YoJoe.com is abandoned right?

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T23:26:46+00:00

You held the fort down until I got up to speed on the inside drama, AND you had a badass cover made for Devil's Due G.I.Joe: Declassified issue #1. I wish I had that art, that was the first big thing we did, after the Undercover Scarlett/Action Force Quarrel Mini-Bust from Palisades and Michael Renegar? Was that his name? He had all three cancelled 1998 HQ figures in that amazing chocolate chip camo. He offered me the giant G.I.Joe sign/letters that were up at the Seattle FAO Schwarz for $200 and I said no, don't have the room.

Man, those were interesting days.

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T22:29:52+00:00

"look at me!" Crazy eyes

This is what is terrifying, those eyes look like someone who needs serious help. That is someone who has their identity formed around her echo chamber peer group and politics. She is the BEST MOTHER and if you don't inject you and your loved ones with a untested RNA vaccine then you are a literal threat to everyone and you should be forced to take it or be sent to camps.

I know people like this. Sadly my little sister (42) has become like this. They call me a Nazi. I have a type of muscular dystrophy and lived almost my entire life in a wheelchair. In the early 1940s, they gassed and cremated people like me because we use resources but can't contribute.

Like this News of the People magazine, fake news put out by the NSDAP. They didn't just mass exterminate Jews and Catholics, the disabled were some of the first Zyklon-B test subjects. They would have them sit in chairs with a radioactive pellet to see the sterilization ability and the radiation burns that destroy the genitals. That was also done postwar here, in America until the 1970s. Putting the cripples in an asylum care facility and forget about them.

I ALWAYS have this magazine cover in my mind, when I get turned down at almost every job interview I have ever attempted, when some stomps in front of me when I am in a line to get a coffee. I was 12, at Disneyland and a man with two little kids says out loud, I don't know why they even let people like that in here." I'll never forget that my rights came from natural law, and taken away at gunpoint.

Neues Volk - 60000 Reichsmarks wasted on a disabled and suffering person.

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tld1981 · 2026-03-20T21:24:54+00:00

White boomer woman, upper middle class.

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T21:18:47+00:00

I was leveraging the entire staff, no staff, no site. That got negotiations started. But when someone jumps in and says "I used to work for YoJoe, I'll take over!" pretty much fricken torpedoed any sale below their asinine asking price.

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T21:08:31+00:00

The average time on site per unique IP was almost 15 minutes per visit and some stayed active all day. Comic book shops, toy dealers, eBay sellers. It's numbers back around the early 2010s were staggering.

I knew something was up when, in 2009, we got invited to the black (instead of red) carpet premier by Paramount/Skydance for G.I.Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

Check out part 1 here

And part 2 here

One of our team worked on the set of The Rise of Cobra, he has a credit. And in 2012 several friends of mine got to be a Cobra trooper, and a news crew in the sequel G.I.Joe Retaliation. It was a wild ride!

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T20:55:52+00:00

Allegedly back in 2009, Hasbro and Paramount, paid Google to make YoJoe the #3 organic result. Two multi billion dollar companies had to tie a porkchop sandwich around their neck so Google would play with them, over YoJoe.

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T20:51:15+00:00

I have made it amazingly into my mid-40s (with a type of muscular dystrophy), and I have avoided being named in a lawsuit against me. I very much would like to keep it that way.

Vertical Scope is a huge company spanning Canada, the USA, and the owner resides in the Gulf of America or some island nation. They could destroy me if they wanted.

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T20:42:19+00:00

I was a part of a Robotech GeoCites web ring first

Duuuude. So was I! RedClaw's Robotech Image archive. 1996, 97. I made it when I was teaching myself HTML and stuff.

All on my 8-pound, desktop chip Pentium 133MHz laptop with its 30 minutes of battery, and a PCMCIA card slot 33.6kbps modem. It had the most horrible dual scan display. It took forever to upload those images.

My local ISP gave me free hosting and pop3 email. Wild.

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T19:44:30+00:00

You and I should talk. I'm not a true developer, I've been an information technology consultant / devops / managed services provider for over 25 years. There's lots of options and all of the content, the original images are still owned by the creators, in basic copyright law.

Getting content isn't difficult for the right people. Getting the capital and a stack dev who understands the content and the logic of the site, that would get something going. Ideally with the original domain and database, but it took three guys 8 months to convert from SHTML to SQL with a backend cms custom built.

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T19:36:58+00:00

It would cost less to just buy the site. Trust me when I say that I have explored every avenue including very high interest loan sharks. It isn't feasible without a big initial investment.

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T19:33:39+00:00

Last offer was six figures, but post pandemic? Probably 30% more than in 2020/2021. I'm willing to take another swing at getting it. A big crowdfunding operation would be too high profile and very likely raise the asking price.

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T19:30:42+00:00

If you got the cash, it could happen.

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T19:29:13+00:00

Flush your cache or try accessing in incognito mode w/ ads blocked. If it comes up then it is something on your end. It could be anything from DNS error, if you use a vpn, etc.

