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Community Promotion Ads — 2020
You lost your “beta” label in 2019, so welcome to your very first edition of Community Promotion Ads, for the year of 2020!
What are Community Promotion Ads?
Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.
Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?
This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:

interesting blogs
helpful resources on the subject matter
cool events or conferences
anything else your community would genuinely be interested in

The goal is for future visitors to find out about the stuff your community deems important. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are relevant to your own community's interests, both for those already in the community and those yet to join.
Why do we reset the ads every year?
Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.
The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.
How does it work?
The answers you post to this question must conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored.

All answers should be in the exact form of:
[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]

   [1]: http://image-url
   [2]: http://clickthrough-url

Please do not add anything else to the body of the post. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.
The question must always be tagged with the magic community-ads tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.

Image requirements

The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.
Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)
Must be GIF or PNG
No animated GIFs
Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB
If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.

Score Threshold
There is a minimum score threshold an answer must meet (currently 6) before it will be shown on the main site.
You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats here.

Cheers for this - what is the preferred clean/nice way to remove an ad if it's well above the threshold? For example once an event has happened and is no longer relevant?

Deleting the answer should fix that, I believe, @Zhaph-BenDuguid


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(How) Should we customize the "Ask Question" page?
As seen on Meta.SE, The new ask page is now live on the network!
There are many options for each SE site to customize this page:

What's per-site customizable, and what's the procedure to get it live?
As you can see, any existing custom guidance on "How to ask," "How to
  tag," or any custom error or warning messages your site may already
  have in place will still be there, and will still be customizable with
  the same restraints (basic HTML, using paragraphs, lists, links) as
  before:

The "welcome modal" for new askers (seen with the default text in screenshot 1), everything between the title and "Before you
  post..." (this is only custom on 4 sites at the moment, [such as
  EL&U][14]).
The full contents of the "Draft your question" sidebar (seen with the default text in screenshot 2, and with custom text in
  screenshot 3).
The text in the tag popover, between "Tags help the right people..." and the bullet points (seen with custom text in screenshot
  2, and with the default text on screenshot 3).
The above three have no character limits, aside from "within reason."
The placeholder text in the title field (text only; seen with the default text in screenshot 2, and with custom text on screenshot
  3).
The warning text shown in the "Review your question" sidebar, regex-based (seen with the default text in screenshot 4, and with
  custom text on screenshot 5).
Tag-related error messages and warnings, regex-based (seen with custom error text in screenshot 4, with the default text on screenshot
  5,  and with a tag warning
  here).
The warning and error messages described in the two bullet points above have a limit of 1000 characters.

These can only be edited by staff, so the process to get them live is
  as described [here][15]:

Create a Meta post on the appropriate Meta site, and discuss it with your community.
Once a consensus is reached, a mod should escalate it to the CM team. Generally speaking, the "contact us" form is the best way to go,
  though a ping in chat can sometimes work too (the most that could
  happen is we ask you to use the form).
Unless there are any outstanding issues, the CMs should be able to get to it Soon™.

Do we have any change requests to the existing setup, and if so, what are they?

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Should there be a Lego Masters tag?
So, the second season of the Australian reality TV show Lego Masters has started, and apparently it's based off of similar shows that ran on British and American television under the same name. There doesn't currently seem to be a tag for these Lego Masters television shows; should we add one, so that people can ask questions about them? I could see questions like "How do I do this thing I saw someone do on Episode X of Season Y of the Australian Lego Masters show" or "Is it possible to get parts lists to make copies of the builds for Lego Masters" being on topic for this stack.

Generally tags are only added when there is a demand for them. If someone asks a question about LEGO Masters and they have the privilege to do create a new tag at 150 reputation, they may do so. If they do not have the required rep, they can make a comment, or flag their post to have a tag added.
Please note that new 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.
I don't believe there is a way to create a tag without having it included in a question.

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


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Community's view on old question grammar edits
As you may have noticed, there have been multiple old questions popping up due to edits. I feel like such amount of edits hurts the community.
First reason is that they don't really bring anything useful to the questions being edited. It isn't essential to question if "im" or "Im" has been used instead of "I'm". I find such edits fine if this is a fresh question, but I don't see how this would make old questions better. What would be useful here is to provide a better answer and then maybe do a few grammar fixes (and certainly don't bring anything new to question OP didn't consider in his question) as you review the question itself. But don't just do grammar alone.
Second reason is that the real (new) questions tend to disappear quickly. They are being moved by all the edits to old questions and may be unnoticed, thus unanswered. I've been quite active here for past couple of months, yet still I tend to miss one or another new question purely because of the high amount of edits to old questions.
Third reason - some edits change the question too much (or even add new (mis)information) that it alters authors idea about the question he was asking about. This may discourage new members of Bricks.SE community from posting new questions. It also looks like members of this community are more focused on typos than the quality of the content.
Overall, I find it good to review and fix some errors, but going full "grammar nazi" mode isn't that great.
What's the stand of the community on this issue?
Edit. I just noticed there's an Archaeologist badge you can achieve editing posts older than 6 months.
PS. If you find a typo, it could be this was placed intentionally or was a pure mistake. However this doesn't change the idea. I will rollback whichever edit will be made to this post except tags.

