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2021 Moderator Election Q&A – Question Collection

The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it here.

Bricks is scheduled for an election next week, 2021-09-27. In connection with that, we will be holding a Q&A with the candidates. This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation.  Participation is completely voluntary.
Here’s how it’ll work:

Until the nomination phase, (so, until 2021-09-27 at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post one question per answer.

If your question contains a link, please use the syntax of [text](link), as that will make it easier for transcribing for the finished questionnaire.

This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into currently.

We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The following two questions are guaranteed to be included:

How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?
How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc. a question that you feel shouldn’t have been?

The community team may also include the following three questions if the community doesn’t supply enough questions.

In your opinion, what do moderators do?
A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?

At the start of the nomination phase, the Community Team will select up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election. We exclude any suggested questions that are negatively scored.

We will post the final questionnaire on the Election page. Candidates will have the option to fill out the questionnaire, and their answers will appear beneath their intro statements.
This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&A.

If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to post as a comment here.

We get a large number of "What is this element?" questions, which we are great at answering, and provides a good service to the askers, but doesn't really provide much "long term value to the internet". What is your approach to improving these questions to avoid a wall of identical questions?

This is something I have been meaning to bring up for a while as a discussion on the Meta site. I think it's definitely worth reviewing.

What would you do about complaints when a user submits many trivial edits?

How would you weigh the importance of factual knowledge versus interpersonal skills in moderators?

How would you handle situations with unwelcoming behaviour towards new users? Be it a blatantly unresearched question, a demonstrably false answer, or even a proper contribution.


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Fishy views on a user's questions
I noticed a new question was receiving a surprising number of views for a question only a few hours old with no answers (and no votes as of this writing). So I looked at the question tab on that user's activity, waited a few minutes, and reloaded the page. To my surprise, the views for several of the user's questions increased dramatically.
Here are screenshots:

five minutes later:

five more minutes later:

The views per question can be summarized as follows:
2:55  3:00   3:05    Question
 936    986   1010    Controversial Friends comic in the British LEGO Magazine?
 828    875    902    Instructions for the LEGO Star Wars Holiday X-Wing (4002019)
 816    866    886    Does the LEGO Star Wars Holiday X-Wing (4002019) contain any unique pieces?
 845    888    902    What are some LEGO Christmas trees designs I can build?
 597    624    647    2001 BIONICLE Trading Card #255?
 456    474    489    Complete set of 2004 Knights Kingdom card images?
 952    989   1018    What LEGO set has the smallest box?
 209    209    209    Is this non-disassemblable LEGO instruction step real?
 328    328    328    How can I assemble 2 opposing gears so that the axle rotations are perfectly parallel?
  62     62     62    What can I do with all my brick separators? [duplicate]
 234    234    234    Replace Battery in LEGO Dino Attack Light-Up T-Rex Head?
 394    394    394    Capture video stream from LEGO Studio Camera (Logitech USB webcam) in ev3dev?

Notice the bottom five questions in that table. Those question were ask before the Winter Bash and the views did not change at all, while the newer questions have gained ~100 views each in ten minutes - interesting.
For reference to see just how unusual this is look at the questions page. Normal questions on bricks are getting between 25 and 90 views. HNQs get a lot more 100 though 12000!, the normal number being around 1000 views.
I marked up a screen shot of the questions page, all of Alexander O'Mara's questions are in red and I notated all of the HNQs (When a question becomes a Hot Network Question it is logged). There is no question with over 90 views that was not a HNQ, except for Alexander O'Mara's.
Click for full size (it's big)

Now this part is pure speculation. However it looks like there are phony views being directed towards this user's questions in order to get the "Fashionable" hat.

get over 9,000 combined total views on all questions that you asked during Winter Bash

This probably has something to do with the competition, and the user being in second at the moment... Kind of sad if this is what is going on.

I also saw a part-ID Q&A with a suspect number of votes...

@AlexanderO'Mara if your talking about my answer here I too was surprised. But more surprised was I to find it DVed - right before 10 UVs, the amount to earn the enlightened badge. Coincidence is it?

Could be that it looks fishy.

@AlexanderO'Mara I don't see anything clear and convincing here that would disqualify either of you from winning, and I don't have the tools or time at my disposal to adequately investigate any foul play. I am wondering, given the context, if the two of you would be open to splitting the grand prize rather than having it come down to a coin flip. I'd be able to send each of you something costing as much as 100 EUR on German shop.lego.com (Perhaps the new Mobile Crane?). This does deviate from the original rules, so I'd need you both to agree to it, otherwise I'll flip a coin to see who wins.

@jncraton The suspicious voting in David's favor and my disfavor got much more brazen at the end of WB. That being said, they did contribute a fair bit to this site and I'd be willing to overlook anything ugly that transpired in the final days and split the prize (not really sure about the Mobile Crane specifically though, might we be able to choose our own <= 100 EUR set?)

@AlexanderO'Mara I appreciate your willingness to work with me on this. I'm open to any set that you want. You could each choose your own.

@jncraton I've purposefully avoided talking to AlexanderO'Mara since this all transpired. I'm lacking good or kind words. I'd love to refute each erroneous accusation he has made about me, but I'd need more then the 600 characters in a comment. (Even the reply to your comment here is charged with a passive aggressive attitude.) If Alexander has succeeded in painting the race for first as "voting fraud" (which contrary to what he believes never transpired from my end) then may I offer an alternative. Disqualify both of us and give the first place prize to zovits.

Last-minute double downvotes 10 seconds apart on my post, while your wrong answer is getting 3 upvotes in 7 minutes? The picture paints itself. I'm still willing to overlook it, but please do not insult us.

@NeverForget "Disqualify both of us and give the first place prize to zovits." I would donate the first prize to a charity (like Fairy Bricks), so should this decision be made, my involvement may as well be skipped over :)

@zovits You know, I think I like that plan even better. That way all of it goes to someone deserving, and it doesn't reward those last-minute votes aimed at fixing the This is Fine hat results. I'm good with the set, or any other smaller sets that might be substituted, being donated to Fairy Bricks.

CC-ing @jncraton because I think we've technically all agreed to this.

@AlexanderO'Mara After doing some thinking about this, I'm comfortable not awarding a first place prize if you'd both prefer that. However, I don't believe that I'm able to donate the prize to charity. TLG is pretty strict about support staying within the community that it is intended for. It's not supposed to be "sold, resold, or handed over to the public". How do we feel about giving out 5 prizes assigned randomly to everyone with at least 3 hats, with the two winners excluded?

Seeing as how zovits is not interested and TLG has restrictions on donating the prize I'm fine with going with your original idea to split the prize (if @AlexanderO'Mara is still willing).

@jncraton In light of TLG's rules about who prizes can go to, I'll still honor my agreement to split the prize.

@AlexanderO'Mara That works for me. I'll move forward with the two of you splitting the prize.

Since I have access to the logs, I spent a few minutes digging through this. Not a full-on investigation, just enough to see if there's fire behind this smoke...
Observations:

Yes, someone's been scraping profiles & hitting a bunch of questions via a big ol' pile of proxies to inflate the view counts.
That includes your questions as well as Alexander's.
There's no compelling reason for me to believe the culprit is either you or Alexander.
This is why we can't have nice things...

My recommendation: ignore the view-based hats for the purpose of this contest and just have fun.

Thanks for taking the time to conduct this investigation!

One of my concerns about this competition was how high level users or moderators had a huge advantage over regular users as they could easily get certain hats without much scrutiny. Such as the hats that require you to close a question, edit it, and re-open it.
The goal of this competition has always been to facilitate positive engagement on the site and to celebrate the holidays. I believe the threshold of getting three hats (as in 2017) was enough to be achievable to everyone with a suitable amount of effort and hopefully it would have lead them to participate more to contribute on the site.
Unfortunately I cannot verify the claim that some questions could have had their view counts manipulates. As a moderator, the only relevant tools I have access to are very general viewing statistics and suspicious voting patterns (which in this case does not apply). It might be possible for Stack Exchange admin staff to verify suspicious views but I am not sure that would be the fairest solution to this problem.
It looks like David and Alexander O'Mara are currently tied for first place at the moment so it is down to a coin toss as to who will win.
As the competition is very nearly over, I think we should consider how we can make the event as fair as possible next year, assuming it will be held again at all, considering how the event was mostly a repeat of previous years events.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

sort: votes


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2019: a year in moderation
It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:

We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
  -- A Theory of Moderation

While there certainly are Moderators here, a significant amount of the moderation is done by ordinary people, using the privileges
they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.
As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together.
And what could be more festive than a big pile of numbers?
So here is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Bricks over the past 12 months:
                  Action                  Moderators Community¹
----------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended²                                   0          4
Users destroyed³                                   1          0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue             64        208
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue                 7          8
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue          50         71
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue                34         64
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue                121        301
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue                12        142
Questions protected                                3          7
Questions merged                                   2          0
Questions flagged⁵                                 0        108
Questions closed                                  17         21
Question flags handled⁵                            6        102
Posts undeleted                                    2          4
Posts locked                                       1         20
Posts deleted⁶                                    97         81
Posts bumped                                       0         52
Escalations to the Community Manager team          1          0
Comments flagged                                   0         90
Comments deleted⁷                                 72        162
Comment flags handled                             19         71
Answers flagged                                    0        294
Answer flags handled                             235         58

Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Bricks without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
³ A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:

Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? I posted a similar report here last year: 2018: a year in moderation...
You can also check out this report on other sites
Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites

Wishing you all a happy new year...

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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Should we merge the Sorting and Organizing tags?
At the moment we've got 3 questions that are tagged sorting, 2 of which are also tagged organization, the remaining one could be equally happy under organization I think?

