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Should we implement 'how-to-ask' tips for certain tags? (Updated May 2021)
Stack Exchange has a network wide feature which allows clear instructions on how to ask a question to be displayed for certain 'problem' tags. The full details about the feature can be found here.
I would like to propose we use this feature for identification questions.
Approximately 7% of questions posted on LEGO Answers are identification questions. A lot of the users who ask these questions tend be new to Stack Exchange. The only way they can find out how to ask a good identification question is to visit the tag wiki page which is buried away in the tag database.
With the 'how-to-ask' feature implemented for the identification tag, users who use the tag will have a prompt similar to the one shown in the mockup below.

Should we implement this system for identification questions?
If a 'how-to-ask' tip is provided for identifcation questions, what tips should be provided?
Are there any other tags that would benefit from this feature?

Hey! Can you mention which tags you want this added to now in the question? We're sending this to our devs to have them do this but it's unclear which tags we're going to be adding the warning to. Thanks! Is it just [tag:piece-identification] and [tag:set-identification] or the other identification tags as well? Could y'all put a new answer with the slightly different variants for each tag that you want?

In regards to the identification tag being replaced with various other more specific tags I would like to suggest the following changes:

part-identification

Part identification questions get better answers if they...

Provide detailed descriptions of the physical appearance of the part
Include clear photos of the part of parts
Include details about when and where they were found

set-identification

Set identification questions get better answers if they...

Provide detailed descriptions of the physical appearance of the set
Include clear photos of the set
Include details about when and where they were found

minifigure-identification

Minifigure identification questions get better answers if they...

Provide detailed descriptions of the physical appearance of the minifigure
Include clear photos of the minifigure
Include details about when and where they were found

sticker-identification

Sticker identification questions get better answers if they...

Provide detailed descriptions of the physical appearance of the stickers
Include clear photos of the stickers or sticker sheet
Include details about when and where they were found

There is also the model-identification which is rarely used but I am not sure if it is necessary. It does sometimes get confused with the set-identification tag which is quite similar but has a different usage.

Thanks for this! :D

Hi @Catija, would you be able to let me know if the developers have been notified? I don't think we have any objections to this change.

It's in their backlog - which is unfortunately long. Thanks for your patience!

Thanks! Just updated the tags.

This has been implemented. Thanks for your patience.

Should we implement this system for identification questions?

Oh, yes!

If a 'how-to-ask' tip is provided for identifcation questions, what tips should be provided?

The second and third in the example picture seem to be good, pictures (or maybe even drawings, sketches) would be quite appreciated. I don't think the first one would help a lot, it is very subjective and vague, but I'd add a couple more:

What kind of connections does the piece have? (Studs, Technic, other)
What is the overall color, theme or style of the set? (By style I mean System or Technic)

Are there any other tags that would benefit from this feature?

Mindstorms questions seem to be the ones that would benefit a lot from some generic tips on error messages, but in this regard I can't offer any concrete and up to date advice.

The reasoning I had for the first tip was due to the amount of questions that get posted as 'What is this minifig/set/piece?'.

I would also consider including a tip to identify if the element is actually from the LEGO system or if it is from another building brick system.  People might scour their resources to identify a certain LEGO piece only to find out it's actually from Mega Bloks.

I've compiled a possible list in my post here. Please let me know if you have any suggestions.

How does this sound?

Identification questions get better answers if they...

Provide detailed descriptions of the physical appearance of the part (color, theme, connections, etc...)
Have picture and/or illustrations
Include details about when and where they were found

Sounds good enough for me :)

This is now live

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


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Is it proper procedure to merge several answers into mine?
With regards to question Unidenitified LEGO set, I wonder if it is proper custom to take parts of other answers and merge them into the most comprehensive one to create one, all-encompassing answer?
I don't want to generate the impression that I am stealing answers from others to boost my own answer. User @shea just added another answer with a component that is new info. Since my answer was the first and is the most comprehensive at this point, is it okay to add the component of @shea's question into mine?

Ideally, we'd like to have a "definitive" answer to a question - this is exactly what Community Wiki was originally designed for - multiple people working on a single answer - you can convert your answer into a Community Wiki (which won't affect any other answers to the question) as you edit it - see for example my answer to What is the largest single LEGO piece.
As the OP can only accept one answer, it's not unreasonable for some dedicated user to combine other answers into their own to form a whole answer - however it is only polite in that case to note that inspiration/details came from the other answers and up-vote them (there's even a badge for that).

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Do we agree on how to capitalize LEGO?
It seems like LEGO is the official way to write it, but folks seem to like to write Lego or lego.

See also: FYI - informed LEGO of the existence of bricks.se - where TLG responded with:

Also LEGO needs to be written always in capital letters and should never stand alone so LEGO bricks, LEGO Sets...

Our general approach here has been that we don't go around capitalising every single instance (in the same way that we might not purge every single instance of LEGOs), but if you're editing a post for some other reason (spelling, formatting, etc.) then please do fix them up.
Although I'm sure you'll find examples where I've only fixed up LEGO...

I'm pretty sure the Lego company can't dictate how people spell their name. Trademark law doesn't forbid you from speaking about a company or product and doesn't impose any restrictions on the users of the site.
To the extent that the site itself wishes to be friendly towards Lego, and wishes to use the name Lego in its name, the site needs to respect Lego's own guidelines. But that is because Lego is allowing the site to use their name. If bricks.stackexchange.com weren't called "Lego Answers" then the Lego group would have no possible reason to expect any particular treatment of its trademarks.
In short: I think the site should do whatever Lego wants with regards to the trademark. However, I'm certain that the users, that is, people posting Qs and As, do not need to learn the Lego trademark guidelines and follow them. That isn't what trademarks do and that isn't how language works. Spell it however you want.

All I know is that at least half my rep came from fixing lego and Lego to LEGO, so I think we all agree. (Or at least the people doing peer reviews.)