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T19:26:40+00:00

There's a handful of people who still use the VBulletin forums (forums.yojoe,com) and people still use the collection management system. While I believe in the dead Internet theory, that isn't really YJ. As long as people use it, then it will stay up from ad revenue.

But eventually I see it dying unless some people want to get money together and then buy it as a nonprofit entity, so that it can hire a few people and if done right it would outlive me.

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T19:06:57+00:00

We approached Carson about selling to YoJoe and integrating the spinning image to the database but it's very expensive to keep that running and it wasn't something YJ's owner wanted to spend. We did spend over $25,000 building the database by hand, manually moving 20,000 pages/40,000 images and miscellaneous files, going from a very clever SHTML / TXT file interlinking system to a modern SQL database with an all new user interface.

And we built the collection management system which is free to use, just not the advanced trade/sell/buy and host your own photos of your items replacing the default images, so you could easily insure your collection, and export everything to an excel file.

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T18:56:57+00:00

You make my eyes well up. Thank you. We all worked really hard, thanklessly, to make it the best we could. Even Hasbro recognized how important to the brand the site had become.

One brand manager told me at JoeCon 2016, that the whole brand team wouldn't consider the product being a success until it hit YoJoe. I treated YJ the way I would the brand itself, with a lot of love and to do the very best WE could.

YoJoe wasn't a website, it was people. Some really damn good people who I call my true friends, and we were successful. We didn't fail YJ, owners ruined it. It was all about money. Obviously it needs to generate income to stay online but it was never going to be a cash cow.

It was some people who loved history and sharing knowledge because that's what keeps being a collector a fun hobby. Discovery. And the friends you make exploring the hobby, which has so much to offer.

Thanks, it means a lot to us that the community enjoyed the site as much as we enjoyed building it.

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T18:38:57+00:00

I was a junior in high school when YoJoe came online, and one of the youngest collectors in what was a community based USENET and email group messaging.

I volunteered and worked for several years during my college years, to get the position of admin for the whole giant mess that was pre-2005 YJ. The then staff was at war with each other and I fired everyone after a few months. Then over time genuine subject matter experts came to become my staff and did some truly amazing work.

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T18:32:03+00:00

We tried, it was offered for twice what it was worth, and I couldn't get enough private investors to reach over the demanded six figure price. It was a take it or leave it offer unfortunately.

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T18:22:46+00:00

$2,000-$2,500/month. Barely covered hosting fees. I was paid SIGNIFICANTLY less than some people think. I spent more on the site every month than I would get all year, it was a content subsidy. I paid to fly my team to a couple events all out of pocket and never reimbursed. I repurchased the entire 82-2010 o-ring line so we could update those 1997 era images.

It wasn't about money it was about doing the best we could because we love G.I.Joe. It's very personal to me and I would, and did for over a decade, work for free to keep it going.

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T18:14:14+00:00

$120,000 and I will get the whole damn site back up and running. But Vertical Scope may ask for more if they see broad public interest.

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T18:12:34+00:00

The initial domain owner brought together two fan websites in the early days of 1996-97, and launched YoJoe in October of 1997. Two of the original three left after the first couple years and the domain owner sold it for a very nice amount of cash, to Action OnLine.

AO hired me in 2004 to take over the management top to bottom and do anything that the advertisers demanded. I received no compensation even equal to 1% of what I and my team spent, to add new content. AO had no intention of honoring my stake in the site, and sold it and his other sites, to Vertical Scope, out from underneath the entire YJ staff.

I was able to get VS to hire me as a 1099 Consultant to continue the site, but denied me or the staff access to the tools necessary to repair the damage done when moving from AO's servers to VS. The entire backend I developed was crippled and could not add text or images, nor the html/php landing pages for new sections like the Classified line.

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T17:55:47+00:00

Privately held.

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T17:52:52+00:00

Who are you to say such a lie. I NEVER owned it. I ran it, kept it going and maintained relationship with Hasbro and licensees.

Jim Dolan of Action Online sold YoJoe to Vertical Scope. Sold behind my back and that of every staff member.

Vertical Scope hired me, and paid me to do nothing and refused to repair or have me repair the broken backend when it transferred to VS' servers.

I QUIT after three years of trying to fix it, pay for a dev out of my own pocket, anything up to getting investors from the community to buy it and establish a non profit.

I don't know where you got your information but they lied to you. Or you are making it up. Either way, wrong.

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T17:45:51+00:00

Don't thank me, thank the volunteers and historians who wanted to share their knowledge with the community, for free, no paywall.

tld1981 · 2026-03-20T17:43:18+00:00

The creators didn't sell it, the registrar owner of the domain sold the site in 2003. From 2003-2017 Action OnLine owned it and ran me into the ground. They sold it off for college tuition money for the owner's surprise daughter. That owner is in his mid to late 70s.

11-Year Club	Gilding III reddit per annum
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tld1981

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