Were you collecting online in the late 90s? Nostalgia!

[Haruna]

I'm being reminded of so much through you guys' comments! I love it.

I was reading along and I saw my name, ahhhhhhh!  Hi there!!

Hi there!!! I am so very surprised that you're the same LadyMoondancer! I've seen you around on the boards and I just assumed you had the same name. I'm laughing at myself now! I'm so very happy to hear you're still in the pony community. It's kind of like meeting a favorite author. Your website and fanfiction had a big impact on me as a growing writer! Do you have your fanfictions saved anymore? (sorry, rabid fan!)

HQT ran Dream Castle website and I still have one of her fanfictions saved on my computer (the one about the fairy tale princesses), and I wish I'd saved the other one about Lord Dale.  The Ice Palace was run by . . . IceFeather, I want to say?  I think she also ran the Church of the Holy MOC Mimic, which was hilarious.

Oh, yes, that's right! HQT ran the Dream Castle website. When she resigned I was terribly sad. And yes, IceFeather, not HQT, ran the Ice Palace, that's right. I have a kinda strange memory of her -- back when you could see who you were bidding against, I was in a fierce, down-to-the-wire bidding war with her over a non-BBE Baby Ribbon, and I won. I was always a little nervous that she was upset with me, but I didn't know her personally, so it was kind of silly.

[kitkatvintage]

I was on the ponypeople email group in the late 90's. That was my daily ritual after high school: come home & read the day's worth of pony email.

When I started collecting, I copied all of Dream Valley & later Taffeta's UK Scrapbook into a black & white composition notebook BY HAND because my parents wouldn't let me use that much computer paper to print it out. I still have the notebook with all of my early collection notes including who I bought or traded with & how much I paid for each pony (ahem... $30 Mimic).

I rember when Paypal first launched & gave you a $5 credit for signing up, and for every person you referred you got another $5 credit. Haha!! To think Paypal started out giving money away before all the fees started...

My first international trade got me UK Magic Star for a so soft Gusty, adult sea pony, & a Birthflower mail order. At the time I thought I got a sweet deal.
 

[Emberfly]

I remember all of this.  I started collecting just as the G2 ponies came out and Dream Valley was my place to go for identification.  I guess that would have been '98 I believe (that's when I set up my yahoo email address with a pony name).

I remember my first eBay pony purchase (no picture), it was a nasty Blossom for $5 that the seller was kind enough to refund me for when I mentioned the cut tail and the coating of rust and dirt inside her.  She's still the worst pony I'd ever come across.  I wish I'd taken a picture.  And another non picture purchase of Minty that turned out to be the yellow Italian Minty.  I was so disappointed that it wasn't the Minty I wanted, I couldn't wait to trade her away.  Now I'm sad I did.

The money orders...  It was a great day for me to learn that I didn't have to go to the Bank each time for a money order.  The post office sells them?  Really?  And then I got a couple from some sales and misplaced them and was never able to cash them.  That was a waste.  Loving Paypal now.

I don't recall the pink and black Trading Post, it must have been before my time.  I remember some early swaps, man were they different than now but I did get a lovely picture from Tickle out of one of them.

I always wanted to go to Pony Palooza.

There are so many awesome half memories that I'd love to share but don't know enough to explain.  There was some kind of contest thing and I submitted my idea of the origins of MLPs being from another planet that was accessed from the Stargate.  My sci-fi love surfaces.  I got an honorable mention for weirdness (maybe originallity, I don't remember).

Ah, the early days.  Thanks for the trip down Memory Lane.  I loved all my pony peeps from back then, such great community.

[Lilithdrff]

I was in the original boards pre-1997. So many of the oldies might remember me from back then

[silverdawn]

Oh the days.  I would've been 15-16 in the late 90's when I first started collecting again.  My poor parents all worried that I was just "giving my address away to ANYONE!".   They watched way too much dateline.  Because I was underage I begged my parents to get an ebay account and let me use it.  In the end I had to settle for Yahoo Auctions because it was free at the time and they didn't want to put their credit card online.  Just who WAS this ebay anyway?  They could be ANYONE!  Finally I managed to convince them to let me have my own eBay account in 99.  I was *so* excited!

I still remember the first paypal payment I got, and wondering what the heck it was... My mom worked at a bank so money order were free for employees and I abused the poop out of that.  I think the poor tellers hated me by the time I moved away.  I lived in Canada, but opened a US dollars account just so I could do pony trading.  Back when the Cnd dollar was 60 cents to the US dollar.  Good money to made on the exchange alone!

I remember my first obsession with the princess accessories back when the only info we had was Dream Valley's backcard pictures.  For the longest time we all thought Taffeta had a blue crown clip.  I wondered why I could never find it until I got what I thought was going to be an extra pink crown clip from Pristina, only to discover it was definitely a different color and had to belong to Taffeta!  My family had just come back into town late on Sunday night after being gone all weekend; us kids were zonkered in the back seat, but when I opened that package and saw that clip I was so excited!  My poor parents just looked at me like I was crazy. 

