He-Man.org closing in a week

[Denyer]

Well, I assume it's the site as well since the collecting resources have been offline for a while and redirect back to the forum (also a shame, the photos and minicomic scans were useful). I think they're running vBulletin 4.2.5 so would suspect the PHP versioning on top of everything else might have been a last straw, as it'll end up being for a lot of the internet's early history in the awkward period between plain HTML sites and modern technology. There are options but a bit tricky with a really large forum.

https://www.he-man.org/forums/boards/sh ... er-14-2023

Sounds like there were some disagreements around Revelation too, though, and of course the breakdown of comms with Emiliano. On a tangent -- https://www.formotoys.com/

Some other decent MOTU and generalist sites still out there, some mentioned in that thread... https://vaultsofgrayskull.net/ https://foreternia.com/ https://battleramblog.com/ https://www.actionfigurebarbecue.com/ https://www.poeghostal.com/ http://www.oafe.net/ https://thefwoosh.com/ https://www.grayskullweaponsrack.com/ https://pixel-dan.com/ https://www.motuukcomics.co.uk/ https://www.planeteternia.de/

[Warcry]

That's a real shame.

I'm not a He-Man guy myself, but that site's been a staple of the internet for, what, 25 years? Is there still an active community on the site, or was it mostly an historical place by this point? Either way, I could only imagine the hole it'll leave in the fandom.

[Denyer]

Yeah, the forum is still active. So the fact nothing's being worked out with other people to take over is a bit... well, what I'd expect to be honest. Val/JVS3 originally took on the site from someone else who's popped up in the comments (can't load the thread from where I am currently) and apparently wants to be the person to end it. Presumably the notice of a week is to try to mitigate against the whole thing being scraped more than it has already over the years and possible larger final period hosting bill. None of which existing archiving will necessarily survive if e.g. archive.org respects robots.txt* directives. The site doesn't particularly get on with some other fan-sites, nor the non-profit organisation** that holds a lot of the original MOTU/POP production materials. Would guess more has happened behind the scenes for there to be no baton passed.

The main Origins line is winding up but there's still a ton of MOTU product -- an animation line spinning off from Origins, Masterverse which is larger scale and not just based on Netflix stuff, possible film incoming etc. It's doing somewhat better than TFs in terms of the parent company having any clues about how to manage a brand, even if as a customer I don't appreciate some of the directions Mattel is going with it.

* Not 100% sure what the current situation is, there's been back-and-forth over the years:
https://archive.org/post/406632/why-doe ... -robotstxt
https://www.webmasterworld.com/robots_txt/4898080.htm
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31040524
https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i- ... chive-org/

** e.g., https://www.battlegrip.com/power-and-th ... power-con/

[HotdogDivebomb 2.0]

It's doing somewhat better than TFs in terms of the parent company having any clues about how to manage a brand

No you see it's actually a Good Idea to change the name of the core toyline every 18 months and to reissue 40 year old toys in sealed packaging so that nobody can see exactly what they are.

[Denyer]

Mmm.

The site thread's into mud-slinging by now, but apparently some form of archiving is still planned. Believe it if it happens. If it's a static archive that should get it crawlable by Google (the current broken state of searching seems to be to do with a third-party "Sphinx" search plugin that was presumably selected/necessary due to the size of the database). edit: Although doing the maths, posts are still in single digit millions.

I think in the same position I'd make a static copy of the existing forums, sling that on cheaper hosting, set up a phpBB instance with the existing users imported, look at options for a wiki to stick the toy resources worth saving into then turn that over to other people to input stuff if anyone's got time for it.

edit: Christ, have just found a PM from 2017 that rather contextualises things. Can't say I agreed with things over the years and that's why I didn't log in for what was probably well over a decade, but interventions should have happened years ago by the sound of it.

"My MOTUC collection is up for auction to recoup expenses for this site and Power-Con"

Hi everyone. First of all, I apologize for the mass PM I sent out and hope you'll all forgive me for doing so.

