Pojo.com

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Pojo.com

Url	http://www.pojo.com/
Founded:	December 1998
Founder:	see text
Owner:	Pojo (Bill Gill)
Category:	Gaming
SLanguage:	English
Programming language:	{{{PLanguage}}}

Pojo's Pokemon Magazine, Issue #2 - January 2000

Pojo.com is a website devoted primarily to gaming. It has a variety of individual pages devoted to collectible card games, such as Yu-Gi-Oh!, Magic: The Gathering, Star Wars Minis, Inuyasha, Pokémon, Heroclix, VS System, Dragon Ball Z, Pirates of the Spanish Main, Pirates of the Caribbean, Duel Masters, Fullmetal Alchemist and also has a general Anime site.

It is also home to the Pojo message board, which as of February 14, 2007, had more than 50,000 registered users, and over 5 million posts.

1 Card of the Day
2 Deck Garage
3 History
4 Message Board
5 Previous Versions
6 The Magazine
- 6.1 The Books
7 External links

[edit] Card of the Day

Commonly abbreviated as COTD, Jason Klaczynski (Ness) began COTD as a feature on the Pokémon site in 2000. Jason went on to win the 2006 Pokemon TCG World championship. All sections of Pojo now have the COTD feature where staff members review three to five cards per week.

[edit] Deck Garage

The Deck Garage is a feature where readers can email their decks to staff members, aka Deck Mechanics, who pick a few decks each week to review. Some of the best Pokémon players in the world have been Deck Mechanics. There have been Deck Mechs on other popular Pojo sections. Bill Gill created the terms "Deck Garage" and "Deck Mechanics" in 1999 for the Pokemon section and Pokemon Magazine, as he grew up working in his father's automobile service station in IL. These terms have become commonplace on many gaming sites.

[edit] History

The site was started in December 1998 as a Pokémon Only site called "The Pokémon Dojo" at thepojo.com domain. It was named after the Fighting Dojo in the original Red & Blue Pokémon games. During 1999, the site drew around 100,000 unique visitors each day and focused on providing tips for Pokémon Video Games and Trading Card Gaming Tips and Decks to readers.

Separately, Paul Adkins sold quirky golf equipment he manufactured under the domain of "Pojo.com," which came from "Paul & Jody" (Jody is Paul's wife). Adkins was, however, finding his server was overloaded with people looking for "the pojo.com", and he received lots of negative mail from kids looking for Pokémon information. In September 1999, he offered the domain name to Gill in exchange for a brand new Dell PC. Thepojo.com then became Pojo.com and has been updated daily since it's origin.

In October 1999, H&S Media, a magazine publisher made famous by Mary Beth's Beanie Baby Monthly, became affiliated with Pojo to create a monthly Pokémon Magazine. The December (first) issue of Pojo's Pokémon News & Price Guide Monthly hit streets in November 1999 and quickly sold over 1,000,000 copies. The magazine sold quite well for nearly two years until the publisher was forced into bankruptcy.

In mid 1999, Gill became Internet Buddies with Scott Gerhardt. Scott was one of the highest rated Pokémon Trading Card Game Players in the World. Scott worked daily on pojo.com for over two years, and was, as Gill put it, "a Pojo God". Scott also started the Magic the Gathering section of Pojo.com in February 2001.

Also in mid 1999, a Dragon Ball Z (DBZ) section was added. Besides Bill, four other people worked regularly to make it the hottest DBZ site on the Internet. These four people were: Eric Gerson, Andy Diehl, Kunhal, & Douglas VanDerveer. Pojo's Total Dragon Ball Z magazine followed soon after, sold extremely well, and led to more DBZ magazines and books.

In 2002, a Yu-Gi-Oh! section was added to Pojo.com. This section featured the same formulas that made Pojo's Pokémon, DBZ & Magic the Gathering sites popular: Daily News, Featured Writers, Card of the Day, Deck Garage, Cartoon/Anime information, and fan submitted deck ideas. It is currently the most popular section of the website.

Many other sections have and still live happily on Pojo.com since its inception, including: Naruto, Digimon, Duelmasters, Inuyasha, Monster Rancher, WizKid's Pirates, UDE's Vs., Fullmetal Alchemist, Yu Yu Hakusho, Shaman King, UDE's Quickstrike Games both Pirates of the Caribbean and Avatar the Last Airbender, Star Wars Minis, Dreamblade, The Spoils and more. New games are added at least once every couple of months, as they become more and more popular.

Pojo.com has consistently received lots of traffic. In May of 2003, during the height of Yugioh's popularity, Pojo had over 1,660,000 unique visitors and over 41,000,000 page views that month.

[edit] Message Board

The Pojo Message Board discuss topics on various collectible card games, not limited to the site's topics. It is also used by some members for the purpose of trading. It is, perhaps, the most popular setion of Pojo's site.

[edit] Sections of the Message Board

All sections of the message board that are focused on games include a separate section on trading through the mail.

Yu-Gi-Oh! - Contains a number of forums devoted to talk about Yu-Gi-Oh! including gossip, decks, anime, trading, etc. Currently, Yu-Gi-Oh! is clearly the most popular section of the site, and is the only forum which has an area only visible to site 'veterans'. Kevin Tewart, a "Senior Game Designer" and a person involved in deciding the Banned/Restricted List for Yu-Gi-Oh! and other Upper Deck Entertainment employees are frequent visitors to the board.