I remember when digital cameras were still new and tons of eBay sellers would use flatbed scanners to get their images (if they had any images at all).  My dad was a tech teacher at the school I went to, and it was always a huge deal when he would sign out the digital camera so I could take pictures of the ponies I needed to sell.  You had to get a 3.5" floppy, and slide it in the side of the massive thing.  You could only take up to 1.44 MB of data at a time.  When we finally upgraded to a camera that used memory cards with 4 whole MB's, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

I had The Royal Fortress back in the day too.  Ugh, such a hideous website with a *terrible* layout.  I'm improved it with The Petite Pocket, and my Princess Accessory Guide was okay, but everytime I see it on Ponyland Tours I want to fix the navigation layout.  Odin Deathcrush and I also ran the mlpfaq.com for awhile, but sadly that was created at the end of my collecting and was more or less put out there and then left to collect dust until I cancelled the domain name. 

I'm sure there's tons more stuff I'm forgetting but that's all I've got for now.   I've been playing with the idea of maybe starting a little website again to do some selling on the side, but do people even do that anymore?

Silverdawn

[Sarah-Bee]

I had forgotten about Pretty Bow and Argentina Flutterbye!  I remember when I got her and I thought I had this super rare pony.  Then once it was discovered she was from Argentina and she wasn't uber hard to find her price plummeted.  It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that she wasn't Pretty Bow

I still call mine Pretty Bow

I started collecting in 2003 and I didn't join any forums (I wasn't very tech-minded lol) until 2005 so I only used eBay and remember sending cheques for payment lol.

I used Dream Valley for everything.

I remember seeing an auction for Greek Ladybird before I even knew any Greek ponies existed and she went for a huge amount! She was my grail from then on!

[Haruna]

The sites I miss most are actually customizer sites... Lady Minty's Customs *cries* I wish there was an archive somewhere of ALL her photos... I was fortunate enough to obtain one of her customs.

I remember Lady Minty's site, yes! I think she also took in baits that no one could do anything more with, kind of like a horse sanctuary; she had a quote I love from Black Beauty on that bait page, saying something like "My troubles are all over, and I am at home."

I remember when the German Babies pulled in the big bucks:p  I paid $295 for my Baby Cherries Jubilee, and that was a bargain at the time!  I also remember when you could pretty easily pick up a Mimic for $30-$40, and Rapunzel sold for under $100.

. . .

I remember the "Shadow Wars" that happened when the G2s came out.  I remember all those "love all ponies!" banners that people had to try to stop the flame war:p

Yes, Rapunzel! That's another later-year pony that didn't get as much attention then as now. Red Roses, also, is another. I'm not sure she even cost more than others in her set back then; does anyone remember?

And, yeah, many people really hated the G2 line. Seeing them in stores is one of the main things that got me back into collecting, though, so though I think Hasbro could have done better, I don't mind them. I think they're kind of cute.

It seems like it was much more common then for people to have their own MLP-themed websites, which in hindsight were often quite primitive. Lots of text that often shifted around as you scrolled the page, and the text was often quite small. I guess now people have many more outlets to share their interests and don't need to build a website from scratch. I still have a Word document that is the text for the website I wanted to create. One of the features was going to be the backcard stories. I think I got scooped on that by . . . the Paradise Estate Library? There was some site called that . . .

Yeah, lots of people had their own websites back then, right! And they were for the most part more primitive. I think most people used plain ol' HTML back then. (Which I like because it's the only programming language I know!) I also had a notebook full of plans for the website I wanted to create. I smile when I think of my little self planning all that.

About the auctions without pictures--YES, and if they did have pictures they were  from a scanner!  Ponies floating on a greenish-black background, and Lemon Drop's hair always looked pink-ish.

That's right, I'd almost forgotten! It was super-common to see pictures of ponies from scanners! We were living in the dark ages!

[Beldarna]

I love reading this thread. I was never part of the online world most describe but I have a story as well. I was a young teen when our school got internet and My Little Pony was the last thing I would dare search for, being afraid of being bullied. But I found baby loftys song site and wrote down the adress on a piece of paper I had in my backpack. I also remember reading about the new line of MLP (G2) and searching for them in stores and being dissapoined about not finding them.

My family finally got our own computer in 1999 but it was not until 2002 I found my way in to the onlineworld of collecting mlp. I posted about finding the old VHSs on my page of the largest online communtiy in Sweden at that time and a girl who browsed saw it and invited me to her mlpgroup. I was awed at finding other people who liked MLP and they kept on and on about the Dream Valley and I went there and died of happiness.

Eventually the mlpgroup died, the girl who ran it just dissapeared but before it closed down, a girl managed to get a message in about a (swedish) forum for collectors being created and I went there and somehow became a mod. But the servers was not that good and the place had to be moved a year or so later and when it came about again, I was demoted. Why I didn't know and with school taking all my time I didn't bother to ask, I was rather relieved actually. I did found out eventually that the admin had just forgotten about me as I wasn't as active because of school.

