Toy Fair 1986 catalog now online! Many unseen colourschemes!

White Hubcap!! That would have been awesome.

Galvatron w/a Black laser cannon, now that links Megs better.

Cool, thx for the update.

DREWCIFER

So that's where the blue on Wheelie came from... suddenly some of the artwork featuring him makes a lot more sense.

Glad to help. My wife is an historian, so I recognize the value of primary sources like this. Also, Wheelie with metallic teal trim...weird!

I always used to think that my G1 Cosmos had a faulty head, but now i see that his head IS supposed be down.

So...Cyclonus was originally Scourge and vice versa? Or did they just get the captions wrong?

I feel cheated... Swindle has his arm joints on his shoulders instead of his waist!

very cool

I'm really surprised at all of the mistakes. Many TFs mistransformed? Names switched? Blurr displayed facing backwards? Wow.

Man, even back then Hasbro had official pictures of mistransformed toys.

Look at the stickers on the doors of Runabout. do those stickers look familiar? Maybe a 1984 seeker named Thundercracker or Thrust?

lol, powerglides jet mode has the head looking up, hub caps arms are in in robot mode. Also I think hub cap and tailgate have swapped colours

I can't believe that the TFWiki guys replaced the images linked in the news story at http://www.seibertron.com/transformers/ ... mes/17954/ with "Fuck Yeah Seacons". Considering how many images they've taken particularly from the galleries here at Seibertron and that we front paged this auction on Seibertron.com to help out the AllSpark and TFWiki, I'd say posting a couple of the images falls within their "fair use" clause.

TFWiki.net wrote:This image © Hasbro, Takaratomy, or both. Low resolution images are used for documentary purposes to illustrate a product or character on TFWiki.net under the fair use provision of United States copyright law. See Copyrights.

I can't believe that those guys would post that on a website seen by so many people. Very disappointing.

Seibertron wrote:I can't believe that the TFWiki guys replaced the images linked in the news story at http://www.seibertron.com/transformers/ ... mes/17954/ with **** Yeah Seacons". Considering how many images they've taken particularly from the galleries here at Seibertron and that we front paged this auction on Seibertron.com to help out the AllSpark and TFWiki, I'd say posting a couple of the images falls within their "fair use" clause.

TFWiki.net wrote:This image © Hasbro, Takaratomy, or both. Low resolution images are used for documentary purposes to illustrate a product or character on TFWiki.net under the fair use provision of United States copyright law. See Copyrights.

I can't believe that those guys would post that on a website seen by so many people. Very disappointing.

Perhaps one of their representatives should come on by and explain their actions, especially considering how many of our members came forward to assist with the cause.

Far as I can tell, just a little joke image since the posted images were being hotlinked.

Counterpunch wrote:Perhaps one of their representatives should come on by and explain their actions, especially considering how many of our members came forward to assist with the cause.

For what it's worth, I actually sent a polite PM request to MKall to take the hotlinked pics down once I saw a gripe about the hotlinking on one of the Wiki Talk pages. (I don't know if he's read it yet, though.) That was before I realized we'd also swapped the pics, though.

So... I tried to get this done politely first, but apparently I'm one of the few who felt like that was a better approach than swapping the pics right off the bat.

Give me a break about 'the cause'. The cause was really the Hasbro Children's Charity-and that wasn't mentioned in this story. This is about pictures in a toy catalogue, not sick kids. Don't mix the two issues.

While I wouldn't have posted something with that particular language, I also wouldn't have hotlinked from a site that has as many users as this one does. Poor ettiquite was met with poor ettiquite.

Well Big Show, if you think there's some issue with the news, you're welcome to point it out.

I'll go ahead and point out all the seibertron images used without request on the Wiki.

And I'll go ahead and say that inter-site politics should be dropped now that the immediate situation's been resolved. The images are now on our server and are loading fine. Any ramifications can be discussed in a different place so as not to further sour the experience for the Seibertron users who wish to discuss this piece of history.

For the record, Counterpunch, I have absolutely no issue with Seibertron or its news department. There are several excellent news stories, and is bookmarked and visited often throughout the day.

