There are a lot of lists of Transformers links out there, but most of them list only a couple dozen websites at the very most. Hundreds of Transformers websites exist, though. And there are even far too many good lists of links for anybody to really keep track of them all. The best I can do is provide you with a few of the more extensive or handy link pages, and a few of the "major" fan websites. And, of course, if you're looking for a specific kind of information, don't forget to try a search engine like Google or Teoma. My own link list is specifically tailored to help people find TF information, and is more or less a highly abbreviated list of links found in the FAQ.
Note: My inclusion or exclusion of any particular links page should not be taken to mean that I'm endorsing or condemning that page. It just means that I forgot about it, didn't know about it, or already had enough of them here and didn't feel like adding any more.
Link lists...
Major TF fansites
Yup! There are several, actually. It can be difficult to keep track of them (at least, it is for a non-MUSHer like me) because they come and go, but you have a lot of MUSH options. Unfortunately there's no longer a centralized list of TF MUSHes, but you should be able to find many of them just using Google. There are also some general-purpose MUD and MUSH listing sites that can help you track them down, such as Mud Connect.
What's a MUSH, you might be wondering? A MUSH is an online game which many people can play at once. Unlike more recent online games such as Everquest or Diablo, MUSHes (and MUDs) are entirely text-based. The letters stand for "Multi-User Shared Hallucination". MUD games are usually about fighting monsters and increasing your character's experience level, but MUSHes are more focused on role-playing and character interactions. Playing a TF MUSH is a bit like living in an episode of a Transformers cartoon.
Many of the best sources of Transformers information are big lists, catalogs, or archives of things. Fans have compiled lists of almost anything you could think of, some practical or obvious, others obscure. Here are a whole bunch of them! Unless otherwise noted, anything calling itself "Transformers" instead of naming a specific TF line covers all TF lines.
There is a fanfic newsgroup, and there are also two very extensive TF fanfic websites. Among these, you should be able to find nearly every fic which has been publicly posted, as well as expose your own writing to the entire Transfan community for feedback. The newsgroup is alt.toys.transformers.fanfic (although you can post your fics to ATT as well, if you want). The websites are Charlotte Brogden's "TF Lexicon" and Vulcana's "Tranfic Base". There's lots of other fanfic which people write and place on their own sites, but don't submit to the group or one of the megasites. I can't help you find that stuff; just use a search engine or browse around for it.
A good start would be to read "A Guide to Using ATTM and RTTM" by Burt "Skyflight" Ward. Although this guide was originally written for the marketplace newsgroups, it contains information on toy grading that will be helpful to you in any sales setting.
The oldest way to buy and sell TFs online is to do it on Usenet. There are two newsgroups devoted to Transformers sales: alt.toys.transformers.marketplace and rec.toys.transformers.marketplace. The old-fashioned way of buying or selling toys in the marketplace groups is to make "for sale" or "want to buy" posts, which basically list the items of interest and their prices. Increasingly, though, the marketplace groups are becoming little more than billboards where people leave ads for their online auctions (mostly at eBay).
The are also many websites which serve as hobby / collectibles stores where you can buy whatever Transformers are in stock, both old and new. These stores come in all sizes, from pages run by a single fan where they offer up their finds from flea markets and garage sales to major team operations with "shopping cart" and credit card capabilities. Many of the larger online stores even import Japanese-exclusive toys and offer pre- orders for upcoming items. I'm not inclined to try listing stores in the FAQ because there are far too many for me to give a comprehensive list, and I don't want to seem like I'm endorsing or favoring certain stores just because they're ones I happen the know the names of. So, I'll just say that there are lots of them out there. You can find the big ones easily through the usual channels: link indices and search engines. The big stores aren't necessarily the best ones, of course -- some are, some aren't. So to find some of the smaller stores you'll need to surf around or maybe ask other fans what their favorites are.
The other big (and obvious) option is online auctions. eBay dominates the field, but you'll find Transformers at pretty much any supersite which has an auctions section such as Yahoo! or Amazon. There are some cautions regarding auction sites, of course... For one thing, it's not unusual to find sellers hocking items that they know very little about or have labelled in a misleading fashion. Not everything which is marked as "Hard To Find! RARE!" on eBay is hard to find or rare. Not everything which is claimed to be a prototype toy is actually a prototype, either. In fact, the vast majority of "prototypes" on eBay are nothing but stolen (yes, stolen) pre-production test shots, made at the factory while they are fine-tuning the tooling for the production line. Please be an informed consumer and don't overbid on things out of ignorance or impatience. It's not worth it to pay ten times the retail cost of a just-released toy when you can pick it up off a store shelf yourself in two weeks' time.
Fonts, icons, sounds, movies, wallpapers, and games. I think that about covers it. TF video games are listed in the section on TF merchandise, III/B. As for the rest:
There are over two dozen Transformers fonts available. The oldest is a primitive Windows .FON file which was the work of Iggy Drougge and Alden Bates. It duplicates the lettering from the classic TF logo. The disadvantage of a FON file over a modern font is that it doesn't scale nicely, so it's really only available in one size. It is, however, the only Transformers font with the 3D beveled look. Two Transfans -- Neale Davidson and Jim Sorenson -- have made TrueType (.TTF) fonts for us to enjoy, though, covering a wide range of text faces. Neale has created fonts based on the logos for many, many Transformers lines and sub-lines including such obscurities as the "sparking" letters used to spell out "Laser Rod" on G2 toys belonging to that group, and has also duplicated the lettering found in some TF comic books. Jim has made fonts that mimic Transformer writing systems as seen in the Beast Wars series on computer screens and the hulls of spaceships. There are variants on Autobot, Decepticon, Maximal, and Predacon writing, as well as a font with the symbols seen on the aliens' Golden Disc. In addition, there is another font based on the G1 logo similar to Neale's, but with slightly different letter shapes (and non-beveled, of course). This font, "SF TransRobotics" by Derek Vogelpohl may be familiar to you if you are a fan of Cartoon Network's "Toonami" programming block, as it was the typeface they used for all their onscreen text (including their logo) for several years. All of these fonts can be found on the TF fonts page I maintain.
