Soooo.... anyone else still browse Zoids fansites?

[Zoidstar]

Since the late 90s, one of my favorite things to do on the internet is look up Zoids stuff. Ironically, that's how I wound up here. Lately I've noticed a lot of sites have started to just disappear.

Zoidspoison, Pheno's site, and Zoidfans are obviously long gone. WIKD's site is gone. The Gojulas Lair is gone. Tilly's site is... broken??? ChannelZi seems to be broken indefinitely. Lionel's site seems to be in the same boat, save for a few pages I can bring up in my history.

I was very pleasantly surprised to see Zoido.Smeat is still up, as well as the Deal's Wheels site. Mr. Hook's Zoids site is still up after all these years. I'm also glad Pheno's site is still going. The subreddit seems to be where most Zoiders are nowadays, and I still see a couple of customizers from Zoidspoison post regularly on there. Maethius' site still works.

I understand that fansites are pretty much dead in this day and age, with most everything being posted in Facebook groups, Discord groups, and the Subreddit, but I still miss going to these sites and used a lot of them for reference for collecting, wishlist making, making repairs, and as an overall reference for decals and parts. Plus with how websites are being formatted nowadays, a lot of these older, unmaintained sites simply don't work anymore...

Anyone know of any obscure Zoids sites that are still running? Or do you have any fond memories of any Zoids fansites you used to visit?

[bill]

Have you even been on discord? There is a section for us. It was where I discovered TwoToys and his works. There are so very many people there. I've even see some of us here over there. Dl discord app search zoids you will find it and all it's many sections. This is if you are phone vs pc. If pc discord is a website. I seem to be less and less on a pc and more n more on a phone myself. Microsoft lost touch so very long ago and stopped listening thus I stopped using them as much as possible.

[Zoidstar]

I really need to do discord more. I was active on a few groups there, but they were deleted and now it's just become this app that just sits on my phone/another window that constantly pops up when I turn on my PC. I'm going to go look for it now lol!

I've kinda come full circle in the phone vs. PC myself. I went from PC to fully mobile, then back to PC, and now I'm pretty much on both of them at the same time. At least when I'm not at work. Always switching between the two.

And unfortunately, that seems to be most companies nowadays. I've got a lot of gripes with Windows myself, but I have a very poor track record with Macs despite using one at my old place of work without incident for years. And I skipped out on Linux because I kept putting off learning it until I honestly kinda forgot it existed lol.

[Maethius]

I haven't gone hunting for the old sites much... Iron Bible was up a while back but not sure if it was maintained? Most of the stronger groups migrated to places like Facebook. I personally don't like how Discord works so I don't frequent it.

I do pine for the old days and the annual custom contests. ^_^

[Snowflake]

The internet is on its deathbed. There's very little left and they're still attacking it. I check out Vision of Zoids once in a rare while just to remind myself of those cool designs, that's it

[Hanyoutai]

So far as I know, The Iron Bible (my site) is the only English-speaking Zoids fan site that still updates (and it's not super often, since I'm busy with work these days, but I have no intention of dropping it in the foreseeable future.) If anyone else knows of any I'd absolutely love to hear about them.

Aside from the ones mentioned here, there are a few more if you delve into non-English speaking sites, which is a lot easier these days. Auto translations (for Japanese > English, at least) have progressed to the point of usually getting the gist of what's being said, if it's not too slang heavy. Zoids Ignition updates the most, in terms of talking about in-universe content. They have a lot of columns and stuff that focus on OJR era content. Lots of obscure magazine images, side views of Zoids, etc.

Zoikino also updates frequently. They contain reviews with amazing photo quality of almost every single new release. They discuss current news, and have an amazing gallery of customs made by them and other fans from all over the world. The bottom of the gallery page gets pretty nostalgic as you'll probably see some famous older customs, including those that used to appear on the ye-old Tomy website and magazine custom contests.

(Funny enough, while going through fan sites for this, I noticed many of the blogs posted 2023 as their "I'm posting a year so far in the future that this post stays on top" date)

[bill]

Since you asked I had to search zoids and see. I know I utilize a few different websites for zoids list and manuals or just to see the countless things I've overlooked thruout the decades. I don't know any of the names of any of the website I wonder thru. However since I searched I noticed Zoids Wild Arena card game is now an app on google play. I DL'd it but have yet to try it out. Just reporting the sighting for those who may be interested.