A year later some people there kept on and on about the MLPArena and made it sound like ponyheaven so I finally clicked a link to it and was shocked at the mere size of it. I couldn't imagine so many people liking the same thing as me! It took me almost two years of browsing and lurking before I dared to join. I remember seeing a lot of the names who are being posted here, I think Abaska was a mod or admin? But when I finally joined most of them had already dissapeared.

[PonyWisp]

So many memories in this thread... I don't even know where to start.   I remember probably 98% of everything mentioned, though I was still young and didn't really get "involved" with things, I was collecting and watching everything pony going on around me on the web.  I thought it was the most amazing thing ever that other people were into ponies too!  I used to be BabyBrightbow(Baby B), then for a while here PonyWisp.  Oh how things change...

[alkevin]

In the early 90´s I was receiving my first pony, not for collection, but as a toy.

[brighteyes]

Oh man, such nostalgia!  I was on the usenet for ponies (I think it was alt.mylittlepony or something?) when the G2 relaunched and 99% of people (including myself) hated them.  It was sad to see the very few that liked them doggedly swimming against the current of loathing.  Of course now I think they actually are pretty cute and feel like a big jerk for threatening to buy a bunch and make a big bonfire of them   I didn't find the forums until later though.  The only collector I remember from the Usenet was Spoosh because I bought a lot of ponies from him and he lived close enough to me at the time he was able to drop them off. 

I remember eBay auctions without pictures and the hassle of sending money orders or "well concealed cash" and waiting forever for the seller to get it and then ship out the pony.  I remember having little to no recourse if the seller never did ship out the pony. 

Ponies that didn't keep their value- anything overseas was crazy expensive in the 90's.  I remember the TAF babies going for over 100$ and then the price crashing as more became available.  I remember Perfume Puffs were incredibly unloved and hard to sell.

Dream Valley was like... a ray of sunshine.  I printed off the entire site on our super slow crappy inkjet printer and my dad being flabbergasted that the ink cartridges never lasted as long as he thought they should    I put all the pages in a binder and took it with me to flea markets so I could ID the ponies on the spot and see if they were worth what the seller was asking.  I still visit Dream Valley when I want to ID a pony.

ETA:

Oh and I remember this fanfiction website that had Paradise Estate as kind of a soap opera with monthly installments.  Oh the drama! It was delicious fun.  I wish I could remember the name of that site.  I'm sure it isn't around anymore though.

[LittleSpiffy]

So many memories in this thread... I don't even know where to start.   I remember probably 98% of everything mentioned, though I was still young and didn't really get "involved" with things, I was collecting and watching everything pony going on around me on the web.  I thought it was the most amazing thing ever that other people were into ponies too!  I used to be BabyBrightbow(Baby B), then for a while here PonyWisp.  Oh how things change...

LoL, I didn't know you were BabyBrightbow

I wonder if WildfireChiefsGirl or styxxiejones are around here using different names...

[PinkRosedust]

I didn't get around to much interneting until the early 2000's so I don't remember a lot of this, but I love to read about it.

I do have nostalgia for ebay. In the late 90's I had my mom buy me toys from there sometimes, but sadly that was when I was not into ponies - I wasn't playing with them anymore and I wasn't collecting yet either. Such a pity! I mostly wanted Pokemon and Puppy in my Pockets. =P and I do remember having to actively look for which auctions actually had a photo!

Also, am I the only one whose go-to G1 site is still Dream Valley? lol. I mean there are better sites to ID accessories and such but whenever I can't remember a G1's name I immediately hop over to Dream Valley.

[Mermaid]

Red roses! I blame tuneful for the price increase on her! She was some what hard to find, but not impossible! I remember I bought mine from a user named Michelle for $7. That was in 99.

I also bought two moc Greeks on ebay for $40 a piece. Orange sunlight and pink parasol. I decarded them both, because there were literally a dozen of them on eBay, and what seemed like an endless supply of Greeks.

Does anyone remember when everyone started decarding their argies because a few members were finding the cardboard was staining them? It was a pretty big fiasco with the decarding versus not decarding.

[LittleSpiffy]

Red roses! I blame tuneful for the price increase on her! She was some what hard to find, but not impossible! I remember I bought mine from a user named Michelle for $7. That was in 99.

I also bought two moc Greeks on ebay for $40 a piece. Orange sunlight and pink parasol. I decarded them both, because there were literally a dozen of them on eBay, and what seemed like an endless supply of Greeks.

Does anyone remember when everyone started decarding their argies because a few members were finding the cardboard was staining them? It was a pretty big fiasco with the decarding versus not decarding.

I remember that!  There was some sort of massive flood where a bunch of MOC Argies got damaged...then they all hit eBay!  Some were dried out, others had mildew growing on the cards, and others were shipped to their new homes *still wet*.  I got 3 Argies around that time : gray earth Lofty, a gree first tooth baby, and Arco Iris Sunglider.  Sunglider came to me wet, so I decarded her...all of them found new homes Iin recent years <3