Pokémon Abode: Difference between revisions

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Pokémon Abode
Language	English
Status	Defunct
Run	1997 - 2001
Date opened	1997
Date closed	2001
Creator	Ryan Dumlao
Current owner	{{{owner}}}
Mascot
Website

Pokémon Abode is a now defunct Pokémon site.

Together with Universal Pokémon Network, The PokéMasters and Bulbagarden, Pokémon Abode formed a partnership known as the Anti-Spammer Alliance from 1999-2000. After the dissolution of these websites' original communities, the group became retroactively known as the Big Four, as they were generally considered to be the largest, most active, and best ran Pokémon forums of their day.

History

It was started in 1997 by Ryan Dumlao, who ran the site under the alias "PokeAbode Man". It began in earnest as a small information-only site on Tripod.com, but once a UBB-based forum was established on a third-party message board network, the site began to flourish. By 1999, the site expanded to its own domain at pokemonabode.com, with a dedicated server and full UBB-based forum with several subforums. The community around it grew to a large size, with upwards of a million pageviews per day. Upon expansion, PokeAbode Man brought on his only other collaborator on the site, Raichupacabra, as the Staff Artist and daily contributor.

At this time, the site was incorporated into the IGN.com network as an IGN Affiliate, which helped to fund the growing costs of running the website. The partnership grew Pokemon Abode's reach even further, as it integrated its news/announcements into IGN's system. They were also able to give extensive coverage during E3 conferences as a result of IGN's affiliation.

Due to its large size and competition with other large Pokémon sites, a budding rivalry with the Universal Pokémon Network grew between the respective sites' message board communities. While sometimes volatile, the sites demonstrated the strong following of both the Pokémon franchise and the Pokémon web communities.

The site created a few spinoff sites as subdomains, notably Laughing OnLine, which created the infamous "WAZZUP" Budweiser parody video featuring Pokémon characters, and AbodeWorks Games which featured two Windows-based Pokémon fan games programmed by PokeAbode Man.

By the middle of the dot-com-bomb of 2000/2001, IGN's parent company Snowball had IPO'd and crashed; ad revenue from IGN's affiliate network dropped sharply to the point that costs for the servers exceeded income for the site, and PokeAbode Man was forced to shutter the site around the end of 2001.

Webmaster

The site was created and ran in its entirety by Ryan Dumlao, who was in middle school and high school during its life. Under the alias "PokeAbode Man", he was very involved in the Pokémon Abode forum community, but delegated responsibility and autonomy of the forums to several moderators on the forum. After the site closed in 2001, he continued on to study electrical engineering at UC San Diego and UCLA and is still active in the web development community today.

This article is a part of Project Fandom, a Bulbapedia Project that aims to write comprehensive articles on every aspect of the Pokémon Fandom.