The tags more or less represent the same questions. The question is which one of the two tags should be the preferred tag.
I've added sorting as a suggested synonym for organisation which can be voted on here.

Seeing as my vote's not an insta-approve, I've voted on that. Wasn't sure if suggesting it as a mod would have just created it. Clearly not.

I would have kinda expected it that way too, but you can actually force it anywy on the general synonyms page where there's an "approve" link (well, was, since I just did it). That said, I kinda liked [tag:sorting]... oh well

@Joubarc Yes, I knew about the insta-approve, but was deliberately not using it as I wasn't sure about how the rest of us felt...

Ah, "oops", then.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


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Combine Mindstorms and NXT/RCX tags
What should we do?
 - Keep: [tag:nxt] and [tag:rcx];    Unusable/'Reserved': [tag:mindstorms]

                                      OR

 - Keep: [tag:mindstorms];           Tag synonyms:        [tag:nxt] and [tag:rcx]

In other words, should we 'combine' nxt and rcx into mindstorms?

@Ambo100 Tags names do not contain any magiscules. :)

I think RCX and NXT are two sufficiently apart technologies that they will each require its specific tag, so I really don't like having nxt and rcx being synonyms for mindstorms.
However, there might be questions which aren't so much about a specific Mindstorms kit but rather about robotic design in a more general sense. If these questions happen, taging them with rcx or nxt will be ill-suited, while mindstorms might be better — although there maybe robotics would be best (let's not forget Spybotics :-).
My own suggestion is to keep all three tags for the moment, but specify in the mindstorms wiki that if the question is specific to the NXT or RCX, then the appropriate tags should be used.
But really, I think we don't have a sufficient vision of what questions will arise to make that kind of decision now. Then again, I'm tagnostic, so my advise isn't worth squat here.

Or [tag:WeDo] which also fits into Robotics.

I've removed my votes on the NXT/RCX synonyms and adjusted the Wiki body to include a note about using the technology specific tags.

The way you did it is exactly what I had in mind

Or Cybermaster and Scout. :)

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


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Incorrect "lego" in site welcome message
The site welcome message you get when not logged in says:

Welcome to Q&A for lego and building block enthusiasts

It should say

Welcome to Q&A for LEGO® building blocks enthusiasts

Wanted to post about this, and the title auto-suggestion led me here. Has this still not been fixed yet? ಠ_ಠ

Well, first attempt at this ended up making the about page look dumb. Stupid symbols.
Crosses fingers and tries again
If this doesn't work, it's gonna be LEGO(R) – all-ASCII like God intended!

@Joe: It works now (at least for browsers that handle Unicode properly - which should be most desktop browsers at any rate). Just a bit frustrated yesterday ;-)

sigh... That's a different (but related) problem. Will dig into...


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Ideas for how to make ourselves known at events
I've commented in another message about about holding a booth at AFOLcon somewhere in the future and I'd like to expand on that.
Of course, having an actual booth may prove difficult, depending on the events. Most will gladly give you room to show your creations, but having a booth just to advertise something as bricks.SE may be overcooking it.
But of course, if we happen to have a booth to display some creations, we might as well publicize SE a bit. What's the proper way to do that? "Business cards" seems an obvious first step, but what should we have on them? Are there any official guidelines from the overlords on that matter? I imagine other SE sites do something like that regularly.
Another LEGO-specific idea is to build a QR code with white and black tiles, which work perfectly for people with a smartphone and doesn't take up much display room.
What if we're attending events as guests? I'll go to Fana'Briques this year (as every year), but due to the ever-increasing popularity of the event and overbooking, I won't have a stand of my own (just a few GBC modules, if that); so what can I do there to promote bricks.se?
If we're going to hand out business cards, we might as well try to find a design everybody agrees with.

Funny you should mention this, I've been thinking about the idea since you mentioned it on another Meta topic.

The Great Western LEGO Show

Museum of the Great Western Railway, Swindon, England, UK.
6th-7th October 2012.

I live about 3 hours away and would like to attend the exhibition but I have no experience as an exhibitor.

See also this answer to How can I get Stack Exchange to send me to a conference?

-Woot!- I'll be attending BrickCon. It will be held at Seattle Center on Oct 6-7 of 2012 at the same time as the Great Western Show. Maybe @Ambo100 and I could do something to promote Stack Exchange from opposite ends of the pond? I have an idea regarding possible swag that we could hand out during the conventions... How about a couple of different color LEGO tiles imprinted with the names of several StackExchange sites? Nobody I know throws away free LEGO. I still have my Major Stackings brick from the badge I got at last years event. :)

EDIT- I had a great time at BrickCon 2012 in October. You can read
  about it here. I touched base with Stack Exchange before I went
  and SE was kind enough to send me a little SE swag to hand out while I
  was there. They even paid for my admission(Thanks Anna!). I wore my
  Major Stackings badge with gusto.

Certainly there are some resources around to help Stack Exchange sites with some "real world" promotion:

Intro to CHAOS Promotion Seminar

If we can come up with some sensible ideas, we can start talking about support if we need it, as well as materials, swag, etc.

To get a better idea of the process involved take a look at the 'Supporting Community Conferences' post on the Stack Exchange blog.
The Stack Exchange network ethos seems to be based on experts, so our target equivalent would most likely be experienced model makers and public speakers. People who get as much out of discussing LEGO bricks as they do building with them.

You mentioned QR code... Here it is:

QR code for http://bricks.stackexchange.com

Sound like a challenge, what would be the fewest amount of bricks required to make a bricks.stackexchange.com QR code?

I'll be putting that on all my GBC modules!

I'll be displaying some (very crude) posters/flyers with unanswered questions and a link (+QR code indeed) to answer them at the LEGO Fan Weekend in Skaerbaek,  I'm curious to see if it will generate some traffic.
The design is rather simple: a big "WANTED" headline, then "Do you know: "+ unanswered question, followed by a pic and the link to bricks.se. I can upload the PDFs somewhere if someone wants to see/use them, but two of the links contain my userid so you'll probably want to make your own flyers.

I don't think they got much attention; maybe a few people actually seemed to be interested by what was on there. Then again, I was too busy chasing stray GBC balls to be sure.


text:
Winter Bash 2013

This event will run from 16 December 2013 to 3 January 2014. Users
  will be able to see their entire hat collection at http://winterbash2013.stackexchange.com.
  That site will also have a landing page, explaining the rules and
  other details of the event.
Individual users who don’t want to participate, don’t want to see
  hats, and/or are generally anti-hat will have an “I hate hats” option
  available. And just like last time, at the end of the event, all
  hats will go back into storage.
The only visual change to the Stack Exchange sites themselves will be
  the presence of the hats and the “I hate hats” button in the footer.
All responses will need to be in by 1 December 2013. Sites that
  haven’t responded by then will be considered to have opted out from
  the event.

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because Winter Bash 2014 happened over a year ago.

Last years Winter Bash was successful and I'd like to see it return this winter.

Fun was had collecting hats ;)

Three up votes - Ambo100 are you going to reply back with a "yes" then?

@Zhaph-BenDuguid Sorry, I've replied with a yes, we are set for Winterbash 2013.

Sweet :) Here come the hats!


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Winter Bash 2012 Preparations

Last year, on our Gaming site, we hosted an event called Hat Dash,
  where users earned "hats" for their gravatars by completing certain
  tasks (analogous to badges). Certain actions would trigger the user
  receiving a hat, which their gravatar could then "wear".
For example, editing a post would yield an editor-themed hat (fedora
  with pen) to the editor.
This year, we're expanding the promotion to all sites which choose to participate, and redesigning the hat selection to be more
  appropriate to the entire network (no severed Wampa heads). Some of
  it is holiday-themed, some of it is a bit silly, and all of it is
  (hopefully) fun!
This event will run from 19 December 2012 to 4 January 2013. Users
  will be able to see their entire hat collection on http://winterba.sh.
  That site will also have a landing page, explaining the rules and
  other details of the event.
Individual users who don’t want to participate, don’t want to see
  hats, and/or are generally  anti-hat will have an "I hate hats" option
  available, just as we had on Gaming last year.
The only visual change to the site itself will be the presence of the
  hats and the "I hate hats" button in the footer.
All responses will need to be in by 28 November 2012. Sites that
  haven’t responded by then will be considered to have "opted out" from
  the event.

I like hats. Do we get to choose which one we would wear from the several that will be earned?

Yes, you do. People, please do wear your hats :-)

I like the idea of the competition. I think it suites the playful nature of LEGO bricks but I worry the sites community may be too small to benefit.

I don't think we're too small - and it might help spread the word among the network ;)

Especially if we can get LEGO-themed hats, which I think we should ask for

So is that a unanimous yes then? ;)

@Zhaph-BenDuguid From the moderators only, it looks like it's a yes.

And on the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any "no" anyway, so I'd say, let's treat it as a "yes", and if people complain later it'll be a good opportunity to tell them to read meta too.


text:
LEGO Answers is now Bricks
LEGO Answers has been renamed to Bricks (Stack Exchange)
Aside from the change in name, we are still the same site question and answer site for LEGO and building block enthusiasts.

It is unfortunate that a new user cannot tell from the front page what this SE is about anymore.


text:
LEGO Fan Media Days 2017 - Trip Report
Bricks Stack Exchange has been given an opportunity, for the first time ever, to attend an official LEGO event since becoming a Recognised Fan Media site in February 2017.
This June I attended the LEGO Fan Media Days event on behalf of our ambassador jncraton. The event consisted of three packed days of presentations, tours, interviews, discussions/feedback sessions as well as a 'secret unveiling'.

31st May 2017: LEGO House Tour
1st June 2017: LEGO Idea House
2nd June 2017: LEGOLAND Billund

This looks amazing! Thanks for taking the time to share your trip details with us all and for representing Bricks.SE at this event!

1st June 2017: LEGO Idea House
The LEGO Idea house is less than a minute walk away from the LEGO House and adjacent to Ole Kirk's House (the original home of Ole Kirk Christiansen, founder of The LEGO Group).
Private Museum
The buildings houses a private museum of The LEGO Group, the museum is used primarily for staff, business relations and media.

The museum follows the LEGO history in chronological order, weaving between smaller rooms covering the themes of Star Wars, Duplo and Education.
Memory Lane
Tucked away, below the LEGO Idea House is 'Memory Lane' a archive of almost every LEGO set produced from 1966 to the present day. The purpose of the archive is to document the history of LEGO sets and provide reference for employees.

At the rate LEGO are producing new sets, there will only be a few more years until every shelf has been filled.
The current basement is too small and not suitable for long-term storage, being underground it's particularly vulnerable to natural disasters (such as flooding). There are plans in the near future to move above ground to a larger storage space.

Flickr: Recognised LEGO Fan Media Days 2017 (Day 2 - LEGO Idea House)

2nd June 2017: LEGOLAND Billund
On the final day we had a chance to relax and explore the beautiful LEGOLAND park in Billund. We had a short tour of Miniland and had the chance to see two of the newest attractions.
Worlds Tallest Minland
New for 2017, the 'Worlds Tallest Miniland' features five of the tallest buildings from around the world built to a 1:150 scale of their original design. The models combined are built out of over 830,000 bricks.

The five models shown above (from left to right) include:

Shanghai Tower (4.21m)
One World Trade Center (3.61m)
Makkah Royal Clock Tower Hotel (4.00m)
Taipei 101 (3.39m)
Burj Khalifa (5.52m)

A sixth model of the Eiffel tower also features in the area along with a 24cm high rendition of the LEGOLAND LEGOTOP ride.

LEGO Ninjago World
LEGO Ninjago World opened in Billind in 2016, the first new area of the park since Polar Land opened in 2012. Ninjago World is based around the popular line of Ninjago LEGO products a collection of elements of fantasy, ninjas and dragons

The main attraction, perhaps rather appropriately named 'Ninjago The Ride' is an indoor dark ride where guests are transported around on moving vehicle and must use hand movements to defeat the villains shown on the projectors ahead.
I really appreciate LEGOLAND attractions that encourage guests to physically interact as much as possible. Perhaps my favourite example of such a ride would be the Fire Brigade attraction featuring in most LEGOLAND parks.
Guests must physically pump a hydrant to be able to put out the fires and power their fire truck. There is a healthy competitive spirit and it's perhaps one of the few rides where you are required to do all the work.

Flickr: Recognised LEGO Fan Media Days 2017 (Day 3 - LEGOLAND Billund)

31st May 2017: LEGO House Tour
In the heart of Billund lies LEGO House, a place for LEGO Fans and families to experience the playfulness of LEGO. The LEGO House is due to open on the 28th September 2017. It will include paid attractions as well as an area open to the general public, including eateries and a LEGO Shop.
The LEGO House consists of four individually coloured experience zones with a Masterpiece Gallery featuring fan made creations, the History Collection in the basement which illustrates the development of the company and LEGO brand over time.

Image: LEGO® House: seen from above
Presentations
Representatives across five continents attended and gave short 5-10 minute presentations about a variety of LEGO fan communities.
CEO Session
We were also given a chance to have a group interview with the current LEGO CEO Bali Padda about a broad range of topics.
One of the topics I found most interesting was the commitment by The LEGO Group to conduct research into developing fully sustainable plastic, a goal (set by the previous CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp) which they aim to achieve by 2030.
LEGO House Masterpiece Gallery Reveal
The LEGO House General Manager Jesper Vilstrup and Senior Experience Designer Stuart Harris gave a presentation revealing the first models to feature in the Masterpiece Gallery.
Three towering dinosaurs, each representing the core build styles of System, Duplo and Technic will feature in the centre of the gallery at the highest point inside the building.

Tree of Creativity

One of the largest (6 million bricks) and tallest (15m high) LEGO models ever built. It is surrounded by a staircase that winds its way around the tree, up to the top floor.

As you climb the stairs, it becomes apparent that the tree is inhabited by small colonies of minifigures representing most of the major LEGO themes.
World Explorer
The three islands included in this area include: a towering city island, town & countryside island and a paradise fairground island.

All of the models are packed full of exciting details and the whole collection of models feels alive.
These islands have some of the most spectacular light setups I have seen, almost every building and many vehicles have lighting incorporated into them.

Flickr: Recognised LEGO Fan Media Days 2017 (Day 1 - LEGO House Tour)

There was a nice group photo from the event posted on the LAN:


text:
Winter Bash 2014

As another year draws to a close, we wanted to do something fun and
  lighthearted with our communities, as a way of celebrating the many
  amazing people who make the sites awesome. So, we’re announcing Winter
  Bash 2014!
Most of you probably remember previous years’ events, but I’ll recap
  anyway, for the newbies among us. Winter Bash is an annual event that
  can run on any Stack Exchange site that chooses to participate. Users
  earn “hats” for their gravatars by completing certain tasks (analogous
  to badges). Certain actions trigger the user receiving a hat, which
  their gravatar can “wear”. We track everyone’s progress earning hats
  in a leaderboard that looks something like this:

Winter Bash 2014 will again be available to all sites that choose to participate. We’re redesigning all the hats and adding some extra
  features to keep things fresh and exciting.
Some Details
This event will run from 15 December 2014 to 4 January 2015. Users
  will be able to see their entire hat collection on
  winterbash2014.stackexchange.com. That site will also have a landing page, explaining the rules and other details of the event.
Individual users who don’t want to participate, don’t want to see
  hats, and/or are generally anti-hat will have an “I hate hats” option
  available. And just like last time, at the end of the event, all hats
  will go back into storage.
The only visual change to the Stack Exchange sites themselves will be
  the presence of the hats and the “I hate hats” button in the footer.

The community of every site on the Stack Exchange gets to choose if they would like to take part in this event. Based on the very positive feedback from the last two years (2013, 2012), in which nobody has made any objections to taking part, I would like LEGO Stack Exchange to be involved in this years Winter Bash.
However, if any one has any objections to taking part, please explain why in response to this question.
Whilst last year the default options was to opt-out of the event, this year we must contact Stack Exchange if we do not wish to be involved.
All responses must be in by 1st December 2014.

Huzzah! More hats :-D

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because Winter Bash 2014 happened over a year ago.


text:
AFOLCON / BRICK 2014
You may or may not be aware that I am currently attending the Brick 2014 convention in ExCeL, London.
I am going with the intention of promoting our Stack Exchange site to the LEGO community. I also promised to produce a daily report of the event, particularly for those who were unable to attend the convention.
I will have time to publish the full report once the event has ended.

Nice work there, I've got my tickets for Sunday, so might see you there :-)

AFOLCON 2014 (Wednesday 26th November)
The Adult Fan Of Lego Convention took place the day before BRICK 2014 was due to open to the public. The convention had guest speakers from every aspect of LEGO, including those that work for or with The LEGO Group.
Fiona Wright

Image: LinkedIn. Fiona Wright.
Fiona Wright is the General Manager and Vice President of LEGO UK, she has been a member of the company since she was recruited as the Europe North Brand director in 1999.
She talked about how the company has changed since then. In particular during 2003-2004 when The LEGO Group yearly profits had begun to fail. She attributed this to the The LEGO Groups' attempts to expand the company with more and more merchandising, theme parks and digital media.

2003 was a very disappointing year for LEGO Company.
Net sales fell by 26 percent from DKK 11.4 billion in 2002 to DKK 8.4
  billion. Play material sales declined by 29 percent to DKK 7.2
  billion.
The result was a pre-tax loss on earnings of DKK 1.4 billion, i.e. a
  drop of DKK 2 billion as compared with 2002.
The year’s result can only be described as unsatisfactory.

Source: LEGO Annual Report 2003. Page 3.

Guy Bagley
Guy Bagley works for Merlin Entertainment as a LEGO Model Maker. He makes models for LEGOLAND Theme Parks, Discovery Centres, LEGO Stores and special events.
He previously worked for several toy companies as a designer before joining LEGO 20 years ago. His first task was to build a sphere out of LEGO, building spheres allow new model makers to better understand how to 'sculpt' large scale LEGO models.
Every model in the LEGOLAND parks over 6ft have steel structures within the models and every day the welds, bolts, bearing and motors of the models and inspected. External checks are performed monthly and a full scale inspection is performed each year.
Guy has also worked on many of the LEGO Discovery Centres and LEGO are aiming to create two new centres every year. There seems to be a lot of pressure to produce new models for LDC's and model makers don't get quiet enough time as they had to rebuild old models.

Image: LinkedIn. Guy Bagley.

Max Valembois
Max is a designer for the LEGO MInecraft sets. During the design process, compromises had to be made to best fit the iconic elements of LEGO and Minecraft. Most noticeably, LEGO bricks aren't a perfect cube, so the best approximation is chosen.
The designers chose to not make the Minecraft characters look as rectangular and square as they do in the Minecraft universe because they would be unrecognisable as LEGO.

Image: LEGO Minecraft Product Page. Video screen capture.

Keith David Severson
Keith is the Senior manager for the LEGO Community Support team. Kevin talked about the LEGO Ambassador Network (LAN) introduced in 2005 as 'a focused and structured approach to engaging with and supporting the global adult fan of LEGO (AFOL) community'.
LUGBULK Facts

There are 376,401 AFOLs (Adult Fans of LEGO) in 223 recognised LUGs (LEGO User Groups).
Over 16 million LEGO parts were sent out in LUGBULK orders in 2014.
LUGBULK runs of the 'Missing Parts' supply chain. Therefore requests for missing parts from LEGO customers take priority over LUGBULK orders. LUGBULK orders can take a long time to be processed and shipped to the LUG, particularly around peak times (Christmas).

Alice Finch

Image: Flickr. Alice Finch and her castle
Alice is an AFOL of LEGO, well known in the LEGO fan community for her large scale MOCs, most notably the recreation of Hogwarts from the Harry Potter franchise.
I highly recommend reading the Brothers Brick interview as it covers most of the points she talked about in her presentation. There is also a gallery of the finished Hogwarts model on Flickr.

Team Exosuit
Tim Goddard, Ian Grieg, Andrew Hamilton, Yvonne Doyle, Drew Maughan and Jeremy Williams collaborated with Peter Reid to make the Exo Suit set a reality with LEGO Ideas.

I'm sorry this report isn't yet finished but I'm posting what I have written so far. I'm not accustomed to writing so much on an iPad!

BRICK 2014 (27th-29th November)
The BRICK 2014 convention was the largest of its kind in the UK. The convention originally was intended to be held at the O2 arena in London, but due to the high demand in tickets it was moved to the much larger ExCeL convention centre, less than a mile away.
Fan Zone
Undoubtably the highlight of the event, the Fan Zone showcased almost every kind of LEGO models created by the LEGO fan community from all over Europe.
Aside from the usual City and Space themes that are a staple of almost every LEGO exhibition, you could also pockets of Fabuland, Steampunk, Microscale and Mosaic models.
Shopping
Toys R Us, as the official partner retailer were selling almost every set you could buy at a normal LEGO store.
Sadly there was no official LEGO store where you could spend and earn VIP points, however Toys R Us ran (and continue to run until 21st December) a promotion where you could earn a £20 gift coupon for spending £75 or more on LEGO.
There were also a dozen or so independent traders from across Europe selling their loose parts as well as rare and discontinued sets.
Verdict
For adults and children there is plenty to see and do. If you intend to see the whole show you can expect to spend at least a full day looking around.
The tickets for both Saturday and Sunday were sold out and crowded. I strongly recommend anyone who wishes to go to BRICK 2015 either does so on a weekday or purchases a VIP pass to get access to the show floor an hour earlier than the public.


text:
Pluralize [tag:minifigure]
I think, and on SO it's a common though, that a tag should be in plural form if it can and that doesn't change sense.
So let's pluralize minifigure by analogy with video-games.

Thanks for pointing this out.

minifigure is now synonymous with minifigures which is now the primary tag.
It looks like nearly every other tag that can be considered quantitative has already been written in plural form, it seems sensible that minifigures should be treated the same.


text:
Bricks SE - Year in Review 2017
2017 has been a particularly memorable year for Bricks SE, most notably for the new relationship that had been established between the site and The LEGO Group.
Through the various community events, we were given the valuable opportunity to meet LEGO community members.

Very nice! Thanks for putting all of this together in one place.

Event Timeline
'Becoming a recognized LEGO User Group' - 11th January
In January, jncraton successfully applied for Bricks SE to become a recognized LEGO User Group. Since early February jncraton has been our sites ambassador to The LEGO Group.
Related: 'New recognition status with TLG' - 11th December

'LEGO Answers is now Bricks' - 21st April
To respect TLG wishes to to protect the LEGO brand and trademark, the community decided to rename LEGO® Answers to Bricks Stack Exchange.
Aside from the change in name, we are still the same site question and answer site for LEGO and building block enthusiasts.

'LEGO Fan Media Days 2017 - Trip Report' - 6th June
For the first time ever, Bricks Stack Exchange had been given the opportunity, to attend an official LEGO event since becoming a Recognised Fan Media site.

'TLG Support for Boost questions' - 6th June
LEGO provided us with a copy of the LEGO Boost kit to facilitate answering questions about this new product.

'Enfield Trip Report' - 17th September
LUG Ambassador jncraton attended RLFM event in Enfield, USA to connect with the Lego Community Engagement team and fellow Fan Media communities.

'LEGO House AFOL Opening Event - Trip Report' - 23rd September
Community moderator Zhaph - Ben Duguid attended the LEGO House AFOL Opening Event in Billund, Denmark.

'Win a LEGO set prize for participating in Winter Bash 2017!' - 15th Dec
To coincide with the yearly network wide Winter Bash events, Bricks SE hosted a prize draw for those who participated and earned three or more hats during the holiday season.

2017 Statistics
Most Viewed Quesitons
Question                                                                    Views
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------
How do I center a 2x2 plate on a 3x3 plate?                                  10534
The LEGO Logo Font                                                           7592
What is this light grey LEGO plate with six sides?                           3059
Why is LEGO usually uppercase?                                               2449
LEGO Mindstorms 9797 (NXT Education base set) Software Download              2389
How should I arrange LEGO to sell per pound?                                 2026
Can you identify this bevelled grey 2x1 piece?                               1940
What is this piece slightly longer than a 2x2 plate with grooves and a hole? 1851
Can you identify these 20 year old LEGO sets?                                1822
What are the programming languages that can be used on Lego Mindstorm EV3?   1629

New Users by Month
Month New Users
----- ----------
1     131
2     150
3     107
4     176
5     109
6     95
7     118
8     104
9     123
10    115
11    164
12    210

All Time Statistics
New Users per Year
Year New Users
---- ---------
2011 533
2012 627
2013 797
2014 910
2015 1010
2016 1101
2017 1602

Edits per Year
Year Edits
---- -----
2011 602
2012 434
2013 436
2014 509
2015 538
2016 711
2017 1148

Comments per Year
Year Comments
---- --------
2011 1086
2012 905
2013 848
2014 876
2015 987
2016 876
2017 960

Voting per Year
Year Accepts Upvotes Downvotes
---- ------- ------- ---------
2011 170     4970    140
2012 148     4596    102
2013 133     3711    137
2014 143     5396    197
2015 166     4592    285
2016 152     3633    365
2017 169     5385    269

Posts per Year
Year Questions Answers
---- --------- -------
2011 237       509
2012 248       459
2013 263       489
2014 352       623
2015 399       633
2016 364       602
2017 425       559

Source: SE Data query

It's great to see that we had the most new users, posts, and edits in 2017!

I know it wouldn't be in the SEDE yet but this one would be in third on the most viewed list.

@David Well spotted! I will try and check back later to see if it has changed.


text:
"Close as Off topic" statement is incorrect
The current "Close as off-topic" description reads:

Questions on LEGO® - Stack Exchange are expected to generally relate to LEGOs, within the scope defined in the faq.

As per the official LEGO Group fair play guidelines:

Proper Use of the LEGO Trademark on a Web Site
  If the LEGO trademark is used at all, it should always be used as an adjective, not as a noun. For example, say "MODELS BUILT OF LEGO BRICKS". Never say "MODELS BUILT OF LEGOs".

Can we change the Close as Off topic statement to:

Questions on LEGO® - Stack Exchange are expected to generally relate to LEGO Bricks, within the scope defined in the faq.

Alternatively, we could make it more general:

Questions on LEGO® - Stack Exchange are expected to generally relate to brick building toys, within the scope defined in the faq.

Note also that the guidelines state:

[I]mproper use of the LEGO trademark cannot be made proper by including a disclaimer.

Regardless of whether it reads better or not, LEGO group want it written as an adjective rather than a noun, so on core site furniture we should respect that. I'm not calling for editors to go around changing everyone's questions and answers to the correct form, although someone else might.

Ooh, this is covered in the trademark usage guidelines. Good to know.

@JoeWreschnig But if their extreme paranoia results in us getting shut down because we didn't follow their guidelines, that would be a shame :(

@JoeWreschnig Heh. If we ever meet up, I'd love to buy you a beer or three (or your preferred beverage of choice). :D

This has been changed to read "LEGO Bricks", thanks!


text:
Do we use Lego, or Legos?
On this site, which term do we use (or prefer to use) in questions and in tags? I'm inclined to the former, but then I'm British so that's the only way it could possibly be said.

Hmm, we could ask on English Stack Exchange about this ... actually, it was already asked.

I personally hate it when people call LEGO "legos". Ugh.

neither, the correct term is something of the form lego-brick. LEGO is the name of the company, and they're explicit about not referring to the toys as just lego, but instead as lego bricks.

...in an effort to enforce their trademark claims. Its silly, yes, but its the way it works, and if we want to exist, we need to make an effort to play by the rules.

This was discussed to some extent during the definition phase of the site:

It's going to come up eventually, so can we all agree…Lego bricks not Legos?

The general feeling seemed to be:
Where possible (tags, FAQ, etc.) we should use the approved form, but elsewhere, not sweat it too much.
Edit to add:
I believe the relevant section of the guidelines is:

The LEGO Trademarks may be used under certain Limited Circumstances on an Unofficial Web Site
The LEGO trademarks (but not the logo) may be used in a non-commercial manner to refer to LEGO products or elements which are shown or discussed on a web site, as long as the trademark is not unduly emphasized or used in a way that can lead an observer to mistakenly believe that the site is sponsored or authorized by the LEGO Group.
Proper Use of the LEGO Trademark on a Web Site
If the LEGO trademark is used at all, it should always be used as an adjective, not as a noun. For example, say "MODELS BUILT OF LEGO BRICKS". Never say "MODELS BUILT OF LEGOs".Also, the trademark should appear in the same typeface as the surrounding text and should not be isolated or set apart from the surrounding text. In other words, the trademarks should not be emphasized or highlighted. Finally, the LEGO trademark should always appear with a ® symbol each time it is used.

I'm not a lawyer, so can't really summarise it, however in the previous discussion, it was pointed out that we can't really police the community in terms of "using the LEGO trademark as an adjective rather than a noun", however where it is used on core parts of the site (FAQ, tags, etc.) then it should be as an adjective, and include the ® symbol.

I've got nothing to add to this :-)

I fully agree it's not going to look (or read) great with LEGO® everywhere - however even they don't seem to want that enforced really - look at their quotes, no ® in there, and while we might not have LEGO in our URL, the logo at the top just reads "LEGO®", and the title tag is <title>LEGO® - Stack Exchange</title> so we don't really have anything but LEGO in our name at the moment ;)

The "off-topic" close reason states "Questions on LEGO® - Stack Exchange are expected to generally relate to LEGOs". I'm trying to get used to seeing "LEGOs", and do I now have to put up with the company trademark with its ® symbol, and "LEGOs", in the same sentence?!

We shouldn't be using LEGOs at all - it should be "Questions on LEGO® - Stack Exchange are expected to generally relate to LEGO Bricks"

@BoltClock I've raised this as a bug: http://meta.bricks.stackexchange.com/questions/53/close-as-off-topic-statement-is-incorrect

The thing which LEGO considers the most important is the usage of all capitals. In the book 50 Years of the LEGO Brick, they use it that way consistently, most of the time without the trademark ®. Also, quite a few times "LEGO" is actually used as a noun, but it's always as a shorctut for "The LEGO Company", so I suppose that's acceptable. "LEGO" as a shortcut for "LEGO bricks" is not.

Which is a bit of a pain with our all lower case tags :(

I believe LEGO is the plural form of LEGO.

I think LEGO is the brand and LEGO bricks are the bricks? Although many people call the bricks legos; I don't think that's a force that can be stopped.

Indeed. As a Brit I would support "Lego"...which means this bites a bit.

As a kid who played with them from the time I was three, through the end of my life, and who will always be eight years old on my knees when confronted with a pile of bricks, they are called only "legos". Notice that I represent no entity other than myself when I say that.

Years ago if you accidentally visited "legos.com" you'd be presented with this image:


text:
Rename tag minifigures -> minifigs
While minifigures may be the 'correct' term, I've never come across anyone who uses that term, instead, everyone uses minifigs, and as such the tag should be renamed. Thoughts?

"Minifig" is simply a short form. It started off as "minifigure".

Are we talking about the collectables product line Minifigures, or the more general "Mini Figures" that are found in the Pick-a-brick selector?

Do we care about that distinction?

the keyword must be minifigure as spaces are not allowed. minifig and mini figure should be considered synonims.

@jfyelle I know, that's what hyphens are for ;) It's just that Joe was using as justification "the official product line is minifigures" but that is the collectable packets, rather than the generic term for the figures. That said, as we're hoping to catch google searches for "minifig", we won't do that if there's a hyphen ;)


text:
Do we really need a [brick] tag?
While reviewing suggested edits I came across this. Nothing wrong with the tag wiki edit (though I'm skipping in the meantime) but it's for a tag called brick, with 29 uses currently.
Is this tag really necessary? Usually we distinguish other systems from bricks, not the other way around, since the overwhelming majority of questions are about bricks, as implied by the name of the site.

This tag does not seem to add anything to the questions, many of these questions use part-identification or piece-information which describe the questions well enough.
Only two questions used this tag alone, I have re-tagged with other more appropriate tags and removed all references to this tag on every other question.

I know I am a new user here and even made that wiki excerpt myself but when I think about brick tag, it seems useless to me. It's like having a movie tag in Movies & TV stack exchange. I will say we should get rid of that tag.

On a sidenote movies did had [tag:movies] tag and then they got rid of it.

Not only Movies, Hinduism also black Listed Hindu tag and got rid of Sanatana Dharma tag.

@NogShine having a tag which apply to almost every question make no sense

Fun fact: There even is a dedicated type of filter for blacklisting such tags (“intrinsic tag”). I suppose we here do not have this one due to the renaming from Lego to Bricks. Moderators should be able to see it here.

The word brick is not just generic for lego parts, it is also a type of part it self.
So yes, I think it should be kept incase people are asking a question regarding the type 'brick/s'.

We don't really need a tag for each type of part. Even if we did, [brick] is still too ambiguous, and it would not be immediately obvious to all users that it was referring to a type of part.

ldcad and bricklink do quite a good job of categorising parts though its not perfect of course. there is brick, brick decorated, brick modified, brick round and brick curved. However categories like technic brick, arch, slope and wedge do overlap because it is impossible to perfectly organize the lego parts library (which is over 60,000 parts)


text:
Benefits of Bricks SE being recognized by LEGO
It is not a secret LEGO recognize and support a lot of AFOL groups all around the world. Most of these groups are LUGs (LEGO User Groups) which are formed by groups of adult LEGO fans gathering together in real life (or maybe term "offline" fits better?). LUG and its members have certain perks, like LUGBULK and some other good stuff, so I won't go too much details about it as this is not the point of this question.
My question is about Bricks SE, which has been recognized as Recognized LEGO Fan Media (RLFM) couple of years ago. It is not entirely clear what kind of benefits does Bricks SE and its members have as RLFM.
From my investigation I found that LEGO has provided some free sets for past severals Winter Bash competitions. As well as some sets used for review. There have been several events in 2017 where Bricks SE members participated. It seems it has been a little quite since then.
So, what kind of perks we, as a community as well as members of this community, get (or can get) regularly in terms of physical (sets, bricks, else) and non-physical (events, gathering, previews, etc) perks?

Further details on this can be found on New recognition status with TLG including a link to the official announcements from TLG on the various levels of support.

Great question. There are a lot of benefits. Here are some of them:

Direct communication with LEGO staff. As our ambassador, I'm connected with the AFOL Engagement Team and can reach out to them with specific questions. We've also participated in Fan Media Days in Billund, and I attended a meet and greet with TLG staff in Enfield.
Direct communication with the AFOL community. As our ambassador, I have access to the LEGO Ambassador Network (LAN). This is basically a forum where ambassadors communicate with one another. TLG has several staff members regularly participate and answer questions on LAN.
Increased awareness among AFOLs for our community. I participate on LAN as a representative of our community, and our community is listed in the community locator to make it easier for other AFOLs to discover. I'm also able to add events (e.g. Winter Bash) to the event calendar for everyone to see.
Activity Support. As was mentioned in the question, LEGO will support activities throughout the year by providing LEGO sets for us.
LUGBULK. We technically have access to this, but we've never tried it as administration would be painful, and most of us can simply join local LUGs.

The most significant perks from my point of view are the connection points that recognition provides for us.
I will say that we don't currently make full use of our activity support. We can have one supported activity up to 500EUR per quarter, and we typically don't take full advantage of this. I'm happy to explore ways that we could do more with this support, but understand that I have to request sets for a specific purpose and report back to TLG regarding how they were used and how they performed (e.g. page views, new users, etc), so we need to be thoughtful about how our requests benefit the entire community.

Would we risk our standing with TLG if we were to use more of this activity support? I can easily imagine quarterly contests, about either building or site activity. Or just a quarterly raffle among all actively contributing (new) users to foster activity and signup rate. Of course, we'd have to consider whether we can even grow anymore while still keeping the questions on topic.

I don't think that we're risking anything as long as I'm staying on top of the paperwork and reporting and we're making good use of the support. I will say that I don't personally have the bandwidth to run a contest every quarter, though. Offering prizes for new user contribution doesn't always seem to generate the kind of engagement that we're looking for either. I think I'd be more interested in providing incentive for great contributors to create great content. e.g. https://bricks.stackexchange.com/questions/10074/how-can-i-motorize-42077-technic-rally-car-with-lego-power-functions

I too want to avoid repeating the Winter Bash hysteria :) My idea would be to run a quarterly event, where we (I'd gladly help) take the list of every user who has earned at least 100 reputation in that quarter and randomly draw a few to win a prize. Repeat this for the subset of the above users who are newbies in the quarter. This way no cutthroat competition would ensue, but everybody (especially newbies) would be incentivized to contribute. If this does not result in way too much content, I'm confident the quality can be held to the existing standards. And if it does, it can be canceled.

I like this idea in principle, and I think it would encourage more user engagement, but it would be very hard for me to report back to TLG how much it is encouraging engagement. I'd be more interested in running something like we did with our annual support in 2018: https://bricks.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/432/2018-annual-support-proposals  The nice thing about doing this through the activity support system is that I wouldn't have to repackage and ship everything, and users could submit proposals for whatever sets they think they can create meaningful Q&A content around.

This still encourages users to be involved in general, as we had rep thresholds in place for proposal submissions. It's actually a lot like your idea, except users have to both meet the rep criteria and put forth a proposal for a set.

@zovits I've put up a request for Q3 activity support proposals: https://bricks.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/513/2020-q3-activity-support-proposals/514 I'd love to hear any feedback that you may have on this.


text:
All of our http inline images are broken
Since StackExchange switched to https for everything (yay) all of our http inline images are broken (boo).
I've seen this twice in the last few days:

on https://bricks.stackexchange.com/posts/8481/revisions I submitted a fix for a question I answered
on https://bricks.stackexchange.com/posts/6840/revisions I fixed my own

So now I'm wondering:

how do we find these occurrences site wide?
how many of them are there?
how many images have we lost forever?

It looks like everything has been fixed (as far as I can tell from using this. It doesn't look like we've lost any images because they were all working before they were re-uploaded.

This is a known issue in the transition to HTTPS. This post has more information:
Help us fix broken images!
That post also includes a tool to identify and fix the broken images. I've fixed a few images. It doesn't look like we have too many, perhaps 30, so it shouldn't be too time consuming to fix them.

It looks like Charlie Harding beat me to cleaning these up.  :)

This tool is very useful, it looks like quite a few have already been cleaned up.


text:
Rename [manipulation] to [disassembly] (or similar)
The tag info for manipulation reads:

The technique of disassembling two or more parts from one another.

and all existing questions are actually about this.
However the word manipulation has a much broader scope than this, which is suboptimal for two reasons:

It may lead to people misusing the tag.
People who want to search questions about disassembling Lego cannot find them, as they cannot find the tag.

I therefore suggest to rename this tag to disassembly, dismantling, unbuilding, or deconstruction (and make the others synonyms).

I'm happy with the choice of [tag:disassembly] but [tag:dismantling] has a nice ring to it too.

Good call.
It seems like this is one of the relics of the early stages of the site.
I've gone through all the questions (17) that use the [manipulation] and it seems to be that the [disassembly] tag is a better fit, so I have remapped the tag to the new one.
Three of these questions use the word 'disassemble' in some form in their title and the tag wiki already uses this word, so it seems more appropriate to use a word for that tag, rather than a word that nobody uses in that context.


text:
Do we accept screen caps that include ads?
Do we accept screen caps that include ads?
Context: Lego Modulars Massive Inflation?
This seems less than ideal to me, but it is enough of a border case I wanted to see if it was just me before asking the question asker to edit the images down to something more salient.

I do not think it is a problem if ads are included as part of a screenshot of a website and they do not take up a significant portion of the image.
In this particular case the advert (and even the status bar at the top of the page) can be cropped out very easily as they do not contribute to the illustration in any meaningful way, at least based on the context of the post.
I have cropped and resized the images used in that post.


text:
Should we have a rendering tag?
We seem to have a variety of questions that are related to creating 3d-renders of LEGO models and parts.  There is a lighting that we have on 11 questions so far, but a render tag would be more generalized and might encompass more questions.  What do you think?

There seems to be some confusion between the usage of the lighting tag for  rendering virtual models and lighting for electronics.
I have removed that tag for the former and have replaced it with a new rendering tag, I have also added the new tag to a few other questions that match the criteria but feel free to tag any other questions that match.

That's awesome. Thanks Ambo100!

Its a topic that comes up also in lots of other lego-related boards so I'd say yes


text:
Winter Bash 2018 Preparations
Winter Bash 2018 is coming up fast, so I thought it would be a good idea to start a discussion on how we'd like to handle things this year.
It seemed like it went well last year, and it was fun to be able to offer a prize. TLG is able to support this event with up to €500 EUR in prizes shipped to multiple addresses. Prizes need to be in stock on German S@H, and prices are in German MSRP.
If you have thoughts on what would make good prizes, how prizes should be awarded, or just general thoughts on Winter Bash 2018, this is the place to do so.

I think it would be great to have another competition on similar terms to last year, perhaps this time we could award prizes to more people considering the amount LEGO are willing to sponsor.

I’m all for it as well. Let’s get more prizes, different categories, giving multiple people a chance of winning. We could do most hats, prizes for a special hat, even a LEGO hat-building competition (though one of us already scored high marks in the Stack Exchange hat competition last year).

Unfortunately, nobody apart from a few members of Stack Exchange staff know which hats will be released so it will be a bit difficult to give prizes for particular hats until the event starts. I like the idea of having a competition similar to last year as well as a creative contest (hat building).

One thing to keep in mind, it might be tough to predict which sets will still be available after the holiday spending period concludes, around the same time Winter Bash ends. Some sets may end up back ordered or sold out.


text:
The "Review queues" dropdown erroneously indicates tasks in the queue
After taking care of the review queue, the dropdown still indicates outstanding tasks in the "Low Quality Posts" queue. The issue persists after refreshing the page. Can anyone confirm it or comment on this?

I can confirm this is rather usual issue. And it only happens when there is an increased number of items that require attention.

There's a fairly large amount of caching going on, as well as "notify you and then check if you can actually do anything" - for example: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/389434/33051 and https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/302093/33051

I have not had this issue, but I have just dealt with the remaining 'Low quality post' in the queue so it should be cleared (at the time of posting).
If it has not cleared, it might be worth checking that you have no filters applied or perhaps waiting a few hours.

My filter settings look the same, but now after waiting a few hours the indicator is indeed gone.


text:
How to remove account of this Lego?
Unknowingly, I created this account thinking this is discussion forum about logo deigning but this came to be another discussion forum of whose I have no idea at all. So, it will be great if someone cane tell how to remove this account.
And if possible please tell me something about Lego.

@jncraton Can you help me?

A good starting place for info on LEGO would be: http://aboutus.lego.com/
If you want to delete your account, go to https://bricks.stackexchange.com/contact and let them know what you need.

Thanks dude for the response.

You've got a 404 page there...

As I commented on your main question, I'll get one of the StackExchange team to remove your LEGO Answers account.
LEGO Answers is a member of the Stack Exchange network, where users can ask and answer questions on various topics. As you've noticed, we're not discussion sites, instead focusing on questions that have clear, quality answers.
I imagine that you'd like your other network accounts left alone (as you have some Reputation over on Ask Ubuntu).
Hopefully you'll come back to us when you have a question we can help you with.
In terms of discussion forums, you could start on the official LEGO Site:

Create and Share - has galleries and message boards for you to share your MOCs.
Creator - has regular building competitions.

zhaph Hey, are you taking this personal? After knowing what is this all about from @gev, I decided to stay on this and frankly my dear, I give damn to reputation. I am here to learn new things not earn reputation. Anyways, thanks for your concern. No need of your help. :)

Hi Habi, no I wasn't taking it personally - sorry if I came across that way, but it's always sad to see people go. I'll send another email to the community team asking them not to remove this account then - glad you're sticking around :)

Zhalph, are you from the Lego? You look very concerned regarding this. I was just tring to be clear on these stuff. I  not only liked the concept of Lego, I just loved it. So, I've decided to stay here.

No, I'm not from LEGO, just a user who helps look after this site and wants people to be happy ;) Just to be clear, this isn't an official LEGO site, just another fan supported and maintained one. As I said, I'm happy you're staying, and I look forward to us being able to help each other :)


text:
Becoming a recognized LEGO User Group
I've been looking into ways to elevate this site as a proper LEGO community in addition to being the best site for finding answers to LEGO questions. After all, we can't be a great Q&A site without having a high-quality, knowledgeable community.
One thought that I have is to work towards getting this site recognized as an official online LEGO User Group (LUG). In addition to official recognition by TLG, this would provide our community with a LEGO Ambassador who would connect us to the LEGO Ambassador Network and Community Engagement team.
Personally, I think it would be great to eventually get to a point where we have more questions that have actually been answered by folks who are directly connected to TLG. I'm not thinking of the customer support type questions, but rather broader questions that would be more engaging to the community such as:

Why did Technic bricks have holes in the studs?
When did Lego decide that it was okay to put a stud into a technic hole?
Why aren't LEGO bricks cubic?

These are already popular questions, and have great answers, but it would be great to occasionally get direct authoritative answers to questions like these. Seeing more authoritative answers would both be fun for our community and add to the legitimacy of the site as a whole. Getting more connected officially with TLG could be a way to make that happen.
What do we think about attempting to be recognized as an official LUG? I'm willing to start the application process and to serve as the ambassador initially, but I didn't want to move in that direction without the support of our community. I was involved early on with Remake, but was not selected as one of the final fan designers, so I do already have a small amount of experience working with the Community Engagement team.
Edit:
I'm going to move forward with this. The application materials are mostly facts and stats, so they aren't worth posting here, but here's the email I'm planning to send on to the CE team if anyone has feedback or would like to make adjustments:

Please find attached our application for LEGO® Answers
  (http://bricks.stackexchange.com) to become a recognized online LUG.
We've been running since 2011, and have seen steady growth in users
  and page views over the last 5 years. As the top fan-driven LEGO Q&A
  site (that we're aware of), we'd love to get more connected
  with TLG in order to increase our own user engagement and potentially
  get more authoritative answers to questions. We do our best to answer
  questions as a community, but it would be neat to have
  someone inside LEGO officially provide insight on questions on occasion.
We would also value more interaction with the LEGO Ambassador Network.
  Our site has a laser-like focus on Q&A, and broadening our network of LEGO enthusiasts
  would certainly help us to generate both more interesting questions
  and higher quality answers.
We'd also be supportive of any collaborative initiatives that would
  improve engagement and help our community know that it is valued by
  TLG. For example, we could hold an annual contest where the community
  votes on the best answer of the year, and the user who provided it could get a
  prize of some kind. It would of course be great if the CE team would be
  willing to provide the prizes for events like this. :)
Our community provides unique benefit to
  LEGO users. The folks answering questions are primarily AFOLs who have
  been involved with this hobby for some time, but the bulk of our
  readers (90%) find us through search engine queries and are often
  parents or children seeking help with common challenges. I expect that
  our readers are less experienced with LEGO than those from many of the
  other sites such as Eurobricks, Brickset, or New Elementary. This
  provides us, and hopefully the CE team if we pursue this type of
  partnership, with a unique opportunity for engaging another segment of
  the LEGO community.
Please let me know if you have any additional questions about our
  community or this application.
Thanks for your consideration,
Jon (and the LEGO® Answers community)

Update (January 23):
Application materials have been sent, and we are waiting for a decision. Applications will be reviewed at the end of January, so we'll hopefully hear back in early February.

It sounds like there is support for giving this a shot. I'll work on filling out the application. It does ask for a secondary contact (name, email, telephone). Would one of the other mods be willing to serve as a secondary contact and pass this information along to me? Alternatively, this could also be a regular user, but the application includes some site usage information only accessible to moderators that another user wouldn't be able to verify.

Sorry, just seen this comment, happy to second it :)

Terrific! Thanks! I've updated my question to include the email that I'm planning to send on to the CE team if anyone would like to see it and/or make changes.