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


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How do we flag or comment on a user's profile?
I came across this new user 'a-child-of-god' (https://bricks.stackexchange.com/users/6377/a-child-of-god).
Like many new Stack Exchange users, his first questions and interactions needs some tweaking but then I saw his profile page.
In his description I think he doing a big no-no for a Stack-Exchange site.  He is promoting a way to circumvent the need to have 50 reputation points by deliberately entering a bad answer which, in many cases, will be turned into a comment by the moderators.
In my opinion, this  kind of systematic hacking of the SE format should not be allowed. But how?
Q: The same way we help new users understand the format for questions and answers, how can we comment on the content of their bio?

We did allow flagging of user profiles. . . for about a week. It turns out people used the mechanism to seek revenge on users who "offended" them on the site. So the more typical thing to do is flag one of the user's posts or comments with an "other" flag for moderator attention.
One thing to keep in mind is that different parts of a user profile are have different levels of publicness. We hardly ever worry about content in a user's "About me" section because you have to dig around a bit to find it. In this case, the advice is perhaps unwise, but not offensive. If the same user was more public with their advice (say, in a comment), that would likely be deleted.
As an aside, the problem of letting people comment before other types of contributions is something I hope to solve.

Hmm - it's not much of a "hack" and it does depend on the value of the answer and how the mods handle these responses.
Not all "Thanks" or "I'm having the same problem" responses get converted to comments - most will just be deleted completely.
I admit that I do tend to be a little more lenient if I think the response has some value but isn't a full answer on its own and converting it to a comment may help the person whose post I've added the comment to.


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Suggestion on Badge Design
When I saw the Badge design (next to the Badge Count in the header) on this site, I noticed it was normal. I would think it would be at the very least interesting to have a LEGO brick there instead. I know it is possible, other SE sites have Badge Designs related to the site (Christianity.SE for example has a Christian Fish as the Badge design in the header). What can be done to change this? Who can do it? May it be done?

It can indeed be done - however currently we're still officially in beta (hence the "Beta" after our site name in the header), and so don't qualify for a custom skin or the other changes that come with a fully graduated site.
In terms of actions, one of the things that Stack Overflow is keen to do is reduce the impact of design-by-committee - which has historically been an issue, and they do have in-house designers that take care of this, but there are a lot of sites now.
In fact, if you sort that list by age, you'll see we're the first graduated site with our own logo instead of just our initials in a blue speech bubble.
We'd probably also want to be distinct from the Gaming badges which look like 1x1 round studs.
In terms of what we really need to do, we need to consistently get at least 10 good quality questions day, which would push us closer to graduation and then consideration for a custom site skin.

I've been wondering how far we were from leaving beta.  I just looked at the page on area51 with our stats/appraisal.  So it seems like we're going to need 10x as many questions before doing so.

Just remember that we don't NEED to leave beta anymore, given the fact that that stage has now been recognized as a valid long-term state.

True, we don't have to leave beta as such, but it's very rare that a site will get a custom skin while still in beta.

So our questions help sites advance?

Our participation helps the site advance, we need more questions per day, and more answers per question ;-)


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Winter Bash 2015

The end of the year is upon us, and here in Stack Land, that can only
  mean one thing: it's time for Winter Bash 2015!
Event Overview
Winter Bash is a fun, lighthearted event we run every year as a way of
  celebrating the many amazing people who make our communities awesome.
  It's open to any Stack Exchange site that chooses to participate.
During Winter Bash, users earn virtual hats by completing certain
  tasks. They're sort of like badges, but they're more visible and less
  permanent. Hats can be "worn" on users' avatars just about anywhere
  avatars show up on the network. Here's an example of what some hats
  looked like last year, taken from the network leaderboard
Of course, we’re rolling out an all-new assortment of hats for this
  year's event, as we have in the past.
The Details
This year's event will start on 14 December 2015 and run up to and
  including 03 January 2016. Users will be able to see all the hats
  they've earned on http://winterbash2015.stackexchange.com. That site
  will also have an FAQ to explain how things work.
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.

This has been good fun for all involved in the past, but as before we want to give you the opportunity to say, actually no, not this year. Remember though that if you opt out individually you won't see any Hats regardless of what everyone else is seeing :)

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because Winter Bash 2015 has finished and we all had fun.

I feel like closing a question has a negative connotation...

It's more than acceptable to close questions on meta when the issues they relate to are fixed (in the case of [tag:bug]) or time specific issues (such as this one).

Good to see you, Z! Yeah, I just realized that I overlooked the status-completed tag... And also that people here seem localized to bricks.se. I'm somewhat new to this particular site, just talking from the experience of having moderated other sites. I suppose it means whatever we want!

Having had support from the community to run the last three Winter Bash Events on LEGO Answers, I'm sure we won't have any objections this year.

Looks like we're all having a lot of fun with our hats again ;)


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moving towards fewer tags
I heard that having tags with few posts associated with them is discouraged in StackExchange and I've scanned the LEGO Answers tags enough to spot a few anomalies:

adult-lego and afol are quite similar and only have 9 questions between them.  Should they be merged?
identification's definition includes "Trying to identify a LEGO element or set that you possess or have seen somewhere?" yet we also have part-identification with relatively few questions which seems to be a distinct subset of identification and many of the questions carry both tags.
model-identification could also be a subset of identification and most of those questions already carry both tags
can someone help me decide when something belongs in building vs design?
aren't investment and trading too similar?
couldn't abs get merged into plastics?  One question is already in both.
brands only has two questions: 1 is already in clone-brands and 2 doesn't benefit much from the tag.

Should we be cleaning this sort of thing up at this stage in the Beta process?

What is wrong with it?

Thanks for bringing these to attention, I've made changes to the most obvious ones:
The adult-lego tag is now a synonym of afol.
The tag abs has been removed.
The brands tag has been removed and replaced with clone-brands where applicable.
Remember tags will be automatically culled and removed from the system if they are not used by at least 1 other question in a 6 month period, occasionally a few tags get used on one or more questions when they perhaps should not be.

The investment and trading tags are indeed very similar but there are quite a few trading questions that I would not consider appropriate to be classed using the investment tag.
sets + identification seems to be used interchangeably with model-identification, I have removed the latter.
I agree, identification, building and design tag could definitely be made clearer. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

That's awesome.  Thanks so much.