I'm the one doing all those edits, I like that dopamine going through me whenever I get reputation...

Proper grammar and spelling means a lot to people who learned English as a second (or third) language. Many, I dare say most of us, have learned it not by speaking naturally at early age, but by learning grammar and spelling rules in theory and then applying them.
Worse yet, grammar errors tends to correspond to the native language of the writer, making it even harder to read for people from other countries, speaking languages from other language groups as their first.
What to you may be a small typo or minor grammar issue, for other non-natives may be the difference between illegible and legible writing.

Exactly. It's like giving you a sandwich without the bread.

I came to this question in search of meta Q that might address https://bricks.stackexchange.com/q/923/2833 and found that @mindstormsboi did too. Why do the grammar edits on that question keep getting rolled back to a version that has no capitalization and ends questions with a period?

@shoover Indeed, edit wars. It's driving me nuts and there is absolutely no reason to create the rollback. What should I do about it? Should I imitate the behavior and continuously make the edit? (FYI the constant rollbacks actually remove 2 rep from me ): )

@shoover And now even this user is making rollback, and I truly don't understand why. Nor do I understand why I should receive an unupvote and an additional downvote on this answer of mine at exactly nine hours ago, the same time when the most recent rollback was made. How rebellious.

@mindstormboi revenge downvotes are forbidden, but notoriously hard to prove.

We've had some similar excitement previously around the capitalisation of the word LEGO and also the legos purges - in general, we prefer edits that are substantial and leave the post better than you found it.
That said, if we didn't think there was value in these minor edits (and to be clear, I like a grammatically correct, properly capitalised, properly punctuated post as much as the next pedant), we would be rejecting them from the review queues - the editor in question at the time of writing doesn't meet the reputation cap to make edits directly, nor to stop earning reputation from edits.
Whilst maybe not ideal, you can always use the Questions view, which can sort them by created date rather than just latest activity.


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Tag typo only appears in specific place
I'm in the tag page, the tags are sorted by popularity, and technic is one of them, as you can see here.

However, If I go to page seven, I see a typo in the tag name.

Hmm, strange. That typo doesn't appear on the first page, and also it does have questions asked with this tag. What's stranger is that all the surrounding tags also have "0 questions" but they do have questions, which I think is SE's fault. Also, it shows the real tag info if I hover over it.
But I'm not focused on that.

So is this odd typo the fault of Stack Exchange, or did someone here make an oopsie? I think it's the first one, right?

All tags are suggested and created by us users, rather than being forced upon us by Stack Exchange ;)

@Zhaph-BenDugid That's not what I meant. I meant that someone merged it or something and that the Stack Exchange database didn't sync or something, or maybe someone forgot about it.

Yes, I merged them back in 2014 - you can see this from the All Synonyms page. This is feature of the site - all synonyms behave like this - if you go to the last couple of pages of the "popular tags", you'll see all the "empty" tags that are mostly synonyms.

Somebody made an oopsie, but it has been corrected by making techinc a synonym of technic: see https://bricks.stackexchange.com/tags/technic/synonyms.

This often happens with misspelled tags; retagging would work too, but somebody else is bound to make the same mistake again. The synonym will help them find the correct tag, instead of creating a new one (if they have the 150 reputation to do so) or wondering why they can't find the one they want (surely, there must be a tag for Lego Techinc, right?)

Indeed we could burn it, but it's likely to come back again at some point, so often easier to keep them around as synonyms.

@Zhaph-BenDuguid: You need a certain reputation to create tags and you should get a warning that you are about to create a tag, so the risk should be rather low. Also note that you can merge the tags, so it does not say techinc on some question.

@Wrzlprmft True, it's less likely to come back now that we're out of beta, and running at full rep - it was probably created when the requirements to create tags were lower - but someone must have created it, even with those warnings for me to create the synonym back in 2014...

@Zhaph-BenDuguid until you have a design, you're still using the beta privilege levels ...


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Large header feature not working
I don't know if I should post this on MSE or here, but I choose to post here first because even the smallest mistake on MSE gets you excessively bombarded with downvotes.

So I tried using the large header markdown feature but it didn't change anything about the tiny column of equal signs, which makes me confused. I'm certain that I copied and pasted the equal signs directly from the markdown advisor and I even spammed a few myself but the equal signs still stayed the same. In the image you can see that the smaller subheader works as intended but I've also discovered that when you put the two together on two different lines without the blank line between them, then the smaller header doesn't appear and the column of equal signs doesn't really change in any way other than becoming bold, which is stranger.
Why does the odd behavior occur, and is it even working as intended?

