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I have noticed on LUGNET that there are a number of sites that are being offered
as alternatives to BrickShelf. My concern is the issue of the number of sites
now competing to fill the void and splintering the community, rather than one
major site or the revitalizing BrickShelf. I am grateful to Sean (MOCpages) and
others that have offered their sites and servers as an alternative, but none of
the site in their current configuration can replace BrickShelf.
Flickr is the one most often mentioned and I am not impressed. For those of us who have been using yahoo photos, you are aware of the pending shut down if yahoo photos in September. Flickr is the alternative that has been pushed by yahoo as the hoist site to move our photos before the Yahoo shutdown. I understand that this is one of the sites owned by Yahoo. The site is sometimes slow and difficult. I have used it from both a Comcast cable connection and from a T-1 line at work. I also remember testing it from a Verizon DSL connection a couple of years ago. Our LEGO photos will be lost among the millions of other photos on the site. The problems were serious enough that I left my photos on yahoo and starting looking at the alternative sites. That’s just my opinion. There are other people who have expressed confidence in the site.
The rights to BrickShelf expire in August. Is it feasible that we as a
community can revitalize BrickShelf in some form as a paid site and say move it
to North Star Computer Systems, since the president, Eric Smith, has offered his
services? Has anyone actually communicated with Kevin? The other sites have
been around and by their own admission generate less than 20 % of the volume
generated by BrickShelf. BrickShelf was unique and it was dedicated to LEGO and
the LEGO community.
There seems to be a pattern of long standing larger events (BrickFest), etc and
programs being replaced by smaller regional events and programs. It is a great
loss to the international community to allow this pattern to continue. I am
hoping there is some way to revitalize BrickShelf on a new hoist server,
especially if Kevin is willing to release the rights to the site.
Clifton
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In lugnet.announce, Clifton D. Chambers wrote:
>
> The rights to BrickShelf expire in August. Is it feasible that we as a
> community can revitalize BrickShelf in some form as a paid site and say move it
> to North Star Computer Systems, since the president, Eric Smith, has offered his
> services? Has anyone actually communicated with Kevin? The other sites have
> been around and by their own admission generate less than 20 % of the volume
> generated by BrickShelf. BrickShelf was unique and it was dedicated to LEGO and
> the LEGO community.
For the record, I am hosting some LEGO club sites in exchange for links back to
the main Northstar page. I also host a number of LEGO-related sites (including
bricklink.com) on a paid basis.
brickshelf.com requires massive resources that cannot possibly be hosted for
free. BS states that it is hosting 1,891,345 images. Assuming an average size of
500 Kb, that's over 900 Gb of images, and that's a conservative estimate. The
number of image views is a big question, but the last I knew was around 10-15
Mbps/day.
I am considering offering a paid version of brickshelf.com that I would host as
an alternative to the generic flickr/photobucket sites. There have been several
other sites popup (mocpages, mocshow) in the past day that are also talking
about subscription services, but I don't know anything about them at this time.
I believe that Northstar is in a good position to host a brickshelf 2.0 site,
but I need to gauge how many people would be willing to pay for a service like
this, based on their disk usage and bandwidth usage.
Before I get accused of being greedy, I am trying to create a viable and
sustainable business model that hopefully can last a long time. Giving away
bandwidth and disk space is not a sustainable business model. A
subscription-based service is the easiest to manage and sustain, since the users
of the site are paying to grow the capabilities (bandwidth, storage, etc.).
There are lots of cheap alternatives to what I'll probably be offering, and I'm
sure I'll get the usual people suggesting that it should be free, but there are
some economic realities that simply won't go away.
Eric Smith
President, Northstar Computer Systems
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This is what I had hoped for, especially if the old links could be preserved.
I'd love to see a tiered version of Brickshelf to make it sustainable.
God Bless,
Nathan
BTW re your other recent post, I have no online presence requirement at the
moment but have always filed away Northstar's name in case I ever do anything
industrial...
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It looks like the situation could be getting complicated...there are all sorts
of things happening. None, to me, look like Brickshelf successors. Eric's
frankness as to the economic feasability is sound, however, the irony is this:
if you charge for the service, you'll never have the 900GB and high traffic to
worry about.
Personally I would gladly pay, but if everyone else must also do so, then it
will NEVER be Brickshelf. If fees are involved, then it will steer people
towards other free sites, thus splintering the resources of pictures, and thus
the "new brickshelf" won't be worth paying for at all.
I am not trying to be negative, and I'm not saying that anybody should have to
pay out of their own pocket to host "the new Brickshelf" for free. I'm saying
there are conflicting realities to be dealt with if we are to see a true
Brickshelf successor. But perhaps a compromise can be made?
Firstly and most important, as much as I hate to say it, the new site MUST allow
for the FREE viewing and uploading of LEGO pictures. Without this, you might as
well not bother trying to make it like the old 'shelf. That said, I put a few
ideas on the table: though simply creating a gallery and uploading is free, fees
will accrue once you go past a data threshold of both storage space and/or total
bandwidth of accessed images in your gallery. This way, anybody can take a few
pictures of their new MOC and toss it online, while the people who really use
the site for hosting many pictures and linking them from forums pay. I realize
this isnt perfect and there are a lot of kinks, particularly the problem of
getting people to pay up only after they have exceeded certain free limits. I
don't think asking for a credit card upon account creation is acceptable, so
this could be an issue.
Any other ideas? I really don't want Brickshelf, or what it meant, to go away.
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In lugnet.announce, Clifton D. Chambers wrote:
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The rights to BrickShelf expire in August.
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Good luck with that one. When piratebricks.com expired the EB Pirate community
(now classic-Pirates.com) was right there to
register before it expired but somehow it got hijacked by some &%#@!*&#! selling
ads for colonoscopys!
Maybe a direct handover would work but that would require cooperation which,
from the outside, seems to be in short supply in all this mess.
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