Icons featuring Transformers characters and objects are available at several sites, but the largest three collections I know of are those of Neale Davidson, Rik Bakke, and Nick Kelsch. Neale has done hundreds of characters in an icon or "sprite" style, covering every Transformer toyline, American and Japanese. Between the archives at Cosmic Rust and Transfandom.com, you can find all of his icon sets. Neale's icons are full-body portraits of varying sizes (each set has a self-consistent scale), while Rik's icon collection consists of headshots at a few standard sizes. Rik has prepared such icons for almost every character from the G1 cartoon, including many who did not have toys or aren't even robotic! For most of these characters, Rik actually has a few variant icons of slightly different sizes, or with different amounts of detail. Rik's site is The Cybertron Chronicle, and his icons are under The Image Portfolio. Lastly, Nick's icon collection is similar to Neale's -- it's enormous, and it spans the entire history of Transformers. Nick has full-body portraits and altmodes, and even some animations. Most of his icons are a little bit "super-deformed" and cutesy. He has an older set which are smaller, but less cute, and includes headshots. All of Nick's icons can be found right on his site. One thing you should note is that all of these icons are presented as GIF images, so if you want to use them on your computer desktop, you may have to convert them to a different format, depending on your operating system.
If you're looking for sound clips from TF shows, it's hard to know where to point you. There are so many Transformers sites out there, and a lot of them have their own small collections of sound files. There are two places with rather extensive collections I can vouch for, and otherwise I'd just recommend looking through the main media archive sites (TF Archive.com and Transfans.com, specifically, although most TF portals have media collections too) or using a web search engine. For sound clips from the G1 series, the Cybertron Chronicle is probably the place to go. Specifically, Rik's Sound Repository section, which has music snippets, sound effects, voice samples for every character (including many one-time robots and humans), and even full-episode audio tracks for download. Rik's voice samples are intended to provide examples of each character's voice, so he's got just about everybody, but just to sample the voice. Few characters have more than two examples. So if you're looking for a recording of a specific line, you may have to extract it yourself from one of Rik's recorded episodes. The other sound archive I know of is Axalon 2, which archives sounds from Beast Wars, mainly dialogue.
Video files of Transformers commercials can be found in the archives, and at the specialty site TF Commercial Headquarters. (The HQ has the biggest selection, but I've been told the quality of the files isn't as good there as some other places.) If you're looking for other TF-related video clips, like fan-made stuff, it's a little trickier. There's no central archive of fan movies. There are a few Transformers clips on Newgrounds, a site dedicated to hosting submitted animation projects. A short special effects clip of a transforming VW Beetle has made a stir on ATT a couple times. It was an animation project by a Michael Smith, Thuan Do, and Carl Coss. You can read about it and see it on Michael's VW Video page, and there's also a short interview about the piece on BotCollector. And, there are many Transfans who do computer animation, and have examples on their websites. There's too many for me to keep track of, sadly. Anyone who wants to put together a definitive fan art/animation resource like the two fanfic sites would be very well appreciated by the community. If you're searching for full-episode downloads, try a few of the major TF archives and portals. Some of them offer episodes which are not currently available for legitimate purchase, like Beast Machines, as a service to fans.
Lastly, if you want pictures or artwork... well, I'm sorry. There's about a jillion sites with picture collections and none of them are even remotely all-encompassing. There are a couple sites that have fairly complete collections of very specific sorts of images, however... For example, all the package artwork from G1 toys is available in beautiful high-quality scans at Botch's Box Art Archive. You can find a lot of fan art posted on a revolving basis on some web boards. TFW2005 and the Allspark both have fanart forums, for example. Extensive archives of screencaps from TF television shows are maintained by Axalon Underground, Seibertron.com, and Nightwind. Basically, though, if you want TF pictures, you're just going to have to do a lot of looking around. Google's image search might prove helpful, so don't overlook it if you've never tried it before.
A few fans have taken it upon themselves to create rather extensive guides or encyclopedias based on Transformers. Detailed toy guides are covered in [N/A] in the toy collecting section, but there are other guides focusing on Transformers fiction. One of the oldest and most-used character resources is the old comic series put out by Marvel, Transformers Universe, which consists of one-page descriptions of every character. There is a TFU archive available online, thanks to the Norwegian TransFans Association (NTFA), with scans of the artwork and transcriptions of the profile texts.
In the encyclopedia vein, you might want to try Stan Lui's TF encyclopedia. It has entries for characters and important places and things, and covers the G1/G2 comic and cartoon as well as BW. Each entry is several paragraphs long, and includes information for different incarnations of that character or thing. For example, if you look up "Megatron", you'll find biographies of G1 Megatron for the cartoon, US comic, and UK comic.
I will say flat-out that there's not nearly enough GoBots stuff on the web. It's sort of pitiful, really. One place to look is That Big TF Variations List, by M Sipher, since it lists all of the GoBots toys in one of the later chapters. TFU.info has a growing GoBots section as well. As for sites dedicated to GoBots, though, the list below is all I've got for you. If you like GoBots and you can make a website, please do the web a favor and put a good one together.
Steve-o's Transformers FAQ is written and maintained by Steve-o
Stonebraker
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