I think that you might be mixing up headers (
,
, etc in HTML) and horizontal rules (
 in HTML). You can make an
 in Markdown like this:
------------

This will render as a horizontal rule or line:

You can make level 1 and level 2 headers in Markdown using the following:
Heading Level 1
===============

Heading Level 2
---------------

Note that both the text of the header and the --- or === text underneath are required for the heading to be rendered. The above will render as:
Heading Level 1
Heading Level 2

that could've been specified before so that i wouldn't have to ask this

That is probably true. I think that it's meant to provide a quick overview. There is quite a bit more detail linked from the  "More" link in your image above that explains needing underlines text to create a header: https://bricks.stackexchange.com/editing-help#headers


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Should similar parts identification questions be considered duplicates?
Should questions like this one be considered duplicates in the official StackExchange-sense of a duplicate?
I'm concerned this doesn't make sense for part-identification questions.
Marking a question like this as a duplicate seems like a bad way to welcome a new user to our site.  Do we expect this new user to have checked every part-identification question already asked to see if they notice a picture that is similar to theirs?  Most of these questions don't have enough words describing the part to be useful in a keyword search.  So as of today you'd need to review 404 existing questions to make sure you are not creating a duplicate.  Assuming that our new user is a LEGO superfan and willing to consider doing that, this superfan would also know that there are 60093 possible parts, so the chance of finding your question are 0.67%.  Wouldn't most people just post their question and hope they're in the 99.33%?  And this problem gets harder every day that somebody adds a new one.
So should we have a site-specific policy for these questions?
Meta-meta
I looked for dupes of this question, but I didn't find any on this meta.

I think that these should be closed as duplicates, because they are fundamentally exact duplicate questions. They include different part images, but they will yield exactly the same set of correct answers. Closing them creates more hope that a Google search will lead back to a single correct answer and makes the site easier to maintain.
It's hard for me to put myself in the shoes of a new user, but I don't think that having your first question closed has to be a totally negative experience. If we leave a comment welcoming them to the site, explain why we're closing their question, and they get their answer via the dupe that we link, it seems like they could see the value in our community. Honestly, if this happened to me, I'd be impressed. Not only was the community able to quickly answer this question, but we remembered that we'd answered it before, and kindly pointed them to the preexisting correct answer.

Just to add to jncraton's answer (which I agree with) the piece (and set) identification tag is likely always going to suffer a bit more on this site than others, especially if people don't describe the part in any detail - and even if they do describe it will they pick the same features?
So we can't rely on the question prompts to find a meaningful duplicate question in the same way that works with other questions.


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2020 Q3 Activity Support Proposals
There's been some discussion previously about how to make use of our quarterly Activity Support provided by TLG. Here's an excerpt regarding LEGO Online Community Activity Support for those who may not be familiar:

The purpose of RLFM/RLOC Activity Support is to provide Recognized
LEGO Fan Media (RLFM) and Recognized LEGO Online Communities (RLOC)
the opportunity to do online activities and reviews outside of the
marketing offerings of the LEGO Group. Any use of the support provided
is to be within the LEGO® Brand Values and requires the RLFM/RLOC to
clearly indicate that the products are provided by the LEGO® Group.
Examples of online activities

Reviews of LEGO sets or themes
Competitions where LEGO sets are used for inspiration and/or prizes
Live builds
Raffles
Token of appreciation to community members

The level of support One request can include products worth no more
than: 500 EUR
Please use your local Shop@Home as reference for products availability
and German Shop@Home for prices before you fill up the order document.
If you don´t have a local Shop@Home, please use German Shop@Home for
prices and assortment availability as reference. Discounted product
prices cannot be used for reference, it must be the full price.
Please note that products NOT available on your local Shop@Home cannot
be ordered. If you order a product not available, it won´t be
replaced. We also recommend you to not request products out of stock
or in backlog as we cannot ensure delivery.

If there is interest, I'd like to split up our Q3 Activity Support between a few members to create engaging and useful content for our community. This would be similar to what we did with our 2018 Annual Support, except we have control over which sets to select.
We can ship to up to 5 different addresses, and request up to 500 EUR of sets, so keep that in mind if you create a proposal. Proposals up to 100 EUR should be easy to work in, but more than that will need stronger justification, as you may be eating into funds that could have been allocated to another member.
I will be accepting proposals here until June 30th. I'm very open to input from anyone on this process. However, because I have to report back to TLG how these sets were used, final decisions over what is approved will be at my discretion. Important factors for me will be community feedback for a users proposal (via comments and votes here), as well as the quality of content that a user generally creates.
Users submitting proposals must meet the following requirements:

You must have earned at least 200 rep in 2020 or 1k rep total.
You may not resell these sets. This is a TLG requirement.
The requested set(s) need to be prominently featured in at least one question. Your question(s) should be part of the proposal to receive your set(s). The question will likely be self-answered by you and should be tagged as activity-support. Alternatively, I'm open to other non-Q&A creative uses of these sets as well (social media campaigns, etc) as long as they serve the core purpose of our community.
You must be committed to completing your proposed work within 2 weeks of receiving your sets.

If inspiration is helpful, here's an example from one of our users who created some excellent content using support from TLG:
How can I motorize 42077 Technic Rally Car with LEGO Power Functions?
Update:
We're moving forward with these three proposals.

I know this community is US based, so I have to ask if this is limited to US only?

@Alex Great question. This is not US only. Most of the world should be fine, with the exception of countries where it wouldn't be legal for TLG to ship to due to sanctions or other legal concerns.

This is great! My interests are all in tinkering with spike-prime (+sensors) which I think are a bit out of the price range. Although I'd love to know how they can interact with each other over BTLE for larger systems.