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Request: visual feature reference for parts on bricks.stackexchange.com
It would be helpful to have some sort of visual feature reference on the site here to hint at what the community has accepted as standard terms to describe various features of LEGO pieces.  I grew up using the term "bumps", but a diagram like the following (from leonardoslegos.com Lego Vocabulary 101) would be a very helpful hint for Newbies (to the community) like me posting questions.
I'm not familiar with what controls are available for modifying the interface on SE sites, but I was thinking an image or link on the Ask Question page would be infinitely educational.  I'm not sure what tag wiki page would be equivalently appropriate.
Thoughts?

Typically we suggest people post lists of technical terms in a meta post and link to it when needed. I think you should assume most users understand and use the basic terminology of the field. Having the reference for newbies is handy, but it's probably overkill to put it on the Ask Question page. This question is a good start. Maybe you can expand it to other commonly used terms?


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How to close questions that are not useful to others
In particular, this is in regard to Infrared sensor behavior. The problem was user error. It's not likely that this question would be of use to anyone else and may in fact come up in searches where someone has a problem with the infrared sensor, but of course this won't help them. None of the options under close seem to match though. What are other moderators doing in cases like this?
For reference, here are the options:

duplicate of... This question has been asked before and already has an answer.
off-topic because... This question does not appear to be about LEGO Bricks within the scope defined in the help center.
unclear what you're asking Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you're asking. See the How to Ask page for help clarifying this question.
too broad There are either too many possible answers, or good answers would be too long for this format. Please add details to narrow the answer set or to isolate an issue that can be answered in a few paragraphs.
primarily opinion-based Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.

Originally these would probably have been closed as "Too Localised", however that was removed a couple of years ago and the recommendation now is to use "Off Topic", and then probably select "Other - add a reason".
That said, there might be some value in having your comment that points out that the Infra-red and Ultrasonic sensors can be easily confused turned into an answer for future readers ;)

I agree with Zhaph that some particularly strange things can be very useful to future readers. After all, the comments on "clicking brick syndrome" indicated that a weird problem had multiple victims.
But I also think that some good questions should feel a little localized.
There are problems that do need solving that are hard to fix! Not everybody can find things they need! Not everybody cares enough to solve a given problem for somebody.
But we are wonderful, experienced people! We do our homework! We have experience, respect for other people, people we will never meet!
I have faith in all of you! Not every problem can be experienced by everybody. And if everybody has a certain problem, somebody will have solved it already.
We have to be willing to solve the problems that nobody else can.
We are the Elite! We are the best! You are the best! Go get 'em, Tiger!


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Stepping down as moderator
I haven't been very active recently, and each time the SE staff inquired, I thought I'd get more involved again.
Truth is, it's not going to happen anytime soon - other commitments, life going on, etc.
Since it's not fair to bricks.se to stay moderator while being for the most part inactive, I'm finally accepting that it's better that I step down so that someone else can get the opportunity. I know there are a lot of good users here which would make tremendous mods. Not sure how the SE staff is going to go forward though.
Anyway, thanks to all, it's been a very interesting ride. I'll most certainly try to connect again from time to time and answer questions if I can :-)

Hey Joubarc, thanks for all your help over the last few years - really been appreciated - I hope we still get to benefit from your wisdom in the future - don't forget that at your rep level you'll effectively still be a mod here ;)

We appreciate the time you've put into the site, hopefully we will still see you around.


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How can I bump a question with low rep?
I posted a question as a Guest, but then I signed up and wasn't the asker anymore. Unfortunately I didn't get the answer I wanted, so how do I get attention to it?
Where are these minifigures from?

In terms of raising awareness - once you have more reputation you can offer a bounty on the question to raise awareness of it, and before then you can share the question on social networks - if you use the "Share" link under the question you'll get a shorter link to it that includes your user id so that you are credited with the referrals.

With regards to your two accounts, you can ask the SO team to merge the accounts:

I accidentally created two accounts; how do I merge them?
If you have two accounts that you would like to join together, please sign into either account, visit the contact form and select ‘I need to merge user profiles’. After you contact us, the Stack Exchange Team will reach out to verify that you own both accounts. If we can confirm your ownership, we will initiate a merge.

I assume you're referring to the following accounts:

Guest - 6815 - Unregistered
Guest - 6822 - Registered

And we'd be merging 6815 into 6822?


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How do you post a picture of an unidentified bag?
I have a bag but no directions.  How do I post a pic of the bag?

When you are posting your question you should be able to see a picture icon in the formatting bar of the text box:

This will allow you to upload an image from your computer to our servers, or link to an image on another website (we'll make a copy of the image on our servers too I think).
How you get the image on to your computer is a slightly different question, and one that's out of scope of this site - it depends on what you're able to take the picture with - however most phones for example will allow you to sync with either a cloud storage provider or with your computer, or have a way to share the image via email - at which point you should be able to save it to your computer and then upload it.

It's worth noting that you can't upload images until you have 10 reputation. Users without this much reputation will have to post a link to the image hosted elsewhere.

Hmm - not sure that's the case - or atleast if it is, then it's a penalty for signing up - An unregistered user (me in Chrome incognito) was able to upload an image just fine: http://meta.bricks.stackexchange.com/q/335/56

There is a privilege at 100 rep that allows images in chat, but it looks like images are allowed earlier now - there's nothing in the New User Restrictions about images, just "more than two hyperlinks" - which would include image links, but one or two images would be fine.

Interesting. For some reason I thought this was rep limited. I wonder if this changed at some point. There are still questions like this one that ask about it: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/183926/reputation-10-to-post-images


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How do we judge the credibility of a mod or user?
I've seen/participated in a couple of moderator elections, and indeed have been a candidate in one as well. And I've seen the weak give way to the strong. The new give way to the veterans.
But I've also seen the low-rep pushed out of the way for the high-rep, and I don't like this.
These points are all but arbitrary, a grouping of random people's first impressions of you.
So when the mod election rolls around, what are the standards we should judge by?

Reputation Score, which mostly shows how active you  or other people are?
Time on the site, which indicates when you first found out this page was here?
Number of badges, which already borders on arbitrary as it is?
Questions answered, which could mean just about anything?