The sole purpose of my second post ever was to make sure that there were no misconceptions about 'causes' in question. Raising $2300 for a Children's Charity (especially in these times) is an incredible effort, and is something that every single person that supported it (be it financially or through spreading the word) should be immensely proud of.

I just wanted to be sure that such an effort remained separate from intra-site pettiness.

Is it me or is that white Hub Cap actually Cliffjumper?

I quite like the colour scheme on Kup and Blurr with the red eyes.

That grey Runamuck should be released as one of the watchdogs from the Ultimate Doom. I quite like the idea of Battlecharger drones.

Hotspot, Streetwise and First Aid all seem quite different.

I like the colour scheme on Superion and even the black on Galvatron instead of the transparent orange lends the toy an air of menace.

Big Show wrote:Give me a break about 'the cause'. The cause was really the Hasbro Children's Charity-and that wasn't mentioned in this story. This is about pictures in a toy catalogue, not sick kids. Don't mix the two issues.

While I wouldn't have posted something with that particular language, I also wouldn't have hotlinked from a site that has as many users as this one does. Poor ettiquite was met with poor ettiquite.

Just for the record:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/seibertron.com
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/tfwiki.net
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/seiber ... fwiki.net/

What we did was not poor etiquette. While I do not understand why this has been blown so out of proportion (especially with so many hosting companies providing relatively inexpensive servers that have thousands of GBs available for bandwidth (or even better yet ... unlimited))? Regardless, it was apparently a big deal to someone. I don't understand why someone wouldn't just contact us via the contact form on Seibertron.com or by sending an email directly to staff@seibertron.com or news@seibertron.com? Contacting Mkall is not a viable option ... he's one staff member on the site out of 30 and he's not the owner of this site either. Someone in an ownership position should have contacted me and I would have been happy to work out a resolution.

Seibertron wrote:Hotlinking an image is not poor etiquette.

Actually, hotlinking is, honestly, very poor etiquette, unless you know for 100% certain beforehand the person is all right with it. Not all pay servers allow lots of bandwidth, so anytime you hotlink you're risking that webmaster possibly having to pay out lots of money. Sure, they can contact you and have you take it down, but they're still out all that bandwidth before that happens. (There's a host of other reasons on top of that why it's bad as well.)

Do a search on the matter, and you'll see that pretty much everyone agrees that hotlinking is a big no-no.

I do think it would have been better if we had handled it politely (and I tried to), but your default assumption should always, always be to not hotlink, not the other way around.

Seibertron wrote:That's what the images are there for ... and I've never given tfwiki a hard time for using a large number of images from this site before either.

Difference being, when we use images from your site, we always host them ourselves by uploading them to our own server.

As for why I contacted MKall, it's because it was he who posted the news article, so I thought it made sense to contact him to edit the single article rather than bothering an admin about what seemed like a relatively trivial matter that could be handled by a moderator.

Jeysie wrote:

Seibertron wrote:Hotlinking an image is not poor etiquette.

Actually, hotlinking is, honestly, very poor etiquette, unless you know for 100% certain beforehand the person is all right with it. Not all pay servers allow lots of bandwidth, so anytime you hotlink you're risking that webmaster possibly having to pay out lots of money. Sure, they can contact you and have you take it down, but they're still out all that bandwidth before that happens. (There's a host of other reasons on top of that why it's bad as well.)

Do a search on the matter, and you'll see that pretty much everyone agrees that hotlinking is a big no-no.

I do think it would have been better if we had handled it politely (and I tried to), but your default assumption should always, always be to not hotlink, not the other way around.

Seibertron wrote:That's what the images are there for ... and I've never given tfwiki a hard time for using a large number of images from this site before either.

Difference being, when we use images from your site, we always host them ourselves by uploading them to our own server.

As for why I contacted MKall, it's because it was he who posted the news article, so I thought it made sense to contact him to edit the single article rather than bothering an admin about what seemed like a relatively trivial matter that could be handled by a moderator.