I'd like to explore the internals, functionality, and potential hackability of the new Mario intelligent brick:

I would perform a teardown via a self-answered Q&A question covering the internals of this element.
If there are funds available, it would also be helpful to get a few of the Power Up Packs to determine how they interact with Mario.
Possible questions:

What is inside the new Mario intelligent brick?
How does the Mario intelligent brick sense and interact with its environment?
What sensors are included in the Mario intelligent brick?

Requested sets:

71360 Mario Starter Course (60 EUR)

Proposal Completed
'How does the LEGO Super Mario figure know which power up is attached?'
'Does the Mario Starter Course require a smart device?'

How the Mario brick works is certainly a question I might ask, because I really wonder how it can detect what it stomps on and if there are anti-cheats (if necessary) to prevent from continuously stomping on the same block over and over (and oher problems), but now that you've mentioned that question I'm afraid you're gonna beat me to it and ask the question yourself.

I've been thinking it would be cool to try to make a working LEGO glider using the sails in the 42105 Catamaran for wings.

Unfortunately they made the sails 2 different sizes, so I would need 2 copies of the set.

I could probably also do a question on a motorized speedboat.
Possible questions:

Can I make a glider out of the large sail pieces in the 42105 Catamaran Technic set?
Can I motorize the 42105 Catamaran Technic set?

Requested sets:

42105 Catamaran 38,98€ * 2 = 77.96€

Proposal Completed
'Motorized speedboat from Technic Catamaran alternate model?'

This looks great, and I'm happy to move forward with this. I've reached out via email with more details.

I would like to do an analysis of the differences between the new front fork suspension of 42107 Ducati Panigale V4 R and the existing lego shock absorbers (part 731c06). I might also be able to review characteristics of other shock absorbers produced by LEGO over the years.
Set cost: $60-$70 (US Price not yet confirmed)

Proposal Completed
'How do the various LEGO springs compare?'

And I promise to adhere to the timeline this year :)

Wait, what timeline?

See point 4 in the original post. My post from the last time we ran this was several months late :)


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Community stance on solliciting for reputation
I have recently commented a few times on users explicitly asking for upvotes and accepted answer reputation points. I understand the drive that the reputation points system gives, but it is starting to become a bit too much.
What is our stance towards asking for these reputation increases? What are the pros and cons of enforcing a policy where these requests are not allowed?
Ultimately the reputation points are a part of this site, used to show which users contribute the most meaningful content, as judged independently by the users. IMHO allowing vote canvassing skews this aspect towards the most aggressive repvote collectors.
Your opinions please...

"I have recently commented a few times on users asking for answer acceptance..."  Not sure,  I've looked here and it seems that you've asked only once. Did you delete some of these comments or something?

@mindstormsboi That could have been me. I purged more than one comment thread primarily between you and a newer user where you were explaining how to use various aspects of the site (posting images, accepting answers, etc). If Phil responded in one of those threads, his comments would have been cleaned up as well.

Indeed - I would suggest flagging those comments as "No longer needed" or "Something else", and we can remove them from the site. If they are in the body of the post, they should be edited out.
I don't mind the occasional comment on an answer along the lines of "If this helped, please consider marking it as an answer and upvoting" especially if the question was from a new user who'd commented "Thanks, that's it!".
You're right that the gameification of these sites can promote a feeling of "needing the points", but we would like to be meaningful within the context of our small corner of the internet. Clearly I'm saying this from a position of privilege as a long term user with a large number of contributions.
It can seem arbitrary when some identification questions (for example) get a number of up-votes and others don't before they are answered, but I do try and upvote even slightly older ident questions when the question is of merit (i.e. reasonable photo, good description of the element, etc.) as well as the answer locating it.

Thanks Zhaph for validating my concerns. I do the same as you - posts get an upvote if they are well written and researched. I was not part of the first wave of users, but have gained a good number of rep points over the past 4 years - with lots of what I deemed good responses left with low votes and no accepted answer checkmarks. You win some you lose some.

@mindstormsboi I applaud your enthusiasm for this site and the LEGO hobby. Please do not stop contributing to this site, your submissions have been helpful. However, please listen to the feedback here and in other posts and adjust your approach a bit. Thanks.


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Is it okay to ask for opinions here that relate to a question on a different SE site?
Question
LEGO-related questions sometimes appear on Worldbuilding SE. I know this because I have posted them occasionally myself.
I currently have two such questions. I'm wondering if it will be okay to:
(a) Ask a supplementary question here that will get me some extra information
(b) Somehow 'advertise' here that I would like help from this expert community. You might say that this question itself is such an advertisement! There is some truth in this but it is not all the truth.
For those who are interested, I'll post the links but hide them to avoid being too blatant.

 https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/184560/lego-as-a-defence-against-barefoot-warriors

 https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/184565/is-it-possible-to-melt-and-accurately-mould-lego-plastic-using-only-neolithic-te

I have other LEGO Worldbuilding question going back awhile.

You can certainly ask questions here related to your questions elsewhere, but as with all questions on Stack Exchange, please ensure that they are good, standalone questions ;)
For example your second question (which seems to have some great answers already, thankfully which didn't appear to harm any actual LEGO) might also already be answered in part by Damage Boiling LEGO Bricks noting the melting point of ABS in general.


