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Hi, everybody.
With all that’s been going on, a lot of people have been asking me things like:
“what should I do?”
“Should I stay on Brickshelf or move to MOCpages?”
“How do I know if any of these services are safe?”
Let me start by saying that Kevin did an amazing job offering Brickshelf to all
of us for free, and it’s always been a valuable core to the fan communities. I
have hundreds of pictures there, myself. And I know from my own experience
running MOCpages that what he’s done has not been easy.
This is my plan, and what I intend to do for the good of all you guys.
MOCpages is, and always has been, a place to share your LEGO creations.
Pictures are a very important part of sharing a LEGO creation, but what’s even
better that just browsing files is being about to read about creations, to hear
what people think, to get ideas, and to learn and grow from each other. And
I’ve always believed very strongly in that. That’s why I started MOCpages, and
I firmly believe that’s why you guys all use it.
The changes I’ve made to MOCpages this week are here to stay. In fact, I will
continue to expand MOCpages’ services so that it can continue to grow with the
community and be a strong and solid core for fans everywhere, for years to come.
This is something that I’ve always wanted to do, but only recently has it become
obvious to me that it’s really needed.
“Who is Sean? Can I trust this guy?”
For those of you that don’t know me, I’ve been heavily involved in the community
for a long time. I’ve been collaborating on LUGNET and RTL for over 10 years. I
helped launch LEGO Factory with The LEGO Company back in 2003. I build town,
sculpture, and micro, although few know I have a huge ‘80s space collection. :)
Together with folks like Robin Sather, I helped create the LEGO Ambassadors
program. (I designed that logo!) :) I have good working professional
relationships with many, many LEGO Company employees, and speak with them daily.
And I’m one of the world’s five LEGO Certified Professionals; my full-time,
self-employed, day-job is creating LEGO sculptures and running MOCpages. Before
I became a full-time “LEGO guy” I worked for 10 years designing humane,
approachable, and purposeful solutions for web applications.
Money?
As a business owner, I know that the only way to keep any service alive is to
run it with a solid financial plan. For years now, MOCpages has been paying its
own bills, covering the cost of servers, upgrades, moderation, and maintinence.
But as the site grows, these will expenses grow, and I will be rolling out three
additional revenue streams: 1) membership, 2) sponsorship, and 3) affilliations.
The purpose of diversified income is so that there is no failure point; if one
pulls in less money for some reason, the others can cover it. I’ll have more
details on the specifics of these later, because right now I’m still putting the
business plan togther.
Because “paid memberships” have been a sticking point here in the forums lately,
I want to address it specifically. I’ve been analyzing how people use sites
like MOCpages and Brickshelf, and how they share their creations. The continued
free MOCpages service will be designed so that most of you can still use (and be
very happy with) the service not having to pay anything. Those who want to flex
their virutal muscles can sign up for a paid membership, of which there will be
two levels. (Basic and Premium, for example.) The two paid levels will get you
all sorts of really cool features in addition to just more storage or other
“basic nessecities”. I’m excited about them, frankly, and I’ll share more when
development of these cool new features is underway and price points are
available. I want to stress again that MOCpages will stay fundamentally free,
much as it is today.
AFOLs rock
But it all comes back to you guys. MOCpages is only a success because of the of
people use it. Last month, over 1.2 million people came to see your creations.
And 85% of the regulars show up every day. It fills me with joy to hear things
like DecoJim’s story, who found a club
and made friends, all because of MOCpages. (And he’s one of my favorite
builders, to boot!)
So to answer those questions, “what should I do?” ... I’d personally love to see
you guys come to MOCpages. It’s up to you, of course, but we’re going to have a
great time there and it’s only going to get better.
Sean
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MOCpages admin
www.mocpages.com
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In lugnet.publish, Sean Kenney wrote:
Hi Sean, and thank you for MOCPages.
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“Who is Sean? Can I trust this guy?”