Or can we use numerical values to judge a person for their ability at all?
I know, this is pretty early to worry about this, but I believe that we should come up with a good way to identify what we want out of not only a mod, but also a regular user, and how we use that way to decide things.

Typically the raw numbers highlighted in elections are focused around moderator specific actions, so the badge count (for example) focuses on the badges around editing and curating posts, rather than just the total count.
Candidates are also encouraged to provide a personal statement about why they want to be a mod and what they would bring to the site, and I believe there are also a set of questions to answer or a chat-room based hustings type setup too.
Just voting by the numbers is like voting for politicians based on their appearance and doesn't end well.
I've seen candidates on other sites that have been comparatively new to the site, but have been active on meta and suggesting good edits that do well.
Also, each site has it's own community and feel, so what happens on one site may not be indicative of what happens here, but we shall see ;)


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Where did the questions go?
Over the last two weeks, there have been very few questions. Where did they go? We haven't asked all the questions about LEGO, we never will!

This may be less of a question (maybe) and more of an announcement, but...
If everyone who sees this sentence asks a good question, the community will come back!

The irony that this question remains unviewed and unanswered is sickening.

It's not just that the Questions are gone (though there was a bit of an influx the last few days), also the upvotes and answer approvals are not what they used to be. I spent some time and effort on a few of them with very little response. Almost feels like @CalebWoodman and I are the only two active members :)

Yep. As much as I'd hate to see this place go, I think we're far into burninatable territory.

Not anymore! Feels good.


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How to encourage identification tag users to elaborate in their titles?
I've been editing a lot recently, (I'm the only guy on the editor list,) and titles are bugging me.
What are we supposed to get from "what is this piece", "where this brick from" or "what number is this part"?
I know there has to be a better way to name your question. If it has a good title, people will answer and upvote it. Sometimes I make a title edit, but while I enjoy moderating, I can't do it for you.
How should we go about encouraging a title that explains its subject properly?

Poor quality identification questions and non-descriptive titles often go hand in hand. They have been an ongoing problem for the site.
First of all, we should encourage users to put reasonable effort into researching the parts they're interested in. We can do this by making people more aware of part/set libraries (such as Bricklink, Peeron and Brickset) as well as part/piece numbers that can be found hidden in most bricks.
Last year, I asked for support to have a 'how-to-ask' tips for identification tags, we had support for the idea and I had contacted a Stack Exchange Community Manager to get the featured added. I'm still hoping to hear from him and I've sent a reminder via SE chat to see if it can be implemented.
UPDATE: The 'how-to-ask' tip is now live for the identification tag!

We could probably edit the tag on part-id and id to directly ask them to use a title that describes the question.


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When is the next Moderator Election?
I may run, but only if it isn't very soon, I want to get more of a feel for these cold, empty forums.

We don't run moderator elections until a site has graduated. That's not in the cards any time soon.
The good news: we don't have any plans to close up shop.
If you are interested in helping out, some sites have had success building an audience with question challenges.

I have pioneered the challenge tag, but we need more active users to make it work!

There is now a moderator election occurring.  We must have graduated since this post.


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Brainstorm for boosting graduation qualifications
As we all know, we have very few questions per day. A lot of users log on, ask a question, and never return. Furthermore, a large number of questions are robotics or basic technology only.
However! We are still in beta. The number of views, users, and questions with answers may be greatly increased if we can reach full site status.

Check it out! We are actually doing well in three categories, fine in another. All we need is for our multiple hundred users to ask more questions and not be afraid to post answers, and we can move to the point where we can be a full site with more people, moderators, and all the other benefits.
Question: How do we get more questions and answers?
(May be rhetorical. Try it!)

Advertise at conventions.  I will be adding a QR code for bricks.SE to all my GBC modules.  Even though it says our numbers of users are "Excellent", I think adding more users will be the biggest help in boosting the other stats.

Having a 'core' community helps - I've been a mod 'pro tem' on SR.SE, and have involvement in a few other sites, and I've found some degree of activity in chat is pretty nice for this. Something like this would come up in chat, people talk about it (and other things!) and bounce ideas off each other in realtime. I for one, will try to pop into the chat for the next month or so, so there's at least someone on when people come in.
There's a few advantages to this - sometimes we share questions we come across where someone on chat is a subject matter expert, and you get pretty good retention if you get the right sense of community on.
That said, lego is a strange topic , since you either freestyle the hell out of things (Moocs!) or use the usually very clear instructions to build as per designs. A lot of existing questions are "identification type" questions (which are an oddity - and a generic question is what many sites do).
I suppose a 'related' question might be 'what sort of questions do I want to see here?' I'd love to see more questions over advanced techniques like building large curved structures. Would questions to do with the use of whatever's the design software people use these days (in my day it was lcad and various wrappers for that) be on topic, and would they be handy ?
My one question here so far involved a step I was stuck in - and I got an answer fast, things are good there.


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Is it valid to ask about whether a given minifig is an official one?
My wife received, via a piece of gift purchasing software, a minifig of Batman with some odd touches such as coming with two large guns rather than any sort of Batarang or grapnel device. Looking through the tour for the site, it looks like the emphasis is on bricks and sets. Is it valid for me to post photos of the minifig and to ask about its provenance?

We already have a few questions about mini-figure authenticity (and other elements), along with a few tips about recognising them:
How can I tell if minifigures are custom-made or LEGO Originals?
If those don't help, then by all means post a question with some pictures :)


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Should we add a "bag-identification" tag?
We have at least 50 questions about bags and what set they come from nowadays. But the skills required to determine the identity of an unmarked bag are not necessarily the same as those needed for piece-ID. I think that this is a big enough of a gap to constitute a new classification. Thoughts?

I'm sorry, I'm not sure how it ended up on overflow on accident.

Personally I think set-identification would be better than "bag identification" - it would cover both "what set do these random pieces come from" and "what set did this unopened bag" come from - the skills required for both of those are the same.


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Is it time to phase out the identification tag?
Let's self-evaluate, guys. We have model-identification, piece-identification, and may soon have bag-identification. I know we've asked about merging stuff into basic identification, but I personally propose that we remove this tag, because there is no generic ID question that doesn't fall under the aforementioned three that I know of. Ideas? Anything blindingly obvious I'm missing?

This is a good call. There are currently 163 questions tagged as identification questions.
I will be going through the list to ensure any identification tagged questions are either tagged as piece-identification or set-identification as is the case per question.
I'm sure there will be a few identification questions that neither fall under 'pieces' or 'sets' but they appear to be very few and they can be addressed individually.
This may take some time, but I encourage everyone who is capable of doing so to re-tag, edit or suggest edits for these questions.
P.S. I think we also need to clearly distinguish the difference between piece-information and part-identification
UPDATE: The identification has been replaced.
New tags include minifigure-identificaiton and set-identification.

I have contacted a moderator to make sure the new identification tags include the 'how-to-ask' tooltips.


text:
Time to kill some tags!
We have a lot of leftover clutter from early beta, but what I notice primarily is the incredible number of unused tags. Can I get a few people to view the tag list and nominate a couple dozen unused tags here? Once we all agree on what should go, we'll burn 'em. Make sure to look at tags with only one question attached.

Tags not associated with any question are automatically destroyed at
  03:00 UTC every day.

A: "How can we get rid of misspelled and unused (or “zombie”) tags?"
I believe most of the unused tags in the end of the tag list are actually just tag synonyms for existing tags.

Thanks, Ambo! In that case, I'll just go ahead and de-tag some stuff. (I'll make sure to document it and post here, and I encourage others to do the same.)

I have some ideas lined up, but I want to make sure everyone agrees first.

Harry potter?

Hero Factory?

All these?

Tracked vehicle and tracks?

All these except patent and sensor?

I'd leave almost all of those - We should probably merge [tag:model-identification] into [tag:identification] although I think it was used for MOCs rather than official sets, the others may drop off over time (i.e. Brickowl has gone) but many of the others are related to specific themes or topics.


text:
Winter Bash 2016
Just a quick heads up that we'll be participating in Winter Bash again this year - for more details on the upcoming festivities, please see below:

The year is rapidly coming to a close, which means even though we typically hate it, it’s time to have some fun...with hats!  That’s right - it’s time for Winter Bash 2016!!
Overview
Most of you remember previous years’ events, but here is a quick little reminder. Winter Bash is an annual event that can run on any Stack Exchange site that chooses to participate. Users have fun by earning “hats” for their gravatars by completing certain tasks (very similar to badges). We track everyone’s progress using hats in a leaderboard that looks similar to this:

As always, we’re coming up with new hat designs for this year’s fun!
The Details
The event will run from 19 December 2016 up to and including 08 January 2017. Users will be able to see all the hats they’ve earned on http://winterbash2016.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.

If you really don't like hats (or possibly fun) then you can opt out (if I recall correctly at the site or network level), and you won't see any hats as you use the site.

It's started! Let's get some hats.

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because WinterBash 2016 has started.


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:
How about a tag for logos?
We've had a spat of questions this week that are amazing logo-centric:

Octan
The LEGO Logo Font
my favorite, The Coffee Chain

And it isn't hard to find older questions that might be easier to discover with this tag:

Chicago Blackhawks logo Lego building instructions
Where can I find the LEGO fire dept. logo in high resolution or in vector format
Did LEGO ever make bricks without the LEGO logo?
LEGO and fuel company commercial relationship?

Is this enough related questions to warrant creating a tag?

I guess the question is how related are they really? And what benefit do we get by grouping them as such.
A question about the font used in the LEGO logo is really about branding, or design, rather than the logo specifically, while a question about building a logo doesn't really benefit from being grouped with questions about finding stickers for a particular real or fictional chain.


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:
Easter building competition
As you've perhaps already seen on other sites, TLG is running an Easter building competition that we are invited to be a part of:

Our colleagues creating global campaigns have asked us to ask you to
  particpate in this years #LEGOEaster campaign and share your amazing
  pictures online using the #LEGOEaster hashtag!
As a special treat the Community Managers have decided to add a little
  raffle chance to win for those of you participating. So we've created
  a flickr account where we would like everything to be pooled and also
  hashtagged. (The Flickr pool is right here -
  https://www.flickr.com/groups/3447329@N23/ )
Once we pass Easter, we will do a Lucky Draw between all the pooled
  images. We will pick 10 raffle winners, each getting a goodie bag with
  LEGO related Easter awesomeness and a medium sized LEGO set on top.
What's required?

Take a Easter themed LEGO picture (inspiration can be
  found using an internet search engine or by taking a look at the work
  done by Stuck In Plastic and Toy Photographers or some of the other
  instagram communities we have here on LAN).
Upload and share the image online (Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook etc), using the hashtag
  #LEGOEaster
Share the image in the Flickr Pool "RLUG #LEGOEaster Campaign" as a raffle ticket for the Lucky Draw.
Add your first name
  and RLUG/RLFM affilitation along with the #LEGOEaster hashtag in the
  comment for the image to validate your Lucky Draw entry.
One entry
  ticket per picture shared in the Flickr pool - please note that you
  can only participate once with each image - taking pictures from
  different angels and uploading them does NOT give additional tickets
  for the Lucky Draw.

Once the Lucky Draw has been completed the winners will be contacted
  via Flickr Mail asking for their full name which the Ambassador for
  the given RLUG/RLFM then will be asked to approve as a member of their
  community before the prize ships.

Happy building!


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:
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
?

I propose
Brick Models
as a site name. The second word adds information by clarifying that the site is not about building brick houses.
"Overflow" also conveys information: this site is run by the same company as a popular programming website. But (1) this is not really important to know; (2) many won't recognize the connection; (3) having "Overflow" in the name is not a reliable indicator of anything; e.g., Physics Overflow is not affiliated with Stack Exchange.

I like that. Just as a note, my first impression of the name was that the site is specifically about LEGO models, and not necessarily about all things LEGO (part identification, history, etc).


text:
Recognised LEGO Fan Media Days 2017 - Sponsorship Proposal
Recognised LEGO Fan Media Days 2017
What?
The Recognised LEGO Fan Media Days 2017 is a three-day event hosted by The LEGO Group for Ambassadors of LEGO User Groups.

The LEGO Ambassador Network (LAN) is a community network to provide
  valuable dialogue and initiate activities of relevance for the mutual
  benefit of the Recognized LEGO User Groups (RLUG), the Recognized LEGO
  Fan Media (RLFM) and The LEGO Group (TLG).

(I have been asked by jncraton (our current Ambassador from LEGO Answers to The LEGO Group) to attend this event on his behalf as he is unable to do so.)
Over the three days TLG will be providing presentations, a LEGO House/LEGOLAND tour, interviews, discussions/feedback as well as a 'secret unveiling'.
Where?
Billund, Denmark
(various locations including within walking distance)
When?
31st May - 2nd June 2017
Why?
This event will be a big opportunity to promote the LEGO Stack Exchange website amongst other LEGO fan and media websites, and possibly get answers to some of our unanswered questions on the site.
I will be given the chance to give a presentation to TLG and other RLFM groups about our community. This will also be the first time that LEGO Answers has attended an official event hosted by The LEGO Group.
In addition to attending the event and providing a presentation I pledge to:

Produce a photo report of the event, which I will share with the
LEGO.SE community on Meta.
Share additional photographs from the event on my personal Flickr
account. (You can find photos from when I previously
attended Brick 2014)

Abbreviations

TLG - The LEGO Group
RLFM - Recognized LEGO Fan Media
SE - Stack Exchange


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:
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!

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)

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)

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


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Do we have a bug caused by the Colorado transfer?
Since the sites moved to Colorado for the week I've seen an unexpected behavior, but only on Bricks.  It always shows me in the header that there is one suggested edit, but when I go to the review queues page or that particular queue it tells me it there are none.  This is happening to me on Linux and MacOS in up-to-date versions of Chrome.

Is it still there? I approved one suggested edit just now. It was your tag wiki edit, so I'm wondering if it was showing in your badge count, but not in your queue since you obviously can't approve your own edit.

That was it!  Thanks.

It still seems like a bug.

It basically is a bug, but I believe that it's also known behavior: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/230726. The review queue count is cached and is the same for all users. It's computationally expensive to personalize this for each user.

That's a totally legit compromise.  And now that I realize tag wiki edit could cause it I won't be surprised next time.  :)


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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.


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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.


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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.


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LEGO House AFOL Opening Event - Trip Report
Thanks to the work of fellow Bricks moderator jncraton getting us registered as a Recognised LEGO Fan Media site, we were invited to send a representative to the AFOL Opening event of The LEGO House - Home of the Brick a week before it opened.
This event was primarily a chance for The LEGO Group to say "thank you" to all the Adult Fans Of LEGO for all their support over the years, but especially with their help putting together The LEGO House - many of the attendees had models on display or had been involved in the planning of the building, right down to naming the café "Brickaccino".
After the doors were opened, we had a chance to get our personalised RFID wristband (this is a standard feature, not just a special treat for us - more on this later) and I grabbed a coffee from the café (I decided that I didn't need an "Overpriced Coffee" for $37 and so settled for a more affordable cortardo) we had a welcome from Jesper Vilstrup and Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, along with a introduction from representatives of the Skærbæk Fan Weekend which is also happening this weekend.

Kjeld in particular re-iterated the point that The LEGO House is for LEGO fans of all ages - and that we should all feel at home in the new Home of the Brick, and feel free to participate and use the areas and spaces as our own. LEGO User Groups and others will be able to use the spaces for events, gatherings and celebrations, as well as just visiting and enjoying the facilities.
The areas of The LEGO House

Welcome and Lobby
Tree of Creativity and Masterpiece Gallery
Experience Zones
History Collection
Parting Gift and LEGO House App

Closing Thoughts
Personally, I had a great time here, and think my kids would enjoy it as much as me - there's plenty of inspiring builds as well as fun little details throughout, and enough LEGO to keep everyone busy for a few hours. With only around 600 AFOLs in the venue it didn't feel crowded or overly busy, and we were all very considerate when rummaging through the (surprisingly) deep LEGO bins to find that last 1x1 tile! How I would feel trying to do the same when there's a few kids also rummaging amongst them I honestly don't know - possibly a little frustrated, but I guess that comes down to overall numbers - but part of the challenge is in building within some constraints!
Ticket and food prices seem fairly reasonable, and I'm sure it could be easily combined with a trip to LEGOLand (almost next door). Travel around Billund is fairly easy on public transport, and it's all very close to the airport.
All my photos are visible in this Google album:
AFOL LEGO House Opening
Edit to add: LEGO have confirmed that they'll be selling about 600 tickets per session (morning or afternoon entry), so it shouldn't feel all that different even in peak periods.
The report reads slightly better if you sort by "Oldest" ;) ‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾↘

This is a brilliant report, thank you! I'm so delighted to see how much much thought has gone into the design of the LEGO house. I would love to see it again once it's open.

This is a fantastic write-up! Thanks for sharing. It looks like you had a great time!

It's probably not worth it to bother with public transport go get from LEGO House to LEGOLand  (or the other way), it's only a little over 1 km, and most people will be able to walk that faster than the average wait for the bus.

That is true, and to be honest the nearest stop to the house at the moment isn't actually much closer anyway ;) It was more a comment on getting there from hotels around Billund or the airport (which I admit is only about 3km once you've walked around the perimeter.

1. Welcome and Lobby
As you enter The LEGO House you are directed towards the wristband dispensers to generate your personalised RFID wristband, peruse the shop (although you may want to leave that till later!) and grab a coffee from Brickaccino. You can also access the forum - a raked seating theatre space for presentations with seating for about 200 people and pass the Koi pond to take the lift one of the public terraces on the roofs of the building.

Through-out this space there are a number of LEGO installations, ranging from the fun (a dog using a signpost) through to the impressive lenticular picture made from cheese slopes.