Magic: The Gathering - For discussion about the first collectible card game Magic the Gathering from Wizards of the Coast.

VS System - For discussion about the Upper Deck Entertainment VS System collectible card game.

Pokémon - For discussion about various aspects of Pokémon, including the games, the TV show and movies, card trading, asking questions about rules, etc.

Dragon Ball Z/GT - For discussion about the various aspects of the DragonBall universe.

Heroclix - For discussion about the Heroclix game, and for general comic book talk. Now also includes a section for the new Horrorclix game from WizKids.

Pirates - For discussion of WizKids Pirates of the Spanish Main line of games as well as Upper Deck Entertainment's Pirates of the Caribbean Quickstrike Game.

Full Metal Alchemist - For discussions of the Full Metal Alchemist Anime & Trading Card Game

Dreamblade - For discussions pertaining to the Dreamblade Miniatures Game.

Duel Masters - For discussion about the Duel Masters card game, including anime discussion.

Star Wars Minis - Star Wars Minis - Squad Building; Trading; Strategies; Gossip; & more. For BOTH the original WOTC Miniature Game and the newer Starship miniature game. Will also incorporate the WizKids PocketTrading Game.

The Spoils - For discussions pertaining to "The Spoils" Trading Card Game

World of Warcraft - For discussions pertaining to the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game and the Massive Multiplayer Online Game.

General - For forums that do not fit anywhere else. Includes the Random Topic Center (Largely deals with 'Real Life' stuff and entertainment not pertaining to games) a Fan Art section, a Fan Fiction section, a general Anime forum, and others.

Video Games - Xbox, PS2, Nintendo Systems, PC discussion.

Miscellaneous Trading Card Games - For TCGs that do not have enough to have their own forums, such as Naruto, Poker, Hecatomb.

Rules & Stuff - Where people can ask about the rules, complain about bad trades, and read announcements. The Trading Committee is in this section.

Staff - The fabled staff section.

[edit] Trading

Trading is a significant feature on the Pojo message board. People use it to trade cards, movies, and video games. Because of how much trading is done through the board, a system has been set up similar to what is used on eBay to track trader ratings. Those with higher ratings are supposedly more reliable, and those with negative ratings are people to be careful around. There is a Trading Committee that offers advise on trading issues and votes on motion relating to trading, such as those to ban forum members who rip other members off. Pojo's trade forums are consistently the most popular sections of the board, and comprise more than one third of all posts.

[edit] Message Board Staff

The Moderators, or Mods, are well known throughout the Pojo message board community. Many of them are regular posters. They have three levels - Mod, Supermod, and Administrator. All of them are volunteers. Although many new members (and even some veterans) have asked how to become a moderator, it has been made clear that new ones will be selected by the current moderators if they need one, and anyone asking can be assured that they will never be selected. Moderators are invited by the existing staff to become a moderator.

[edit] myuu

myuu (no capitals) is worthy of note for several reason. He was the original vbulletin board Admin in 2004. He manipulated his post count to over 9 million (which effectively made it so his post count goes down whenever he makes a post). He was also responsible for a large April Fool's Day prank. He manipulated some users' avatars, custom titles, changed other parts of parts of the forums, such as forum titles, and also added the infamous Sniper Kitten to the top of the page. myuu also used to run the Pojo news section.

[edit] Previous Versions

The message board originally ran using the Ubb (Ultimate Bulletin Board) system, then the ezboard system, and switched again in early 2004 to vBulletin where it remains today. The current message board uses a separate domain (pojo.biz).

Many sections of Pojo have been "retired". Some were retired because the game they focused on stopped production and some were retired because of bandwidth costs. Mega Man, Yu Yu Hakusho, Shaman King, NeoPets, Harry Potter, Monster Rancher, Digimon, and Gundam all used to be sections of Pojo.

[edit] The Magazine

For approximately two years, there was a monthly Pojo Magazine. The magazine was first titled: "Pojo's Pokémon News & Price Guide monthly". Towards the end the title was changed to "Pojo's Pokémon & Other Way Cool Stuff" and for the last three editions had articles about other children-friendly trading card, science fiction and TV phenomenon in an upside-down section at the back.

A UK edition was published by Highbury Entertaiment (who also published the UK editions of Mary Beth's Beanie Baby Monthly and Starlog) edited by Paul Hirons and later Elise Harris.

This second section featured Dragon Ball Z, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Harry Potter, Sailor Moon and more. The UK version also had articles on Thunderbirds, The X-Men and The Powerpuff Girls as well as UK-specific topics.

This section was printed upside down and had its own cover art almost making it a second magazine.

Other "one-shot" Pojo Magazines were printed including magazines on: Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, Gundam Wing, Video Games, Digimon, Monster Rancher and even a guide to State Quarters. The Magazine was discontinued when the publisher (H&S Media) filed for bankruptcy in 2001.

[edit] The Books

After the magazines, Pojo.com began producing large format "unofficial books" to various Card games and pop-culture phenomenon. Books published with the Pojo imprint include: