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Robotech.com


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[I don't know where this post should live so I'm posting here.]

What is the story behind "robotech.com?"  Has it been abandoned?  Feels like the owners are holding onto it...just because...  Waaaaaaaaaay back in the day, I used to love swinging by it (and Macross World and Valkyrie Exchange) to get a dopamine hit before diving back into my thesis.  Fast forwarding to the present, it's just really sad to check on robotech.com and see what it's become.

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And why are they highlighting only Myria on the splash screen?  Don't get me wrong, I love Myria, but there are plenty of other notable females in the series.  I hate having DEI shoved down my throat every where I turn so this isn't a rant about inclusion; this is just an observation that there are plenty of notable women in Robotech that are worthy of being highlighted.

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40 minutes ago, 26662 said:

[I don't know where this post should live so I'm posting here.]

What is the story behind "robotech.com?"  Has it been abandoned?  Feels like the owners are holding onto it...just because...  Waaaaaaaaaay back in the day, I used to love swinging by it (and Macross World and Valkyrie Exchange) to get a dopamine hit before diving back into my thesis.  Fast forwarding to the present, it's just really sad to check on robotech.com and see what it's become.

Pretty much, yeah.

The old site had a lot of issues from the start because HG started skimping on backend maintenance at a fairly early point.  They didn't update the server hardware on a regular basis or apply security fixes with any rigor, and the MySQL database holding all the site's text content only rarely got optimized.  As a result, it lagged like mad and it got hacked semi-regularly.

The site's Community section all but died in 2007-2008 when several volunteer forum moderators who took it upon themselves to suppress criticism of the Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles "movie" for fear that it would somehow hurt the prospects of the proposed live action movie.  Ultimately, they ended up banning or otherwise driving away most of the community's active users.  The forums ended up a ghost town after another year or two, and the community largely moved to private forums and then to Facebook groups.

A few years after the Community section died, the site got hacked again and HG decided to retire the old site in favor of a very basic page with product news and a link to the web storefront.  They've prettied it up a bit since and added basic freeware web forums, but most of their audience had long since moved on and the remaining fan community seems to have felt no incentive to use the new forums that were swiftly overrun by bots.  It seems to exist as little more than an effort to "show the flag" and remind people they haven't completely packed it in despite handing control of the franchise over to Sony Funimation and Big West.

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