LEGO Shop
The shop is also accessible from the public space, so no need to pay to access that or the restaurants. The shop is well stocked with a wide range of LEGO sets, ranging from the common sets that are selling well, through the "hard to find" sets that are usually only in LEGO Stores and some specialist retailers, to the "LEGO Exclusives", including the new LEGO House architecture set that's only available here at the house.
Prices are on a par with the LEGO stores at home (exchange rates not withstanding) with the new house retailing at 449DKK. Other exclusives included some "mini-aquarium" sets, and they also had a "LEGO Portrait" machine, where you sit in a photo-booth choose the best of three photos and receive a set containing a yellow base-plate and grey-scale 1x1 tiles to make your own portrait mosaic!
Unlike some of the parks where the stores are 3rd party, this store is run by TLG, and so your VIP cards are accepted (indeed I managed to forget mine but they found me on the system and added my purchases for me!).

Is the LEGO shop treated like the standard LEGO stores, most importantly, can you use your VIP card there?

Good catch, this should probably be on the main site ;)

Update with the fact that yes, you can use your VIP cards.

3. Experience Zones
Coming down from the Gallery, you head into the experience zones - the four coloured areas representing different themes within the house.
Each zone has its own terrace area on the roof, covered in the rubber surface typically found in playgrounds, with different activities to let the younger visitors let off some steam from climbing frames to steps.
Most of the core areas (World Explorer, City Architect, LEGO Brick Builder and the Critter Creator especially) have DUPLO areas so that everyone can join in with the creative building - and you are certainly encouraged to build and share your creations!
Green - World Explorer, Character Creator and Story Lab
I started in the green World Explorer zone, taking in the impressive city builds, filled with both little jokes that most will get to various AFOL in-jokes that might not be as obvious! Around the edge of the zone are a number of displays of MOCs from the community, with different rooms and items in various scales, but all excellent builds.

After admiring the city, I made a couple of characters in the Character creator - massive selections of minifig parts to make your personal figure - and this was the first real opportunity to use the wristband - once you've made your characters, there are "photo booths" around the space with some handy studs to place your figure on and take a photo, with optional frames that you can then tag to your band for later.

Next it was on to the Story Lab - here up to 18 people (or pairs) can spend 10 minutes making a stop motion animation. You check-in before you start and are assigned a stage: each stage has three fixed cameras and a core stage set (currently a river front in the city, with a farm off to the right) along with a number figures, vehicles and props for your scene. The software gives you a nice onion-skin view of your scene and the previous shot as well as playing your animation each frame to see how it's coming along, and some special effects can also be added. Once the time is up you view the animation with intro and credits, and it's stored to your band for later.

Blue - City Architect, Robo Lab and Test Driver
Moving into the Blue City Architect zone you're confronted with a physical LEGO SimCity environment - a number of tables covered in square holes ready to accept 6x6 plates, with an interactive projection over the top - lots of little minifigs can be seen scurrying around the bare spaces asking for different types of buildings (red homes, green parks, yellow industrial/office and blue municipal) as well as some larger stadiums. Around the tables are building zones - filled with bricks and elements to create the different types of building. As you place them on the table the roads join up and the figures move gratefully into their new zones.

The Robo Lab, similar to the Story Lab requires a pre-registration process to assign you your robot, and then it's your turn to go and try and rescue the Arctic team that got trapped in ice while they were trying to locate some woolly mammoths! Your robot has a number of simple commands (forwards, backwards, rotate left or right, flamethrower and ice cannon) and it's your job to program a number of moves that will hopefully free the mini-figs. As you'd expect, chaining a number commands is more efficient, but any errors with the amount of turn can rapidly add up!

The robots are based around an EV3 heart, but interact with the projected landscape, refusing to cross water, celebrating the release of each mini-fig and so on. The assistant even had a LEGO Claw arm for separating any "boisterous" robots.
Finally for the blue zone is the Test Driver area, where you can build a car to attempt two different challenges - a 4 way race and a fairly tough jump through a hoop! You can grab a photo of your creation at one of the booths scattered around the area which are again added to your wristband.
Red - Brick Builder, Creative Lab and Library
The Red LEGO Brick Builder zone is dominated by the LEGO Falls - a massive "waterfall" of bricks cascading down from near the ceiling, with many troughs of bricks to rummage through and build with.
Off to one side is the "Creative Lab" where a themed collaborative build is taking shape - the theme we were working to was "A graffiti castle", making bricks and gargoyles to build up the sculpture. I think my attempt to create letters on a one stud grid when all I had were 2x4 bricks was a tad ambitious!

The library showcases a number of LEGO publications, including most of the Dorling Kindersley books and single issues of various magazines (including Blocks, Bricks and Bricks Culture).
Yellow - Flower Artist, Critter Creator and Fish Designer
The last main zone moves into the natural world, starting with Flower Artist, once again allowing visitors to create their own flowers from a huge selection of elements and display them for others to see alongside the static builds. Around the walls are more displays animal MOCs - again some familiar, others new to me. As with many of the build zones, you can capture your builds to your wristband.

The Critter Creator has a couple of fun build areas - one to make some dancing bugs (once you've built them, you pop them in a dance zone that then vibrates as the music drums through it) and some racing bugs that have either a fairly easy run down, or have to avoid a couple of dangerous snakes on the way to safety!
The Fish Designer builds on the LEGO Life of George concept of creating a "flat" creation from your bricks before scanning it in and releasing it into the aquarium with all the other creations. The scanning is fairly robust, and is activated by touching your band to the controller so again you have a memento of your build, before you add it to the display wall.

Did you get a picture of the library? I'm really pleased they decided to include it.

Sorry, no didn't picture that. It was a fairly small set of shelves and some book boxes!

5. Parting Gift and The LEGO House App
Back up on the ground floor and you make your way past the Tree of Creativity and a wall displaying just some of the over 900 million combinations of 6 red 2x4 bricks, and through to the exit.
Here you can see an injection moulding machine making red 2x4 bricks, along with an entire process that cools, counts and bags them up ready and waiting for you as you leave. On checking-out (again with your wristband) you're presented with your own card printed with one of the combinations you can build along with a code required to unlock your memories in the App.