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Should the clone-brands tag apply to non-LEGO non-clone toy systems?
When I first saw
A technology building set that is not LEGO Technic, K'NEX, or Meccano. Can you help me with the name?
I thought that it should get the clone-brands tag but I refrained because this really doesn't seem to be cloning LEGO in any fashion.  It is a distinct building system, and just because it is also made out of plastic does not make it a clone of LEGO.  This leads me to two possibilities:

We create a new tag for non-LEGO non-clone things.  I have no idea what this should be called. Bike-shed away!  This question alone doesn't warrant a new tag, but we could get more of these.
We extend the meaning of clone-brands to include non-clone non-LEGO things like this.  The 3rd-party tag seems to overlap this same space, but that seems to be for LEGO-compatible 3rd parties, not distinct toy systems like Fischertechnik or Meccano.

What are your thoughts on this?

No. Fishertechic clearly isn't a Clone Brand, and has limited if any connectivity with LEGO elements.
With regards to non-LEGO, non-Clone things, they aren't really on-topic for the site - from our tour page:

Bricks is a question and answer site for LEGO and building block enthusiasts. […] we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about LEGO bricks and compatible building systems

In my mind, and I think generally:

Clone Brand: Brands or products that uses elements predominantly based on LEGO elements, with some original parts, and often with original set designs.
3rd Party: Products that unofficially fill a gap in the LEGO catalogue in some way. Either purely unique/bespoke parts, or (more often) additional technic or mindstorms based components.

I asked the question and I had difficulty trying to find a suitable tag. I guess now that 3rd-party would have been a reasonable choice.
Why did I ask on your SE?
Because the drop-down list (top right corner of main screen) says quote:

Text version: Bricks - For LEGO® and building block enthusiasts

If the phrase had been, "For LEGO® building block enthusiasts", I would have looked elsewhere but the inclusion of the word "and" seemed to allow my participation.

My opinion?

I was very impressed by the friendliness and helpfulness of the response from everyone who contributed. Not remembering the name of the system, it was proving difficult to find the information elsewhere.

I can certainly understand that the site would change character if absolutely every type of construction set were to be included. Whether this would be for better or worse is not for me to judge.

Participating on this site has actually kindled my interest in LEGO and, as someone who has retired, I'm now considering venturing into MINDSTORMS® and Technic as a fun way of learning informally about robotics.

If you decide to limit questions strictly to LEGO and compatibles may I humbly suggest you change the site description to something like:

Bricks
For LEGO® and compatible building block enthusiasts

In any event, thanks to all on a very friendly SE.


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Do we know when the first election is due?
In the post Congratulations, you're no longer in Beta! Catija wrote on 2019-08-01:

full-site elections will be delayed but will be scheduled eventually

Do we know anything about the planned timeframe of this eventuality?
To avoid misunderstandings, I'm more than happy with the current moderator team, but from other SE sites I gathered the election is a yearly occurrence.

I honestly do not know. The 'graduation' seems to be a mostly cosmetic change with the most noticeable change being the removal of 'Beta' in our sites title. I have contacted Catija♦ in the moderators chat, so hopefully we can get an official response from the SE team.

UPDATE:
I appreciate your patience! The election is scheduled to start September 20th. For more information, see this post.
Great question!
Elections aren't annual, actually. We have some literature that says they're "regular" but that doesn't mean they're on a schedule. We actually run elections when they're needed, in most cases - and we decide they're needed based on when mods step down or when they disappear, which happens from time to time. On some sites like Stack Overflow, that means we may have elections one or two times per year and on smaller sites, we may go five years between elections.
All of that said, this doesn't really apply to y'all since what you're asking about is the first full-site election - what we used to refer to as a site's "Graduation election". These were part of our plan when we rolled out the announcement about the sites leaving beta and it has really been hard that we haven't been able to follow through on that.
The last year has been really complicated for a number of reasons that have caused various delays and greater need for elections across the network. I can go into more detail but the end result is this:

Elections take a good amount of manual work by CMs, so we try to only have a few elections running at a time.
A delay in running elections through January and February added to an already large backlog.
The new moderator agreement is leaving some sites with fewer mods than they need due to mods being absent, taking this time to step down, or declining the agreement.

So, three of the CMs (myself, Cesar and JNat) are working through a list of sites that I have triaged on a presentation board:

The red circle is y'all - those teal sticky notes are sites that I'm going to check in with starting in January. There are a couple of caveats that will decide when y'all actually see an election here:

how many of the yellow sticky notes become orange. The yellow stickies generally represent sites with fewer than three mods. We generally want sites to have at least three, even if there's not a lot of activity on the site because it leaves room for people to be on vacation or take a break without stepping down completely.
when the new CM tooling for elections is complete. Right now, we can only run a few elections at the same time because of the amount of work each takes. Once the project to update our tools is complete (it's in progress now), we'll be able to double or triple the number of elections running at a time.

Since y'all have three mods who are generally active, even though you're absolutely owed an election, we made the decision to hold off on it until we've got some of our other things in a good state.
Let me know if you have any other questions!

