Brickshelf RIP (2000-2007)
I’ve tried to resist jumping onto the bandwagon with this one… but I found this petition to be a little funny…
There seems to be a few different sides in reaction to Brickself going down: (a) those who feel entitled to knowing that BS was going down, (b) those wanting to help BS out (or buy it), (c) the clueless who doesn’t understand how much effort goes into creating a site like BS and complain about it, (d) those who feel devastated that BS went down, (e) and those attacking Kevin personally. On one hand, it IS a blow to the LEGO community at large… but from what I understand, the images are not gone, but there is something in the works to preserve BS, so I expect to see a BS2 sometime soon… either the rights to BS will be bought and the web-site will be paid for somehow (either another volunteer or an business-smart group of investors); or another volunteer will fill in the the community gap.
But on the other hand, I really love Flickr and the tools/resources Flickr gives a person. Most people in Classic Space (and other fringe LEGO people) have moved to Flickr a long time ago, so it hasn’t been that much of a blow. To be honest, I’ve stopped posting to BS over a year or more ago, in favor of posting to Flickr. I realized that not everyone got to see my pictures on a non-LEGO-community web-site, but I posted my Flickr gallery to LUGNET to get exposure. For awhile there, I favored my own image gallery — I owned the images and it was easy to upload/maintain images on my own web-site — but a few months back, I bought a Flickr Pro account, finding it worth the money.
The bottom line is that Brickshelf either needs to incorporate some of the features that Flickr does, otherwise not too many people will morn its passing.