Many of you know who I am. But for those who don't, I'm Val Staples, the owner of He-Man.Org and event director of Power-Con. I've reached a point in my life where, after twenty years of doing what I felt is my part for helping to provide a great online resource and community, as well as working to create a fun convention for He-Man and She-Ra fans, I am asking for some help from all of you.

No one likes going hat-in-hand, but I'm hoping to recoup a small portion of what has gone into providing He-Man.Org and Power-Con. I don't want to go into exact specifics, but years of providing what I hope many fans feel have been great resources and outlets for their fandom has left me tens of thousands of dollars out-of-pocket. I've been very fortunate to have a great career in comics and toys. But a sizable chunk of that income helps me to float the losses or expenses I've put into the brand I love with hopes it brought joy to fans everywhere.

I did all of this by choice, so I don't want anyone to feel sorry for me. We all have obstacles in life to overcome and I know all of you have your own hurdles you face. For me, this is the first time in twenty years that I have ever hosted an auction that benefits me. The last three auctions were 2002, 2004 and 2008. The first helped this site, the second helped repay artists who worked for me on the 200x comic when CrossGen went bankrupt, and the third was again to help this site.

But as much as I love MOTU and POP, and the fan community, it's been hard over the years to keep it all going. I've made a lot of voluntary sacrifices that most fans aren't aware of. And, here in my later years, I realize just how little I've done for myself. For example, I got engaged in 2013 at Power-Con, but I haven't been able to afford a wedding. And I'm not talking anything fancy for a wedding, but all my available finances went back into He-Man.Org and Power-Con. And that's been a bit of a wake-up call. It was easy when it was just me because I didn't mind not having much. But when you're hoping to build a life with someone and possibly even have a family, you quickly learn how priorities need to be balanced better.

I don't have a lot to sell. I've sold off most everything I owed over the years for the prior auctions. But the one thing I do have is a MOTU Classics collection I've been building over the years out of support for the line. I've been subscribing since 2012 (except for Club Grayskull in 2016, as I couldn't afford it), and I've been very fortunate to receive some MOTUC as gifts from fans who knew I didn't have any of the earlier figures. I've been able to enjoy them these past years, but I have to let them go to get back a little bit of my life and hopefully make a small dent in building a new one. I hope fans who gave me those gifts understand, and know I wouldn't part with these if I didn't have to. It means the world to me that some of you think enough of me to have done something so generous as to send me gifts. So thank you.

This is difficult to put out there and I hope you will forgive me for this. I feel I've done right by this fandom for as long as I've been a part of it, and I hope some of you may feel the same way.

edit: Fascinating discussion that gets into Mattel's relationships with fan sites -- https://community.creations.mattel.com/ ... rily-down/

[Sades]

That's sad. It's not my thing, but it's like watching a town change as you age. Businesses and parts that were familiar disappear, all that.

A Discord server could serve as an impromptu community, if it hasn't been suggested already. It's fairly user-friendly/has parts that function similarly, and no one needs to host/run it.

[Denyer]

Loose consensus seems to be for invading https://forum.hemanworld.com/ (vB6) and https://foreternia.com/community (bbPress) -- the owner of HMW has been reaching out and inviting people, and that site's been around a decade or so. At a guess, any influx of people at this stage won't cause them bandwidth issues, the problems the Org will have been having (apart from awkward software versioning and upgrade stuff) would be heavy crawling by bots plus the storage requirements including unknown numbers (but likely many gigabytes) of attachments.

In a best case scenario I think what should have happened years back was archiving in a way that reduced ongoing costs, plus blocking crawling from most sources. There's probably also legacy hosting arrangements where contracts have been rolled forward and aren't delivering value. I've seen that with smaller sites too -- limited storage/bandwidth allocated, old virtual machines and installs kept running because if the host upgrades the server environment everything their customers have on it will stop working. It's a bit of a time-bomb effect.

edit: A couple of things stand out about those forums... the bbPress layout, or that theme, wastes lots of screen space on a desktop browser, and both went with having a very large number of subforums for everything. Both things that are a brake (or traffic calming measure, if we're going with a car analogy) for interaction, and the latter's often worth having when a forum has hundreds or thousands of active members. But it's strange to see in current circumstances.