Goodness. I didn't realise the amount of planning required to coordinate and hold elections network-wide.


text:
Is uploading the image of an instruction sheet a copyright violation to be avoided?
In this answer the requested instruction sheet was found in a posting on a site not dedicated to the permanent hosting of content (Ebay). This means the link provided will eventually rot and the linked content is going to be lost. There are two perspectives here, one is to avoid violating the copyright of the instruction sheet and the other is to keep providing information for future visitors.
What is the official way to solve this conundrum, or what is the opinion of the community?

My concern was not actually for Ritvik's copyright, but for the eBay user. I didn't have a problem with linking to the auction listing (and its images) but could reasonably see someone being unhappy that I copied their image and used it for some other purpose.

I am no expert in copyright law and this can tend to be a fairly complicated subject with terms that varies between countries, so I will do my best to give my interpretation.
For photographs of instruction sheets, set boxes, promotional materials and so on, I believe the copyright belongs to the company that designed the products (LEGO for example) and not the photographer, in this case the eBay user.
I noticed that in this particular case the brand is Ritvik and not LEGO so this is an exception. So in this case it's a bit difficult for me to describe a clear answer as it's a photo of another companies intellectual property.
LEGO generally do not seem to have a problem with people sharing these sorts of things as long as it is done so as fair use and not someone attempting to scam, mislead or harm. If someone was attempting to pass of these instructions as their own, perhaps selling them as their own design, that would be in bad faith. If this was ever an issue I believe it would have been raised at some point as part of us becoming a recognised LEGO group.
The Stack Exchange official guidance is very relevant in this case, as it is mostly about plagiarism of written work.

Perhaps I could suggest some general rules for avoiding copyright violations:

Wherever possible use your own original material.
Clarify the copyright status, some images are available under an open licence which enables free distribution with or without modification and attribution. Google Image search for examples allows you to search for unlicensed material.
Attempt to contact the creator for permission (perhaps more likely to work with individuals as opposed to large companies).
Attribute the creator, perhaps including a link to the original source along with their name.
As a last resort, avoid using copyrighted material all together. Consider if fair use of the copyrighted material is valid and adds value to the answer.

Most jurisdictions have some form of fair use/fair dealing in relation to copyright. Fair use in the US allows use of copyrighted works in certain cases:

the fair use of a copyrighted work ... for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:

the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
the nature of the copyrighted work;
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Based on those factors, most of our use of copyrighted works should fall under fair use because:

We are using them for non-profit educational purposes.
We expect that our impact on the copyright holder (e.g. TLG) is not negative
We are typically using only a portion of a work (instruction step, photo of a set box or build, etc).

I believe it may be reasonable to consider even complete instructions as only a small portion of the overall work, as the set itself is the complete work. I don't personally see an issue with this content on our site, but I am not a lawyer. Several sites have existed for ages that host LEGO set instructions, and it is clear that TLG doesn't have a problem with those existing.
I'm not aware of any DMCA take down notices against our site during my time as a moderator, so I don't personally see a reason to take a more conservative stance on copyright at this time.
Wikipedia's policy on non-free content may also be informative if you've not seen it.


text:
Where should generic toy identification questions go?
Based on this question from the close queue and prior discussion on meta, I'm wondering: is there an appropriate place within StackExchange to discuss generic toy identification questions?
I've found quite a few random bits in bins of supposed LEGO that would be good to identify.  I'm not suggesting that Bricks.SE is the right venue for this, but it would be nice to know where to send folks, if there is such a place.

I don't think there's such a site.
A few days ago, user @Rand'alThor compiled a list of Stack Exchange sites accepting identification questions: Which SE sites accept "identification" questions? but there is simply no Stack Exchange website for toys in general.


text:
Will there be Winter Bash 2020 competition on Bricks.SE?
Last year we had Winter Bash 2019 competition. While you could win some LEGO prizes last year it was quite fun to participate on its own. Are we going to have something like that this Winter Bash period as well?

Thanks for the reminder. I had prepared this beforehand, but I forgot to post it promptly. This year's competition post is up now:
Winter Bash 2020 LEGO Prizes!
Please use that thread for any questions, discussion, or adjustments that may need to be made.

Considering the amount of bickering last year (see here), I hope that at least some of the proposed changes are applied if there are valuable prizes to be won (which inevitably attracts a crowd).
In short, if we could find a way to keep to the intended spirit of the competition (as outlined here):

The goal here is to facilitate positive engagement on the site both to celebrate the holidays and because this is the time of year when we get a lot of new traffic from parents and others just getting into LEGO. My hope is that providing prizes for this will facilitate meaningful engagement on the site. Please don't make a mess of things just to earn hats. :)

and here:

My hope is that Winter Bash can help increase engagement between current users and new users over the next several weeks by encouraging current users to be active on the site.

then I'm all for it, but I'm afraid it's a bit late to start discussing the best way now, as the hats are already being collected.


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Winter Bash 2020 LEGO Prizes!
Happy holidays everyone! Bricks Stack Exchange is once again participating in the Winter Bash celebration with the rest of the Stack Exchange network!

There are a few different ways to win prizes this year. All winners will get a set of their choosing worth up to 100 EUR.

2 winners will be selected randomly from everyone who earns at least 5 hats. Progress can be checked on the Bricks leaderboard.
1 winner will be selected for the best submission to the building competition.
1 winner will be selected randomly from the other submissions to the building competition.

