does after all say “Post your team lineups, get your team rated or rate other teams”
I've been here for one year, and I've experienced nothing but platinum, platinum, and platinum. Now that B&W has finally arrived, I hope that you'll all help showing me what S&M was like before, especially the part that made it fun. (not that I've bored my way through platinum, mind you. I'll probably nostalgia about it for years to come)
And if there's any new users out there that's reading this, know that it is okay to lose. Indeed, even though my very first battle ended up in a win, it was because I stole a stall team from the S&M section, and I barely managed to survive even with a threat list that said what to do if pokemon “x or y” appeared. Everyone has to start at one point, but once you've gotten the hang of playing competitive pokemon, it'll likely only go one way – upwards (and if it doesn't, you may just send me a PM and I'll try to help in w/e way I can ;DDDD)
So in short, I agree with DA that we should really try to be more friendly (shouldn't be that hard), and I'm partly into the Anti's death camp of “forced rating”. The new ones are doing what they should do, it is up to the regulars to actually do their part if S&M are to be more active than it has been during my stay. COMMUNISM DOESN'T WORK IN PRACTICE, dammit
(also anti how much time do you spend on writing these walls of text lol)
EDIT: Also, I'm really agreeing with Wolf about focusing on "fun events". S&M, WHY SO SERIOUS
+Anti: we were all noobs at some point
+Anti: or in sims' case
+Anti: still are noobs
+Anti: his team looks like a salad