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Basically, I trust people.
I trust people from the start.
But who runs MOCPages? You and you alone? Not a team?
Without the ldraw.org team, Ldraw would have died with Jesse. And that’s
basically the same problem with BS.
The deal is not “can I trust this guy” but “can I trust this website”.
Tell me there is a team behind you.
Didier
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In lugnet.publish, Didier Enjary wrote:
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Without the ldraw.org team, Ldraw would have died with Jesse. And that’s
basically the same problem with BS.
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Is this true? Didn’t Tim Courtney establish the LDRAW committee in 1999, well
after (and due to) James Jessiman’s passing in 1997? Furthermore, James was
developing an open standard, he wasn’t providing a service or a selling a
product. These are two very different things.
Brickshelf isn’t having problems because it is run by one person; it’s having
problems because it can’t cover its operating costs. That can happen anywhere.
Ford Motor Company can’t cover its operating costs either, and it has hundreds
of thousands of employees.
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But who runs MOCPages? You and you alone? Not a team?
The deal is not “can I trust this guy” but “can I trust this website”.
Tell me there is a team behind you.
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MOCpages doesn’t need a staff of employees to keep it running. I’m not without
some help, though...
At our datacenter, a team of people are paid to back up the data every day,
monitor the systems, repair or upgrade the computers, keep the power running,
install security patches, and so on. Content, like reviews, are auto-moderated
by MOCpages by detecting bad content (vulgar, attacking, etc). It forwards
anything it’s not sure about to me for manual moderation. Soon, pages and image
uploads will require moderation before becoming public... about 10 volunteers
have offered to help do this.
Am I central to MOCpages? Of course! Running MOCpages part of my
full time job. Could MOCpages transition to
someone else if I got hit by a bus? Of course.
In this regard, MOCpages is much like LUGNET. LUGNET was run by by Todd &
Suzanne for years... And they were able to disinvolve themselves and
successfully transistioned the community to Rene.
Sean
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MOCpages admin
www.mocpages.com
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Am I central to MOCpages? Of course! Running MOCpages part of my
full time job.
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Could MOCpages transition
to someone else if I got hit by a bus?
Of course.
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That’s exactly what I wanted to read. Take care of you and beware of the bus.
Didier
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You have said that old postings on MOCpages that use Brickshelf for image
hosting will automatically have the images copied to MOCpages and the pages
updated to use your hosting. Two questions about this:
1. Is this still true, now that Kevin has given a reprieve for Brickshelf?
2. What happens if someone posts a NEW entry on MOCpages that references
Brickshelf? Will it copy the images in that case as well?
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In lugnet.publish, William R. Ward wrote:
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You have said that old postings on MOCpages that use Brickshelf for image
hosting will automatically have the images copied to MOCpages and the pages
updated to use your hosting. Two questions about this:
1. Is this still true, now that Kevin has given a reprieve for Brickshelf?
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Yes. There are about 130,000 images that were linked to Brickshelf from all the
pages on MOCpages. I’ve now copied all 130,000 of them over to MOCpages and
they’ll be linked to your pages very soon.
This applies to all the images that were linked via the “main photo” or if you
pointed your page to a brickshelf gallery, (and/or adding captions to those
photos). If, however, you used HTML in your pages to embed pictures with <img>
tags you’ll have to find those images and save them manually. I’d actually like
to parse through, find them all, and save them also -- but given the initial
2-week deadline I was afraid there wouldn’t be enough time.
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2. What happens if someone posts a NEW entry on MOCpages that references
Brickshelf? Will it copy the images in that case as well?
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No, the copying process was a one-time thing. I’d reccomend you use MOCpages’
new image uploader going fowards. You can always manually link to images (with
HTML <img> tags) to Brickshelf (or Photobucket, or flickr, or wherever else)
but you do so at your own risk. :)
Sean
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MOCpages admin
www.mocpages.com
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