Thanks go to TLG for supporting this activity by providing prizes for us!
All winners will need to provide me with a shipping address within 1 week of the end of the competition, or their prize will be forfeited. This contest is unfortunately not open to residents of Iran, North Korea, Myanmar/Burma, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Syria, and any other U.S. sanctioned country and where prohibited or restricted by law. This is a legal requirement that is outside of both our control and The LEGO Group's control.
The goal here is to facilitate positive engagement on the site both to celebrate the holidays and because this is the time of year when we get a lot of new traffic from parents and others just getting into LEGO. My hope is that providing prizes for this will facilitate meaningful engagement on the site. Please don't make a mess of things just to earn hats. :)
Good luck and have fun!

Will everybody get the same amount of “votes” in the raffle, or will you use a pro-rating system like the one proposed after last year’s Winter Bash? I proposed giving everyone with at least 5 hats one entry into the raffle, and then adding entries for every 3?/5? additional hats attained.

@PhilB. The plan for this year is to simply give each person with over 5 hats one entry into the drawing. This is somewhat logistically simpler for me, and also removes any incentive at all for folks to go overboard collecting hats. If folks are looking for more chances to win, we do have the building competition available.


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Winter Bash 2020 Building Competition
2020 has been a challenging year for most of us. I know that my holiday plans look very different than in previous years. For this year's challenge, we'd love to see submissions that explore the great things that are still present in the 2020 holiday season, even in the midst of the ongoing pandemic. Here's a summary prompt:

Capture the joy in the unique 2020 holiday season

Submissions for this year's building competition should meet the following criteria:

Builds must be original content that has not been shared in any venue previously.
Builds may only use genuine LEGO elements.
The model should fit within a 16x16 baseplate. We want this to be a relatively open competition based on creativity, and not an opportunity for you to show off how many bricks you have.
Designs must conform to our community guidelines and must not contain content that a reasonable person would find offensive either to themselves or to a child.
Digital submissions are acceptable.
Multiple submissions per user are allowed.
All submissions must be submitted to this thread before the end of Winter Bash (January 2nd). There are no limits on the number of photos you can share for each submission.

We're offering a 100 EUR LEGO set prize for the winner and one randomly selected user who shared a non-winning submission. The determination of the winner will be influenced community votes, but the final determination of a winner will be at my discretion.
A winner will be selected approximately one week after the end of Winter Bash to allow time for interested users to vote and/or leave comments on submissions.
Good luck, and happy building!

Will voting be extended a little after Jan 2nd to give late entries some room? Also, is the number of photos/pictures somehow limited? But great idea anyway!

Oh, and is it limited to one submission per user?

@ChristianRau Great questions. I've updated the post to allow multiple submissions per user, indicate that unlimited photos may be shared, and give a week after the competition for voting.

Thank you. I also came up with another question meanwhile. ;-) Are we allowed to publish the submissions in other venues once the competition is over? I'm sure we are, but I thought I'd ask.

@ChristianRau Absolutely. I'd even be happy for you to share your work elsewhere while the competition is active. That rule is only in place to prevent folks from just sharing old MOCs that happen to vaguely meet the criteria for this competition. Submissions should be new creations built for this contest.

With Christmas and New Year both cancelled, a lot of classic Christmas motifs kinda fell flat. I had really liked to build a little micro-scale Christmas market, but that's just not 2020. But there's still a few things we can enjoy over the holidays, like football! So I designed a model of Heinz Field, the stadium of the Pittsburgh Steelers. I wanted to build a model of Heinz Field for a while now, but I intended it to be about 3 times as large and apart from a few rough ideas it never really took shape yet. So this was a great opportunity to try it on a smaller scale first (it's around 1:2000).

It was quite a challenge on this scale and as you may notice I didn't quite fit it into 16x16 if you include the SNOTed trim of tiles around the border, although I already cut away a small piece from the northwestern parking extension. But the model itself is technically only in a 16x16 (or even 14x16) space. I needed the trim, though, because the base construction is rather complicated as I had to do quite a bit of offsetting by half-plates to get all the seating and facades work out in the way I wanted.
So far it's only a digital design, but I verified that it's all properly buildable with existing LEGO pieces. There's also no parts out of the ordinary and according to Stud.IO it's about 500 parts at ~50€. I plan to build it at some point in reality, even if I might not get my hands on all the parts before the competition is over.

For film enthusiasts, the model can actually be modified rather easily into an homage to one of the best movies filmed at Heinz Field:

Update: I have since refined the design and put it up on Rebrickable.

This looks brilliant! Great work!

Reall good one

So what else can we do during Christmas quarantine? Watch films, of course! But since I already built a model of Nakatomi Plaza recently, I turned to the next best Christmas classic and designed a model of the McCallisters' house from Home Alone. It might make for a nice addition to the minifig scale version we'll likely get on IDEAS next year.