I'm only allowed one upvote ;) We might want to flag this up with the SE community team too for good measure. They were in contact with TLG originally over our name.

I've drop the team a quick line

@jncraton Excellent email.  I am definitely hopeful and excited about this endeavor.

@Zhaph-BenDuguid Thanks for mentioning this to the SE team. That was a good idea.

I have all the application materials compiled and ready to send off. I'm going to sit on them for a couple of days in case there is more feedback on this from our community and then send them out once offices are open in Billund on Monday.

I've sent out the application materials. I'll post an update here when I hear back.

They'll be reviewing application materials at the end of January, so we have at least until early February until we get a decision on this.

@jncraton I would have missed the last update if I hadn't seen your last Meta post. You should consider posting that last edit as an answer to this question to give it some more attention!

Good call. I've added it as an answer.

We are now Recognized LEGO Fan Media (RLFM)!

I am happy to announce that we’ve reviewed and approved your
  application.
Please read through the attached documents carefully and make sure you
  are familiarized with them as much as possible.
Also do not hesitate to either e-mail me with questions and/or put
  them forth in the LEGO Ambassador Network.
-- snip list of forms --
Best regards
Kim Ellekjær Thomsen
Community Manager
Operations & Community Engagament, LCE

Great news (sorry I missed this). Is there any approved/recommended wording within all the docs that we can add to the tour page?

I see that the tour has been updated to reflected that we are now a RLFM organization. That's look good to me. The primary thing that TLG seems concerned about, in addition to the branding guidance we're already aware of, is early product leaks, but that doesn't tend to be as much of an issue for us. It didn't seem to fit in the tour, but I've added a note that leaked content shouldn't be discussed: http://bricks.stackexchange.com/posts/2120/revisions

Yep, I grabbed some similar wording to another couple of sites that were also awarded it this month :)

Sounds good. Thanks!

The IP guidelines I was given also make it clear that the name "LEGO" should not be used in the name of a site. I'm aware that this has been a discussion between SE and TLG in the past, and I'm currently waiting to hear back from TLG on where we stand. The LCE team wasn't happy with our current name, but it wasn't clear if they were aware that this had already been discussed with the legal team.

fabulous plan!
This is an excellent idea.  New users are often confused about our association with The LEGO Group.  Having official answers would provide a lot of insight into a variety of questions.

"What kind of plastic are LEGO bricks made of?" is one example where the community has done an excellent job piecing things together and quoting official sources, but someone with insider knowledge could provide a more complete answer.
"Will The Scooby-Doo Mystery Machine come back in stock at retailers?" is also something that TLG could provide a timely answer to while the community would basically have to wait years to see how it goes before answering with finality.

I'm not sure we'd get official answers to some of the potentially commercially sensitive questions (I.e. whether themes or sets are returning/planned) - other companies I've had dealings with have had to be careful about what they are seen to "officially" announce about upcoming features as these can be seen as driving investment plans.

I'm sure there will be limits, but the more of these questions someone inside of TLG is exposed to the higher chances they'll throw bones to the community.

Here are some of the Recognized LUG requirements I was told by LEGO Employees at BrickFair VA 2016, which may pose an issue:

Must have a website, not social media, with contact ability.
Must host 3 public events a year.

I'm not sure how this site ranks as "website" vs "social media" in the eyes of LEGO (yes, I know we don't consider SE is social media).
AFAIK, this SE site does not presently host any public events (I believe public events are in-person things like BrickFair, but I don't know for sure).

Thanks for the insight from speaking with LEGO employees. My understanding from the application is that online LUGs are exempt from the public event requirement.

We are a website, and there are indeed contact options available - whilst I've currently agreed to be the secondary contact, I'm more than happy to allow a member of the SE Community team to take that role if preferred. I too saw the events requirement, I guess we'll see which way it pans out.

It sounds like the "Online LUG" designation is no longer in use. I ended up actually applying to become "Recognized LEGO Fan Media". I believe this is essentially just a rename to avoid confusion since groups like us have very little in common with a local LUG.


text:
Best question to promote to LAN?
I'd like to promote a top question to the LEGO Ambassador Network (LAN) in order to get more recognition for both that question and our community. If you aren't familiar with the LAN, it's a community made up of a representative from each major LEGO fan organization (LUGs, blogs, forums, etc) along with the staff of the LEGO Community Engagement team.
With that audience in mind, I thought it would be best to nominate questions here that we believe would benefit most from this sort of exposure, and then I'll post the one with the most votes to the LAN.
Please include both a link to the question you'd nominate and a brief description of why so that we can understand your thought process behind promoting it.

Could you clarify what kind of questions we should be looking for? Do they have to be unanswered questions or are we trying to highlight some of the best questions?

Honestly, I wasn't really sure what sort of question would be best, which is part of why I thought it would be helpful to float this to the community and see what we come up with. I don't think the question needs to be unanswered necessarily, but I think it should be a question that could benefit from better answers to encourage participation.

Not directly related, but I've raised an issue about the [tag:featured]  tag not updating the community bulletin.

Considering I wasn't sure what question best represents I've gathered a few questions based on certain criteria.
Best Viral Question
How much usage can a LEGO piece take before it loses its 'clutch power'?

The most upvoted and one of the most viewed question on our site. A great example of a "What if...?" complete with a investigative answer that shows dedication to the LEGO Hobby by pcantin.
The question made it to the front page of Reddit. As well as being featured on Discovery Channel - Daily Planet, Tested, WIRED (Japan), Smithsonian, Gizmodo, Kotaku, NBC News and many other websites!
On the day it was shared on Reddit the site had the highest pages views for a single day of all time (approximately 40k) and the fourth most new users in a day.
Unanswered Questions
In comparison to many other Beta sites LEGO Answers has a very high answer percentage (currently 97%).
Of the 40 unanswered questions, half of them are tagged as EV3 questions. It would be good to get some more technical and experienced users who are familiar with EV3 programming to help answer some of these questions. Of course some of these questions aren't getting answers because they are more to do with software troubleshooting (something that would be better answered by LEGO Customer Support).
Here are some of the top voted Unanswered Questions that I might reccomend:

What is the difference between the plastic used in mainstream minifigs and the plastic used to make the popular collectable series of minifigs?
Where does the EV3 software store its crash reports?
Is there any way to find misplaced bricks in LEGO NXT Programming?

Thanks for the feedback. This makes me think I should just do more of an intro post including our top questions and some areas to get involved.


text:
TLG support for BOOST questions
Some of you may have noticed that I've posted and self-answered a couple of BOOST questions recently. As our LEGO Ambassador, I'm trying out something new. TLG has provided me with a BOOST set in order to help us to better answer questions about that product, and I'm trying to get a few basic questions up in the hopes that more questions from users will be coming soon.
I'm hoping that we can do more of this sort of thing in the future, but I wanted to be the first of us to try it out both for simplicity and so that I can report back directly to TLG.
If you have ideas for other sets or products that might be helpful in the future, I'm open to suggestions. BOOST seemed like a logical place to start as it's likely to generate a lot of questions going forward.

I think the Boost is interesting but there are too many limitations for me to considering buying one, particularly in comparison to the EV3. Hopefully we see some interesting questions and lots of creativity.

I agree completely. For an adult, EV3 has so much more depth than BOOST. BOOST does seem to be much simpler and I could see a younger kid having fun with it.

I'm rather curious about Spike too; and there seems to be a lot of concern in general about the new powered up elements and interaction - especially about compatibility, running stuff without apps, and future obsolescence. Guess I should start firing a few questions of my own

@Joubarc I'm interested in this as well. I have some Powered Up elements, but not Spike or the new Technic Control+ hub. I'll certainly try to answer any questions that I can. I recently changed jobs, so I haven't had a ton of time for LEGO, but hopefully I'll find a good rhythm and have more leisure time soon. :)

I've got boost 17101 and it quickly gets boring after building all five creations and I think it's too childish. 31313 is much better imo because you can build over 30 different creations with it (yes, that includes MOCs) and it's more dynamic. So don't expect any Boost questions.


text:
Feedback session in Enfield
I've been invited out to the LEGO US HQ in Enfield this Friday to talk about Bricks.SE. The event is described as a "Meet and Greet", so it's fairly low-key. I will be giving a brief 10 minute presentation on our community and there will be a feedback session regarding current and future support for us and other fan communities like us.
This post is mostly an FYI, but if there's anything in particular you'd like me to bring up, just let me know.

Wow, that sounds fantastic! I hope you have a good time, it sounds like a good opportunity to meet some interesting people. I can't think of any particular questions at the moment but I'm sure you'll have plenty to talk about.


text:
Enfield Trip Report
I went to the TLG office in Enfield on Friday to report on our community and the support process for Recognized Lego Fan Media. I had a great trip, and it was wonderful to get to meet with folks from other Fan Media communities and connect with the Lego Community Engagement team members face to face.

Kim has posted a public report about the day that you can check out:
https://lan.lego.com/news/overview/community-manager-weekly-the-rlfm-meet-greet-day-in-enfield-ct-r81/
The trip included 10 minute presentations from 12 different RLFMs for the US marketing team, a tour of the Enfield campus, and some other unique opportunities.
I had a terrific time. Let me know if there's anything else that you'd like to know about the trip.


text:
Site name change request from TLG
Some of you are likely aware that there was concern about the name of our site from TLG in the past. As part of becoming Recognized LEGO Fan Media, this concern has resurfaced. I've been in communication with the LEGO community engagement team for several weeks about this, and this is where things currently stand as of this morning:

I’ve been talking with quite a few people around here and the
  requirement to alter the name still stands.
I am aware that previously it has been accepted, but over the past 5
  years or so a lot of things have changed and we are forced to protect
  our trademark and intellectual property even more than ever.
Would it be possible to make a reasonable change where LEGO® Answers
  become part of the site name’s tagline?
Like “Something – Your place for LEGO® Answers!”
We got until end of year to adjust and find a solution.