[WIKD]

I’m around. I did go though some rough life
things. Just last year I contacted several
companies to try and restore the site.
(No I did not have a back up,
yes I am a dumb ass.) I was told that since there
are several copies stored on the “way back
machine” and because it was just simple .jpg
and html there is a good chance it could be
recovered via a Linux script.

No luck as of yet!

[Hanyoutai]

If you've got a lot of time and patience, you can piece some of it back together from waybackmachine yourself by going to each page, clicking "view source" then copy/pasting the relevant data. It's a bit of a pain because there's a lot of trash to weed out from waybackmachine, but it's doable. I've had to do that a couple times when a page I was working on errored during a save and deleted the whole page.

[Maethius]

Wow.... hi, WIKD! It would be cool if the old communities could come back, despite how the world has changed. The old boards had a format and a flow that, quite frankly, seemed to support the hobby better than places like Discord, Reddit, or Facebook. That magic hasn't been rediscovered, let alone improved upon.

[WIKD]

Thanks Hanyoutai, I have not thought about
attempting that, it’s just mainly
the (build process) pictures
that I would like to have available once again.
The site was very simple, nothing as beautiful
as yours,

Maethius good to see you bro! I still have NEVER
seen customs better than the
ones you produce.

I think I have the main Facebook sites,
Discord is worth checking out?

[Maethius]

You're being kind! There are so many customs out there that bury mine. ^_^ I look forward to returning to building customs ASAP!
I belong to a handful of FB Zoid and Gundam groups. I'm not one to comment on Discord; call me old fashioned, but I find navigating Discord... discordant. I only to on there for very specific contact purposes.

[Zoidmagnite]

Jan 6, 2024 19:05:28 GMT -5 WIKD said:

*snip

I was told that since there
are several copies stored on the “way back
machine” and because it was just simple .jpg
and html there is a good chance it could be
recovered via a Linux script.

No luck as of yet!

Hi WIKD! Glad to see you're still around!

I'm a Linux User and I am not aware of any typical Linux script or application that can do that. Have you looked at this:

tonyteaches.tech/download-wayback-machine-website/

I read this article and they use "wget" which is something that Linux uses but it appears that it has been ported to windows and mac (but I know nothing about how that works since I don't use Windows or apple machines).

Using the wget command, the program apparently goes to the wayback machine and pulls their storage of your site from the date of the snapshot. It seems that what you would get would be your "files' of your webpages and apparently images that they captured from your website, but of course, you would need to edit the pages if you choose a new domain to put the site on. That wouldn't be hard to do (but I took an HTML course many years ago when I did my undergrad degree), but if you used an HTML program like Dreamweaver, or Frontpage, and don't know how to write HTML script, it might take you a little bit of time... I just don't know what your HTML experience is.

But it does seem like you could do it that way.

Also, Hanyoutai's suggestion would work as well, and might seem a little slower, but you could recapture the guts of your text information as well as your images and rebuild it in a webwriter of your choice. The benefit of what Hanyoutai suggests would mean that if you didn't know HTML, then you wouldn't have to sift through the files to try and pull your text information out of that.

Also, if you were to use the wget program, it may extract the files, but if it doesn't remove the wayback machine's added stuff, then you still have a chunk of cleaning to do for the HTML files as well. Also, there is no mention that it will pull down the images from your archived site, so you might have to do that manually as well.

But....either way sure beats having to try and rewrite it from scratch and of course the images would be pretty hard to do if you no longer have the files, obviously.

My Linux distro doesn't use wget, so I don't know much about it, though if it works like a packager program does, then it should be reliable code of a sort. wget is registered with GNU, so that says a lot to me right there:

www.gnu.org/software/wget/

[WIKD]

Zoidsmagnite! Great to see you, I am very happy
you are still active. Thank you for the in depth
explanation. It makes more sense now, I
greatly appreciate you taking the time to
reply! I was able to hold on to the domain
and the actual collection, so if I were to ever
feel ambitious I could attempt to re-do it.

I contacted a few companies that offered this
service (around 3-4) and never received a
response. Maybe it’s too old school to be
relevant anymore. Again thank you for your time,
I will stop by here more often.

[Maethius]

I hope you do! Pheno's still around, Darth Daniel is solidly on FB these days, and there are a handful of us "old guard" still around.