I can't believe that someone would sour a positive situation for the whole community that could have easily been handled by Walky contacting us to remove the images instead of posting an inappropriate image like that. One of the staff members on this site innocently hotlinking a few images does not deserve someone inappropriately defacing Seibertron.com without first contacting us and asking us to help them out. That is not fair to us and is immature behavior at best for which we deserve an apology.

Seibertron wrote:

Jeysie wrote:

Seibertron wrote:Hotlinking an image is not poor etiquette.

Actually, hotlinking is, honestly, very poor etiquette, unless you know for 100% certain beforehand the person is all right with it. Not all pay servers allow lots of bandwidth, so anytime you hotlink you're risking that webmaster possibly having to pay out lots of money. Sure, they can contact you and have you take it down, but they're still out all that bandwidth before that happens. (There's a host of other reasons on top of that why it's bad as well.)

Do a search on the matter, and you'll see that pretty much everyone agrees that hotlinking is a big no-no.

I do think it would have been better if we had handled it politely (and I tried to), but your default assumption should always, always be to not hotlink, not the other way around.

Seibertron wrote:That's what the images are there for ... and I've never given tfwiki a hard time for using a large number of images from this site before either.

Difference being, when we use images from your site, we always host them ourselves by uploading them to our own server.

As for why I contacted MKall, it's because it was he who posted the news article, so I thought it made sense to contact him to edit the single article rather than bothering an admin about what seemed like a relatively trivial matter that could be handled by a moderator.

I can't believe that someone would sour a positive situation for the whole community that could have easily been handled by Walky contacting us to remove the images instead of posting an inappropriate image like that. One of the staff members on this site innocently hotlinking a few images does not deserve someone inappropriately defacing Seibertron.com without first contacting us and asking us to help them out. That is not fair to us and is immature behavior at best for which we deserve an apology.

In addition, I'm not going to let the staff of Seibertron.com be the beat up bag for the TFWiki guys over hotlinking an image. Hotlinking hasn't been an issue for years, plus it's EXTREMELY simple to prevent hotlinking of images. If TFWiki really wants to prevent hotlinking, they could easily prevent images from displaying with a simple modification to their server's htaccess file.

Seibertron wrote:One of the staff members on this site innocently hotlinking a few images does not deserve someone inappropriately defacing Seibertron.com without first contacting us and asking us to help them out. That is not fair to us and is immature behavior at best for which we deserve an apology.

You'll have to talk to Walky about that, since he was the one who swapped the images in the first place, on his own accord.

Seibertron wrote:In addition, I'm not going to let the staff of Seibertron.com be the beat up bag for the TFWiki guys over hotlinking an image. Hotlinking hasn't been an issue for years,

Actually, it is still very much an issue for lots of servers. I may not agree with how Walky reacted, but hotlinking without getting the site's permission first just is still not OK, either. Nobody's entirely in the right with this whole issue. Just ask permission first before hotlinking to a site, and you'll never have to deal with this sort of issue again.

Seibertron wrote:plus it's EXTREMELY simple to prevent hotlinking of images. If TFWiki really wants to prevent hotlinking, they could easily prevent images from displaying with a simple modification to their server's htaccess file.

I agree there, but unfortunately getting tech changes implemented tends to be slow going for our staff.

But in any case, since I'm not an admin, just a simple interested editor who wanted to try to get this solved amicably (and obviously failed miserably), I'm bowing out and just suggesting you comment to Walky or the other wiki admins instead (and I hope you have better luck dealing with Walky than I usually do...)

Jeysie wrote:Actually, it is still very much an issue for lots of servers. I may not agree with how Walky reacted, but hotlinking without getting the site's permission first just is still not OK, either. Nobody's entirely in the right with this whole issue. Just ask permission first before hotlinking to a site, and you'll never have to deal with this sort of issue again.

Again, hotlinking is not an issue for people that know what they're doing. With a few simple lines of code (which I have provided below), tfwiki.net would be able to prevent hotlinking and this issue would be resolved. Modifying the htaccess file to resolve this problem would be the correct way to resolve this from a technical stand point.