Throughout the house there are a number of interactive displays that you can start to use once you've activated them with the RFID part of your wristband - on them you can find out about the different zones, and also see the various memories you've saved to your wristband, including the movies and pictures, as well as the "achievements" from Robo Labs. The App (available for iOS and Android) as well as providing a diverting little "find the home for the mini-figs" game also allows you to register your trip and download the memories to your device. To register your trip you need any two IDs from your ticket, your wristband and your 6 Bricks card - which should keep things fairly secure.

The touchscreen apps are written in Unity, running on PCs for those that are interested. There were a few minor issues I had with the tech - the machine my brick-self application was running on threw a "low on memory" error and shut the app down - the team were apologetic, but glad it wasn't explicitly their app that was at fault, and did try and see if the session was saved. I'd also downloaded the Android version of the app the day before our visit and was initially only able to save my video, but I updated it to the latest version (released the night before) and was able to store my images as well. I think it would be nice to be able to view them "in app" as well as store them, but realise that most people would want to download and back up their images.

"The touchscreen apps are written in Unity, running on PCs for those that are interested." I am really glad you brought this up actually, I was also curious. Hopefully everything will be working by opening day,

I love the mini LEGO factory, that looks like it was a lot of fun.

I only found out when I broke it and a couple of nervous helpers came over to see what I had done!

Yep, there should be a video in the shared album as well.

2. Tree of Creativity and Masterpiece Gallery
After the introduction, it was time to explore the main part of the House - starting with a climb around the Tree of Creativity. This is a massive LEGO build, full of details, from the various carvings in the bark trunk to the wonderful dioramas in the canopy - many of the main LEGO themes are represented, including City, Space, Castle and Friends.

The Masterpiece Gallery is currently dominated by three massive Tyrannosaurus Rex models, each built from one of the three core products: DUPLO, System and Technic - and they all look amazing!

Around the walls of the gallery are displays of many MOCs from the AFOL community - and like any good gallery they plan to rotate these exhibitions to showcase the latest and greatest works - there were many classic models here, along with a number I'd not seen before. It would have been nice to see some of the LEGO photographers on display as well, but maybe that's a plan for later.

4. The History Collection and LEGO Cinema
Back downstairs from the Experience Zones and down into the basement you'll come to The History Collection and LEGO Cinema. For us the cinema was showcasing LEGO adverts from history. The History collection starts with a museum telling the history of The LEGO Group, with examples of the toys and sets it has created over the years, starting with the wooden toys, and telling the stories of the first Plastic injection moulding machine the company bought and the move towards toys with a theme that led to the original "LEGO Play System" town planning sets - combining early LEGO bricks with some pre-made vehicles in sets. It then moves into the "modern" era, focusing on the many sets LEGO has produced and not pulling any punches when it comes to some of the decisions that the company made over the years, finally coming back to it's current core values and principles that seem to be holding it steady with it's more focused element inventory.
At the heart of the museum is the collection itself - a room with a number of iconic and classic sets arranged in historical order and covering every theme and style. There's also an interactive table where you can scroll through a list of all the sets ever produced, including looking inside some of them, and add the ones you own to a virtual shelf that is then tagged to your wristband.


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Problems with set identification questions
We seem to be doing a great job with random set identification - even correctly identifying a much larger set from a tiny collection of bricks, or reverse engineering sets from MOCs, however I think we're going to hit the limits of our question title creativity fairly soon:

Ignoring the fact that the bricks in this question where from the same set as the matched question (they were from the same user who has clearly bought a bulk collection of random LEGO bags from somewhere), it's quite conceivable that we are going to have people asking "What set is this from" for some time and trying to come up with unique titles for them will be tricky.
While these are questions that we seem good at answering, I'm not sure how good a fit they are for long term storage - the questions aren't typically searchable, nor are they that helpful to anyone else, unless they also have the same set of elements - but they won't be able to find the question as they are typically all variants of "What set is this?" with a picture.
I've retagged "How can I identify kits from a box of parts" as Set Identification which might help, but I guess we need to think about pruning some of these questions...
Also we should encourage answerers of these questions to show their workings, which will people learn how to do it.

On Graphic Design, we have some rules for identification questions: font identification, style identification. I think some of the ideas can be carried over to set-identification questions.

I'm not a big fan of these questions for the reasons you've highlighted.
Usually I will re-word the title to be more descriptive and adjust the tags used on the question to match the accepted answer. (If a set has been identified as a Star Wars set, it will be tagged as such). It can be difficult to find descriptive titles for every question.

Also we should encourage answerers of these questions to show their
  workings, which will people learn how to do it.

I think this is a good idea but it might be difficult to enforce. Even, just one line to explain how someone identified the set would help.
I'm surprised we don't have a question about how to identify sets in general. If we do, I can't find it.
I've posted a question titled What are the best ways to identify any LEGO set? and added the methods I use to identify a set.
I'm sure there are more techniques people use, so I encourage people to add their answers. Hopefully this will de-mystify how people can identify sets.

I was going to post a question but felt it was already covered by the one linked in my question "how can I identify kits from a box of parts"

I have merged the question. I think I misread it the first time.

Unfortunately some people don't even see this question of yours and decide to post these set questions anyways.

I also don't love these questions in terms of long term storage and usefulness, but I think that we provide the most reliable way to get questions like these answered.
I think that these questions can also be a source of new users for us if they are handled well. These questions are often coming from folks who are emerging from a dark age (whether they know it or not ) and who may be engaging more deeply with the community in the future.
Would it make sense to:

Wiki and clean up our canonical how to identify a set question
Wiki and clean up our canonical how to identify parts question
Add links to these in our help section so that users can have a fighting chance of finding these tools before asking a simple question

One comment from me, a frequent answerer of these questions (because I simply love the challenge it poses :) ). You cannot teach someone how to correctly identify a set from pieces without teaching them the Bricklink parts taxonomy. That itself will take a long post to cover, as there are quite some anomalies in the taxonomy, and quirks in the BL interface.

+1 @PhilB., this might be a good topic for a blog post (or a series of blog posts)?

This. There are a lot of set identification questions coming in lately, and I am a big fan of closing them as duplicates of the canonical set identification question. Show people where the fish are; don't just hand them the fish. Problem is, people keep answering the questions because they're good for bragging rights and easy Internet points for AFOLs.