BWTF/Ben updates

[andersonh1]

Ben's site was my first exposure to Beast Wars. I got back into collecting in college though watching the Beast Wars show, which was also where I first had internet access, and I found Ben's site and got caught up pretty fast on a branch of Transformers I knew nothing about. I'm a pretty knowledgable fan now, but I wasn't at the time, and his site was an excellent resource for me.

[Dominic]

I am not saying we should always keep the discussion basic, wasting huge amounts of time and type defining terms. But, I am worried about is that the hobby as a whole, (thought not as much as say...comics), is becoming more insular in the sense that it is being set-up to assume pre-existing knowledge. That goes far beyond this page.

Dom

[JediTricks]

That is because you are already familiar with the item, but the majority of people coming into this will be looking at the box first, since that's how the product comes. How are collectors supposed to look up, say, 25th Anniversary Prime by your logic?

That is assuming they're looking at a boxed and/or complete figure.

If they are not familiar with the item and they're not looking at the box, they won't know where to look at all, so that point doesn't really counter what I'm saying.

I notice that SSG's forums are set up along those lines, where it is assumed that somebody knows what sub-line a specific variant of a specific character came from. That is one of the reasons I never really got into things there, even before getting out of SW.

I have those forums set up so that the "new" line is the only separate forum, and the other Hasbro lines are in the "retired" section, then there's Kenner vintage, and all have dates underneath so that fits the figures' datestamps. So for action figures, it's not set up that way. However, the Database there is, but that's not what I'm in charge of.

o86 and Mirage make great points about sites like ours and BWTF being portals to growing knowledge for the curious.

I am not saying we should always keep the discussion basic, wasting huge amounts of time and type defining terms. But, I am worried about is that the hobby as a whole, (thought not as much as say...comics), is becoming more insular in the sense that it is being set-up to assume pre-existing knowledge. That goes far beyond this page.

You make a good point, you are totally right about that here, but your leanings with execution are totally 180 from that, merging threads and suggesting insular listing systems. I think it's hard for us as fans to be objective about how outsiders see and interact with us to make themselves no longer outsiders. We have to be able to connect our feelings to our actions, we want to grow our fandom but to do so we must be conscious of what we do that might drive others away.

[Dominic]

I actually merged those topics as a way to organize them, keeping the AHM discussion in one, and the MD discussion elsewhere. If anything, that could make it easier for people to find what they want.

As far as toy-listings go, I am trying to come up with a way that lists them in the most intuitive way possible. As a collector, I have trouble with "list by packaging or line". YoJoe does a good job of listing toys. Of course, they have several redundant lists, (name, year, photo-ID,), but it works. TFU does this well for Transformers.

Dom