Anyone know if they still do that or who's in charge of it? I haven't heard anything about it for some time and I've been out of the loop.
No no no - the Transformers census. I thought I'd ask under toys - ok, thanks, I'll check under general.
Ok - yeah, this was probably my own fault... yeah, I mean the Transformers Toy Census? Anybody? Ok - Was anyone here collecting or discussing Transformers online in the early 90's? And if so, does anyone remember The Ark? Alt.Toys.Transformers? Anyone? A LONG time ago, before big boards like TFW2005 and Allspark, etc - all we had was a couple of newsgroups and a chatroom... anyone? No? Come on - it hasn't been THAT long, has it? Geez. Someone besides me has gotta remember this thing. I'll check under general, but yeah - I mean the old unofficial TF Toy census.
No, not Hasbro - it was everyone on the newsgroup at the time who wanted to participate - you didn't have to, it was all unofficial. I dunno who started it - but a flyer would go around through email, and it had a checklist of all the G1, G2, European, Japanese, etc TF's on it. If you saw something missing, you'd add it. And what you'd do is you wouldn't put your name on it - you'd just fill out how many you had of each, and send it back. I used to get mine from a guy called Rockman - I think it was him. Anyway, eventually they'd put this thing together and you'd get a list BACK - showing you roughly how many of X Transformers were still floating around. I mean, we all understood that there was no way to account for EVERYTHING, of course... but it was kinda fun. They'd do it every couple of years or so. I only did it a couple of times. Didn't know if it still went around. But this was BEFORE Beast Wars got huge, etc. Back when all we HAD was like G1, G2, and the stuff overseas pretty much.... that list would be enormous today. Sorry if I sound like I'm speaking a foreign language. I haven't collected Transformers very seriously since early Beast Wars.
There are still a few of us around from the old ATT days, but only a few. In regard to your question, the Resources section on this site is the place to go for stuff like that; the level of information/details per figure is pretty much unparalleled. Hiro Prime's great toy lists are on here somewhere, and TFArchive also has some excellent toy lists. Personally, I have a thorough spreadsheet I've been keeping for about ten years and it has just over 3600 entries on it. Since we'll never have agreement on what counts and what doesn't, any such attempt at numbering is pretty subjective.