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interests / alt.toys.transformers / Re: What old TF websites and other online resources do you most miss?

SubjectAuthor
* What old TF websites and other online resources do you most miss?Joseph Bardsley
`* Re: What old TF websites and other online resources do you most miss?Zobovor
 `* Re: What old TF websites and other online resources do you most miss?Dave Van Domelen
  `- Re: What old TF websites and other online resources do you most miss?Travoltron

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What old TF websites and other online resources do you most miss?

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Subject: What old TF websites and other online resources do you most miss?
From: joe.bard...@gmail.com (Joseph Bardsley)
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 by: Joseph Bardsley - Wed, 4 May 2022 06:41 UTC

I came across this really great read on Medium the other day, about the "old", pre-Web 2.0 Internet, and it got me thinking about how - for me, at least - that era was when I first came across organized TF fandom. I suspect that, for many of us here, the same or similar is true.

https://tiinatreasure.medium.com/the-internet-that-once-was-c2ceb7192e84

What - if any - vanished TF resource from back in this era do you most miss? For me, it would definitely be Stanley Lui's TF Encyclopedia (I definitely printed it all out, as this article attests), alongside the late, great TF:2k5, Lost Years, and Decepticon Dominion MUSHes.

Honorable mentions? Vulcana's TransFic Base, The Padded Cell, and James Hoxsey's old FTP site.

Hope everyone is doing well,

Joseph

Re: What old TF websites and other online resources do you most miss?

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Subject: Re: What old TF websites and other online resources do you most miss?
From: zmf...@aol.com (Zobovor)
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 by: Zobovor - Fri, 6 May 2022 04:16 UTC

On Wednesday, May 4, 2022 at 12:41:15 AM UTC-6, Joseph Bardsley wrote:

> What - if any - vanished TF resource from back in this era do you most miss?

Oh, man. Haven't thought about all those old web sites in ages.

It used to be that you had to know where to go to find a person's fan web site. If you found one you liked, you had to bookmark it because you might never come across it again. Everybody had links to every site that they liked. This was way before Google was using AI algorithms to suggest web sites for you.

I feel like we've lost something. Before, a well-polished fan site was a gem. It was a person going, "Hi, I'm a fan, and this is what I do," and they had their artwork or fan fiction or whatever. Now, if you want artwork you go to DeviantArt. If you want toy reviews you go to YouTube. And suddenly instead of going to find a specific talented person, you're just inundated with thousands of choices. Too many, really. Everybody competing for your attention. It's tragic.

I remember the struggles with maintaining a fan site. During the early days of AOL, they provided free web hosting, but they only gave you 2MB of space per screen name. But, that's okay because you could have like five screen names on one AOL account. I remember having all these web page links to my main Zobovor screen name as well as Xobovor and TFEncyc and probably one other. What a nightmare to keep track of. I remember trying to expand to GeoCities or Xoom (which became NBCi) or FortuneCity or Crosswinds and watching as every free web hosting service got knocked down, one at a time. FortuneCity held on for a few years, and I even went to a paid subscription model in an effort to keep my web site going, but that didn't last long.

I called my web site the ZMFTS! which stood for Zobovor's Multi-Faceted Transformers Site!, but Hasbro legal contacted me at one point and said I couldn't use the Transformers trademark without permission, so I had to change it to Zobovor's Multi-Faceted Talent Showcase. Oddly enough, when Ben Yee registered BWTF.com and Hasbro said he couldn't have a web site called Beast Wars Transformers, he changed it to "Ben's World of Transformers" which was somehow okay. This was not my last tangle with Hasbro's legal department, incidentally.

I wonder how much of my life I have spent struggling with FTP to upload files to my web site. Sometimes it took hours and it was so frustrating. And there was nothing more annoying than spending hours on an update only for some punk to go, "hay zob you have a dead link lol." Well, that's probably because I was half-asleep and up until two in the morning uploading files. Sheesh.

Well, anyway. Off the soapbox.

Rob Jung had that great Electric Escape web site that had fan fiction and hosted the Trannies and some other cool stuff. I visited his site a lot, back in the day.

Robert Powers had his fan site that also had great fan fiction and some good essays and other things. Another favorite of mine.

Dave Van Domelen was doing custom toys before I started doing my own, and I remember loving all the pictures of the Decoys and such that he had painted. His ancient dinosaur site is still around, of course, which is amazing.

Zob (is also an internet dinosaur, rawr)

Re: What old TF websites and other online resources do you most miss?

<t53ptn$fkh$1@hope.eyrie.org>

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From: dvan...@eyrie.org (Dave Van Domelen)
Newsgroups: alt.toys.transformers
Subject: Re: What old TF websites and other online resources do you most miss?
Date: Fri, 6 May 2022 18:37:43 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: Coherent Comics UnInc
Message-ID: <t53ptn$fkh$1@hope.eyrie.org>
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Originator: dvandom@eyrie.org (Dave Van Domelen)
 by: Dave Van Domelen - Fri, 6 May 2022 18:37 UTC

In article <dc98a520-ea5d-4f11-85b6-adfa1673d5cfn@googlegroups.com>,
Zobovor <zmfts@aol.com> wrote:
>I called my web site the ZMFTS! which stood for Zobovor's Multi-Faceted
>Transformers Site!, but Hasbro legal contacted me at one point and said
>I couldn't use the Transformers trademark without permission, so I had
>to change it to Zobovor's Multi-Faceted Talent Showcase. Oddly enough,
>when Ben Yee registered BWTF.com and Hasbro said he couldn't have a web
>site called Beast Wars Transformers, he changed it to "Ben's World of
>Transformers" which was somehow okay. This was not my last tangle with
>Hasbro's legal department, incidentally.

Ben got that permission as part of a deal. He actually registered
beastwars.com before Hasbro realized the Web was important. Rather than try
to strongarm him, they negotiated. They bought the domain from him and gave
him permission to use BWTF.com as part of the deal.

>Dave Van Domelen was doing custom toys before I started doing my own,
>and I remember loving all the pictures of the Decoys and such that he
>had painted. His ancient dinosaur site is still around, of course,
>which is amazing.

I've never had legal problems with Hasbro, but I *did* get a Cease and
Desist from the Anti-Defamation League over my Beast Wars Anti-Defamation
League page.

Dave Van Domelen, not looking forwards to when the eyrie.org site owner
retires and he has to move everything to another site that doesn't allow
login access, just uploads....

Re: What old TF websites and other online resources do you most miss?

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From: travolt...@defender.uni (Travoltron)
Newsgroups: alt.toys.transformers
Subject: Re: What old TF websites and other online resources do you most miss?
Date: Fri, 6 May 2022 12:29:52 -0700
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 by: Travoltron - Fri, 6 May 2022 19:29 UTC

I found my old website.

http://web.archive.org/web/19991005122445/http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Temple/1986/

Another mirror here, although most of the links seem to be dead on this one.
https://www.oocities.org/superjinrai/

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