Jeysie wrote:

Seibertron wrote:plus it's EXTREMELY simple to prevent hotlinking of images. If TFWiki really wants to prevent hotlinking, they could easily prevent images from displaying with a simple modification to their server's htaccess file.

I agree there, but unfortunately getting tech changes implemented tends to be slow going for our staff.

But in any case, since I'm not an admin, just a simple interested editor who wanted to try to get this solved amicably (and obviously failed miserably), I'm bowing out and just suggesting you comment to Walky or the other wiki admins instead (and I hope you have better luck dealing with Walky than I usually do...)

Walky contacted me and apologized. I stressed that posting an image with the "f" word in it is really inappropriate and unfair to the younger viewers of this site. I also provided him with some code to modify tfwiki.net so that he can prevent all images from being hotlinked on all websites or if he just wants to block images from being hotlinked on Seibertron.com.

Block all images from displaying on all other websites ...

Code: Select all

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?tfwiki\.net/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://www.tfwiki.net/no-hotlinking-error-message.gif [L]


Block all images from just displaying on Seibertron.com ...

Code: Select all

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?seibertron\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://tfwiki.net/no-hotlinking-error-message-please.gif [L]


Hotlinking is not an issue. If tfwiki.net wants to prevent hotlinking, they should do one of the two things above to prevent this in the future. If they do this, all of their concerns about hotlinking will be permanently resolved. I have also offered to help set this up if Walky would like my assistance.

Seibertron wrote:Walky contacted me and apologized. I stressed that posting an image with the "f" word in it is really inappropriate and unfair to the younger viewers of this site.

That's good to hear. I get really tired of the infighting that goes on in the TF fandom sometimes.

Seibertron wrote:Hotlinking is not an issue. If tfwiki.net wants to prevent hotlinking, they should do one of the two things above to prevent this in the future.

Ordinarily I'd agree that preventing hotlinking is pretty simple (as I have it set up on my own website, so I already know the coding). But the problem, from what I hear, is that since we're using a Squid cache set up to help with our load balancing, it's not necessarily as easy as just throwing up a htaccess file.

Jeysie wrote:

Seibertron wrote:Walky contacted me and apologized. I stressed that posting an image with the "f" word in it is really inappropriate and unfair to the younger viewers of this site.

That's good to hear. I get really tired of the infighting that goes on in the TF fandom sometimes.

Seibertron wrote:Hotlinking is not an issue. If tfwiki.net wants to prevent hotlinking, they should do one of the two things above to prevent this in the future.

Ordinarily I'd agree that preventing hotlinking is pretty simple (as I have it set up on my own website, so I already know the coding). But the problem, from what I hear, is that since we're using a Squid cache set up to help with our load balancing, it's not necessarily as easy as just throwing up a htaccess file.

Load balancing for a site the size of tfwiki.net is most likely overkill since the site is just primarily text. The Squid Cache also wouldn't have anything to do with whether or not they can use an .htaccess file, which would just go in the root of their website. Would be happy to help them resolve these issues. I imagine most of their issues have to do with MySQL not being setup properly to handle their traffic and not anything to with these other issues.

As for "squid cache" and .htaccess files ...

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&safe=off&q ... a56c95bda8
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&safe=off&q ... a56c95bda8

Seibertron wrote:Load balancing for a site the size of tfwiki.net is most likely overkill since the site is just primarily text.

Well, we also have a lot of images as well. There's also the overhead of people making and previewing edits, and templates, and similar things. (This is a wiki with frequently changing full webpages that has a few dozen plus people often making more than 500 edits a day.) The site was have a hell of a time at first before we installed the Squid cache, and up until we upgraded our server recently we were still suffering spells of the site not loading.

Seibertron wrote:The Squid Cache also wouldn't have anything to do with whether or not they can use an .htaccess file, which would just go in the root of their website.

Actually, it apparently does, due to the way things pass off between the cache and the server. But one of the guys has also said there's a way for Squid to pass things to a script, so maybe that will work out.