I responded letting TLG know that we'll try to find a solution that works for everyone, and that we appreciate having until the end of the year to work something out.
Five years ago, StackExchange didn't allow us to choose our own name, but I'm hopeful that there is now some flexibility on this. I'm also hopeful that whatever name we choose will help us to clearly communicate to all users that we are not answering on behalf of TLG.
Based on the name suggestion from TLG, and the other thread where our community discussed this, I'd like to approach StackExchange about changing our name to "Brick Overflow". We would just show Brick Overflow on the logged in page, and update the info for anonymous users to read:

Brick Overflow is a question and answer site for LEGO® and building
  block enthusiasts. Join them; it only takes a minute: [sign up link]

This is identical to the current language, aside from replacing "LEGO® Answers" with "Brick Overflow".
Since this represents a very significant change for our site, I'd love to get feedback on this.

I passed this question on to the SE community team, and they are going to discuss it on Thursday to see what sort of options we have. Coming up with alternatives to Brick Overflow might be good, as they'd prefer to avoid having a number of sites that are simply "x Overflow".

I'm putting in a request for a developer to make the change. It might be a few weeks depending on who is around to do the work.

Thanks for the update!

I'm actually going to throw out another (admittedly boring) option just in case it's decided that it is best not to use Brick Overflow. How about just:
Bricks
Many other SE sites have very simple names (e.g. Law, History, Arduino, etc).
I don't think "Bricks" would cause much confusion about what our community is about. Users who aren't logged in would still see a brief description of the site. For example:

For logged in Stack Exchange users, we'd appear like this in the site list:

It seems pretty obvious what the site is about in both cases. This name also has the advantage of being our current URL.
Outside of the Stack Exchange network, I think it would be just fine to refer to ourselves as any of the following if we change our name to just "Bricks" here:

Bricks Stack Exchange
Brick Stack
Stack Bricks
bricks.stackexchange
BricksSE
Bricks.SE (not the best since bricks.se is a Swedish domain that is already registered and could cause some confusion)

Update:
Given that this is the top rated name option, and the SE folks were uncomfortable with using the word "Overflow" due to their own trademark concerns, we are proceeding with renaming the site to just "Bricks".
I've changed our official name on the LUG map:

Update 2:
I received the following communication from TLG regarding the change. They seem pleased that we were able to work this out without a lot of fuss or either party having to escalate things to lawyers:

I am so relieved that you take this change so ”lightly”.
I am really sorry to have to “enforce” this request, but we have to
  protect the brand and trademark and that sometimes results in awkward
  and unwanted consequences.
I hope this will not affect our future cooperation in a negative way
  or that you regret ever applying for recognition.

I conveyed that we understood the reasoning behind this request and are excited to collaborate more in the future.

+1 I'm in favour of Bricks Stack Exchange although I think Bricks on it's own is too generic unless it's being used colloquially on the site. It also avoids the conflicts Brick Overflow had as described in Jon's reply and appears higher in the drop down list of site names.

My only concern with "brick stack exchange" is that potential users will think it is a place for swapping bricks with other users.

And now that LUG hyperlink is broken.

Thanks. I've updated this link to point to the new Community Locator URL.

And you've typed Bricks.SE into the bullet list twice. Also, I looked at New York, U.S. but it isn't there for me.

One of the items in the list has a ".", the other does not. Online communities are no longer located on the LUG map, as this never really made sense. You can now see us in the "Online Communities" section.

It's a bummer The LEGO Group won't make an exception, but I understand why. When it comes to trademarks and such, there's good reason to avoid confusion between official and unofficial sites.
The ideal name under our naming convention would be "LEGO Stack Exchange". But that's clearly a step backwards when it comes to strengthening the relationship with TLG. Given we already have "bricks" as the URL slug, that would be the next best option under our naming scheme. It might be a bit confusing to users of other sites on the network but I don't think it will matter much to folks who find answers on the site via search.
The community team considered the "Brick Overflow" suggestion yesterday. Unfortunately, we can't use that name because:

We're avoiding custom names for sites.
While it's an interesting name, it doesn't help users understand this is a site about LEGO.
Other than MathOverflow, which is a very unusual case, we don't have any sites that use the "X Overflow" convention.
While someone has set up brickoverflow.com as a redirect to this site, I don't know exactly who owns the domain. (Even so, thank you, anonymous domain owner!)
Just as TLG is protective of their brand, we are protective of the Stack Overflow brand. (Yes, I know both sites are in our network, but we don't want to dilute our identity as serving the needs of programmers.) It won't serve this site well to potentially confuse users who might think it's only for developers and not all LEGO enthusiasts.

At any rate, it looks as if just "Bricks" is the best choice (and currently the top-voted option here). When you all have worked out the details with The LEGO Group, let me know.

Thanks for looking into this. Renaming the site to "Bricks" seems to be the best option. I've updated our official name with TLG to "Bricks Stack Exchange". Let us know if there is anything more you need from us to facilitate the name change. I will confirm with the appropriate parties within LEGO just to be sure they are comfortable with the new name.

Hey Jon, I can see from jncraton's edit that TLG are happy with "Bricks", so we should update our site name now?

I think it's very important that our site has an identity and that we respect TLG's wishes.

I like the name Brick Overflow for several reasons.

It had a lot of support and was the most popular name suggestion when the issue was brought up in 2011.
It's clear the site is about LEGO (Bricks) and Stack Exchange (Stack Overflow)
A 'overflow' or abundance of LEGO Bricks is something almost every LEGO Fan dreams of.
It turns out www.brickoverflow.com already redirects to www.bricks.stackexchange.com

My only concern is that the name would be interpenetrated as a combination of LEGO & Stack Overflow, a question for only programming questions related to LEGO products such as Mindstorms but MathOverflow doesn't seem to have that problem.

It's interesting that the brickoverflow.com domain already points to us. I've updated my original recommendation to use "Brick Overflow" with a space, as this matches Stack Overflow.

I used both versions with and without a space but I think it's better with a space. There isn't a very clear reason why MathOverflow is written without a space however...

Is brickoverflow.com owned by Stack Exchange? If not, this may be a problem, even if it redirects now.

@Wrzlprmft It's definitely not owned be SE, it's also not an official alias for the site. That much I now. As for who it is owned by, not sure, the registrant's info is privacy-protected.

I have upvoted "Bricks" as it seems to be the cleanest, simplest name for this site, and lines up with the established bricks.stackexchange.com URL.
If people want alternatives, how about
Brick Building
or
Brick Fans
?


text:
Win a LEGO set prize for participating in Winter Bash 2017! (Ended)
It's that time of year again! We're once again participating in Winter Bash!
While this is a "just for fun" activity, I've reached out to TLG about it, and it sounds like they are willing to provide a prize for us. The winner will be selected randomly from everyone who earns at least 3 hats on Bricks Stack Exchange. You can track your progress on the Bricks SE leaderboards.
I'm excluding myself and the other mods from this as we may have access to unique hats via moderator-only actions, and we want to have a level playing field. I'm willing to be flexible if the winner already has this set, but otherwise the prize will be the current Winter Holiday Train:

The goal here is to facilitate positive engagement on the site both to celebrate the holidays and because this is the time of year when we get a lot of new traffic from parents and others just getting into LEGO thanks to the holiday shopping season.
My hope is that providing a prize for this will facilitate meaningful engagement on the site. Please don't make useless edits to posts or participate in similar shenanigans just to earn hats. Your actions should provide value to the community.
I will need to provide a report to TLG about what sort of engagement this event helped to facilitate, so if you want to see more of this sort of thing happen in the future, go earn some hats!
Happy holidays everyone!

For a full list of regular and secret hats please take a look here!

@Riker The drawing will happen very close to the end of Winter Bash.

Very cool contest, did you see any uptick in the metrics?

@Raystafarian It's hard to say. We certainly saw engagement with Winter Bash, but it's unclear how much having a contest impacted this. We always see an uptick in traffic during November/December thanks to the holiday season, and this year was no exception.

We had 91 users earn a hat in Winter Bash this year! We hope that you all had fun!
39 users earned at least 3 hats, so excluding the moderators, we had 36 of us eligible for the drawing. About a quarter of those user accounts were created in the last month. It is exciting to see participation from new users, and it looks like this activity may have driven at least a few people to really give our community a try for the first time.
The following users were eligible for the prize drawing:
Alexander O'Mara
David
CalvT븃
JW8
Aziraphale
Phil B.
WELZ
X-27
Crazy Ivan
lee
Nick C
zovits
chicks
yper-trollᵀᴹ
user3667576
Joubarc
Malachi
David Lechner
Stephen
André Fernandes
Michael Verschaeve
Rory Alsop
Móż
Paulski73
Alberto Santos
Wrzlprmft
sampoerna quatrain
SlicksterTheBrickster
Mithrandir
oezi
jknappen
Jan Windemuth
Glorfindel
Josh King
Windfire
RAP 77

For winner selection, I used the random.org list randomizer to sort the above list and used the top result as the winner.
The winner this year is Phil B.! Phil has been a very active member of our community for over three years, and I'm very excited to see this go to him! Congrats!

Wow! This is awesome! Thanks for running this fun competition, and good to see so many new members take up the challenge!

Thanks for running this jncranton, and congrats to Phil B - a well deserved winner ;)

36 Users have 3 or more hats right now!*
How exciting that TLG is recognizing our site as a place to get information about their products!
Let us not let them down!
* excluding three moderators

Thanks to the Everybody-Gets A-Hat! there are actually 37 of them now :)