Bring the old forum back
Before the whole format change, this site used to be so great and informative. Lots of great interaction with other toy fans. This is now the first time I'm visiting this site in years & is as dead as I imagined it'd be. So sad. I know it's more if wishful thinking, but it quotidian truly be great to bring the old format back. Just saying.
But they needed the new forum format so they could ban people like me and preserve the community.
There was a brief time when the users of this forum were asked if they wanted to change to a newer format, and the vast majority said no.
That old style way to simply having a single feed or every post, reply or not, was going the way of the dinosaur, but in this one case, in this forum right here, it was the heart of everything we did. That old format really worked for us.
And then the change came and the board died. is that just because all the Super Powers people went elsewhere, or was there just no reason to come back to this forum once it changed format?
Who knows. But I think the damage has been done at this point. Once they lost that old format, they lost their audience, and once done cannot be undone.
I used browse the old RTM forum several times a day. Now I check in twice a year, just to see if there's any change in activity, only to see the same sad, depressing, inactive forum that this place has become.
When the RTM board started, it was one of the main places on the new, young internet for toy collectors, etc., to congregate. There were always lots of interesting topics (some toy-related, and others non toy-related), which made this such a great forum. I'd love for RTM to switch back to the old format, but the internet has grown people have found other favorite toy forums. In addition, I don't think Bobbi and Rob (not sure if those are the admins, it's been so long) have any interest in going back to the old format. The topic of going back to the old format has been brought up several times, but the admins don't seem interested.
I occasionally stop by because I'm hopeful the old format will return, but I'm doubtful things will be the way they used to be (old format, active, interesting topics).
(the whole reason for changing the format was to disallow anonymous posts...or so i thought!
actually, i think this hobby is simply pricing itself out of the range of most collectors,especially newbies. i have hundreds of figures on my shelves which i couldn't begin to "replace" at todays prices (at least not with the increasingly worthless "american peso")
when i started collecting in college it was an attractive hobby because even a *POOR* student could afford it.
The reason for the change was to update the technology under the hood and reduce the spam it generated. The code for the forum was written in the late 90's and was extremely easy to spam. As we upgraded other parts of the site we eventually changed the forum (btw it was the last part to change over).
I stated many times in the past that there was never a push to disallow anonymous posting. I think every forum should allow anonymous posting and never plan to remove that feature here.
The forum format was very difficult to moderate and clear of spam (it was all done by manually). Technically it was obsolete and we decided to change it.
As a side note, forum traffic steadily declined from about 2007 until we changed it in 2012. There are many reasons for this as people come and go, the hobby has changed, other sites come and go and other forms of communication have taken the place of this (like Facebook and Twitter which both provide some of the real-time 'state of consciousness' feel the forum had).
As for the price of collecting, no doubt it has steadily increased as well. However, what it is currently doing is a bifurcation where it is splitting into two distinct markets - high price/quality and low price/quality.
The 'middle class' toys have been disappearing. There are still some, but it isn't nearly what it was 10 years ago when you had many companies making mid-priced toys and selling them at a ton of smaller brick and mortar chains (Tower, Musicland, Sam Goody) along with the big box retailers.
Today you get the very clearly priced and made for kids toys (under $8 with less detail and articulation) and the high-end collector items ($80 1:12 figures and $200 1:6 figures). There are many contributors to this, but part of it is that the collectors are aging and not being replaced as other patterns of play take the place of action figures.
-Rob
Just as dead as today's toy market . This page thrived with the rise of the action figurre craze that came on the death of the trading card and comic book glut. I wish there was more interaction here but no one cares about action figures any more.
Man....just thought of this place for the first time in years and decided to check in and see what was going on. I,too,miss the old board-it was kinda crappy,and frequently spammy,but it was OURS damnit!!! This was the first place I routinely hung my hat back in the early internet days...weirdly enough,I remember it for so much more than toys. Anytime there was a breaking news story RTM was the first place I looked-you guy were often ahead of the rest of the net when it came to news. Anyway....hope you are all doing well and still collecting...I'm around...other places. See ya in the aisles.....
This place used to be the best online, along with the old DC Message Boards. Now, I go to another board and Facebook for all of my discussions. I DO miss this place.
This was the first website I ever visited back in the day. It had many great members like the Toy Detective, TRDouble, Gene Lantern, Scooter, ClanKiller, Niko, Iron Cow, Wheelchair Rocker, Cornboy Mayes, Julius Marx, Jeff Cope. Just to name a few. Strange Planet was here back then also.
Iron Cow had made caricatures of all of us. I think he called it Online Heroes or something along those lines.
Disqus is a lot like the old format. It doesn't allow anonymous posting, but it does allow the kind of free-flowing conversation we all loved so much.