But in any case, I'm sure you guys are hashing this all out.

So yeah, about that catalog...

heh...

And here I thought I was wicked happy I was finally able to pick up my Henkei C-19 Mini-Bot Spy Team today (I'd ordered it in December). Now I compare Cosmos, Warpath and Wheelie to their G1 counterparts... and frankly I'm happier with the Henkei figures. Not that I'm not pleased that we get to see a Toy Fair '86 catalog. I am; I just like the newer figures better. (I even like the Henkei deco of Wheelie better than what's in that catalog. I thought at first his sad face could have been because of the yellowish color, but now I think he was just sad about how long it took to come and the fact that the box got smooshed somewhere along the way... )

Now if only they'd gotten Galvatron right for U2.0...

Good find on the catalog though, whoever found it.

Edit:

Seibertron wrote:I'd like to officially nominate ROTF Lockdown as a future BotCon or Club exclusive DEATH'S HEAD!!!

I know this is from the signature, and totally off-topic here, but I'd second that vote. You think Marvel would go for it though?

Jeysie wrote:

Seibertron wrote:Load balancing for a site the size of tfwiki.net is most likely overkill since the site is just primarily text.

Well, we also have a lot of images as well. There's also the overhead of people making and previewing edits, and templates, and similar things. (This is a wiki with frequently changing full webpages that has a few dozen plus people often making more than 500 edits a day.) The site was have a hell of a time at first before we installed the Squid cache, and up until we upgraded our server recently we were still suffering spells of the site not loading.

Actually, you guys don't have a lot of images which has been my point. In the past 48 hours, I have uploaded close to 50,000 images while I've been trying to restore the galleries after the server disaster happened last week. That doesn't even scratch the surface. I easily have a few million more images to go. Seibertron.com is about a 250gb site which has about 30,000+ people per day visiting which generates about 200,000 to 300,000 pageviews per day. 500 edits per day is nothing, and any capable server would be able to handle "500 edits per day" (that's 1 edit every 2.88 minutes). 5,000,000 edits? Then we'd be talking about server issues. I imagine the root of the problem with tfwiki.net's technical problems has to do with that it's possibly (and I'm assuming here based on the rhetoric I've been told about how "massive" of a site it is) on a $25 to $50 a month server, perhaps on a shared hosting plan instead of a dedicated server, and that the physical limitations of the inexpensive server are what's causing them difficulties. It really sounds like someone just needs to go in there and optimize MySQL and perhaps setup MySQL query caching which would be perfect for a site like tfwiki.net. As someone who has programmed thousands of websites over the past decade as well as many servers, I'm just offering some help out there to resolve a problem that shouldn't exist for a site that we all enjoy.

ShGarland_1383 wrote:

Seibertron wrote:I'd like to officially nominate ROTF Lockdown as a future BotCon or Club exclusive DEATH'S HEAD!!!

I know this is from the signature, and totally off-topic here, but I'd second that vote. You think Marvel would go for it though?

As much as I'd love to say yes, unfortunately I'd have to say no. Glad you see it too though.

On the catalogue:

It's awsome to see a clear picture of darker Galvy. His cannon mount is interestin gtoo; more toon accurate. Is he holding it like a gun? The angle doesn't match his upper arm. Woulda been nice to see that reissued with the purple version. But maybe it didn't secure too well. Slightly different helmet too.

Cyclonus has a startling design there. An all silver head? Yikes!

Actually, Cyclonus' early appearances in Target 2006 had the white head colour scheme in the UK Marvel comics. I like it.

Just goes to show how a different colour scheme can improve or change a toy. Really like that grey Runamuck. Galvatron is nice too.

Did he? I thought I'd seen it somewhere. Well, that'd explain it. Not a shoddy job on the colorist's part.

Looking more at Galvy reveals it doesn't even have a battery cover and that it's button and button holes, and hip packs are totally different than the real deal's.

also relevant:
http://www.toyarchive.com/Transformers/ ... types.html
http://www.toyarchive.com/Transformers/ ... otoLD.html