It features the van of the "Wet Bandits" as well as the tree house Kevin escapes to at the end, although the 16x16 limitation meant they're a bit more crammed together. The tile trim around the border wasn't directly necessary, but the whole thing looks a bit nicer this way and the extra height of the base was needed anyway for the basement entrance. The base would even have room for a battery pack or USB connector and the interior of the house has enough room for one or more LEDs, but many of the windows aren't translucent. Whenever I build it for real, I might make the windows more lighting friendly, similar to the SNOTed ones on the side wings.

It is only a digital design so far and I probably won't build it until around next Christmas. But I made sure it's properly buildable using genuine LEGO pieces and according to Stud.IO it's about 450 parts at ~50€. Regarding the parts, you'll notice in the front view that the roof isn't perfect, but for now I just don't know how to get an inside and outside slope corner directly next to each other.

Update: I have since refined the design and put it up on Rebrickable.

This is great! Those printed 1x1 plates makes perfect little windows.

Winter Hike
Here's my take on a winter hike through the snowy woods:


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Where does Python questions belong to?
You could find a lot of questions with the python tag but does it belong on this site because it also about the ev3 programmable LEGO brick or is it better on Stack Overflow because it's about programming or are both valid?
I've also seen that Stack Overflow also has a "lego", "mindstorms" and "ev3" tag.

Yes, the tag belongs on this site as well. There are a number of 3rd-party firmware replacements for the Mindstorms hubs, so it makes sense for us to be able to tag questions with the language being used in the programme, especially if it's relevant to the question.
As with many programmable systems, there's going to be some cross-over between sites, however many of the questions tagged lego on StackOverflow either predate this site, or seem to be more targeted to SO with things like "How to use TensorFlow to categorise LEGO bricks" or "How to import custom python modules" on an hub ;)


text:
Winter Bash 2020 Winners!
I want to say a big thank you to everyone who participated in Winter Bash this year. We had a total of 600 users earn 1,070 hats. That's a 3x increase in users since last year.
We had 128k visits to our site this December, the most in any December that I have data for, and it was great to see everyone welcoming new folks to the site and answering questions. Thank you to each of you for keeping the site tidy, active, and welcoming for all of the folks that were interacting with our community for the first time.
Drawing Winners
There's no prize for the most hats this year, but I did want to give a shoutout to @Alex for earning the most hats with 18. Alex has been a prolific contributor for the past two years here and it's great to see their name topping this list.
The following 24 users earned at least 5 hats:
Alex (18 hats)
jncraton (15 hats)
chicks (14 hats)
Michael Verschaeve (13 hats)
zovits (13 hats)
Eran (12 hats)
RSchulz (12 hats)
Christian Rau (9 hats)
A J (9 hats)
JW8 (9 hats)
PeterJ (9 hats)
Phil B. (8 hats)
Zhaph - Ben Duguid (8 hats)
Syberion (8 hats)
Tot Zam (8 hats)
H. Pauwelyn (7 hats)
Alexander O'Mara (7 hats)
Ankit Sharma (7 hats)
mindstormsboi (7 hats)
Akash (6 hats)
Glorfindel (6 hats)
Uli (5 hats)
niamulbengali (5 hats)
Alexander Nied (5 hats)

I've excluded the mods from the drawing as I do each year. The two randomly selected winners are:

Uli
Michael Verschaeve

Congrats to our winners!
Building Competition
Grand Prize
The winner of our building competition this year is the beautiful model of Heinz Field by Christian Rau:

This is a perfectly designed microscale model that captures the architectural detail of this structure perfectly.
Random Winner
The winner selected from the other users submitting content for the contest is the delightful winter hike put together by chicks:

Instructions for winners
All winners will get one set of their choosing worth up to 100 EUR that is in stock or available to order as a backorder at their local shop.lego.com. Winners should email me at my SE username at gmail with shipping information and prize selections. I will be reaching out via other means in the next few days if I don't hear anything from the winners.

I did not expect to be mentioned, since I didn't do anything out of ordinary. But thanks for it! And congratulations to Winter Bash 2020 winners!

Thank you very much! While it raised my own chances, it's a bit unfortunate that so few people participated in the building competition. Given that there was also a random selection, the chances are still a lot higher than just through hats, so it's also surprising more people didn't try their luck. It was already featured in the side bar, maybe a creating dedicated community event could help raise more awareness next year? Anyway, it was really fun and I enjoyed it a lot. I didn't know the set needs to be in stock, though. I think the entire shop is largely bombed out since Black Friday. ;-)

@ChristianRau I would have given you a run for your money, but couldnt participate this year due to personal circumstances. Congrats on your prize!

Wow, thank you so much!  I'm so glad Christian's model won in the building.  This is awesome microscale architecture.  I'm also amazed that I came in second on hats.  It was fun to see which other StackExchanges were near us in the leaderboard.

People named Alex really representing in the hats list! Good work, Alexs!

Thanks a lot ! Also congrats to the other winners.

pity we didn't have many moc submissions...

Received the set yesterday. It's the ship in a bottle. I think it will make for a very lovely vase for the flowers set. Thanks again !


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Did we mean to have motor and motors tags?
I just noticed when adding the motors tag to a question that we also have a motor tag.  Is there some value to having the singular and plural of this word both be tags?  This seems more confusing than useful.  Am I missing something?

Looks like we created a synonym for Motors to motor a few years ago, but we'd not completed the merge.
I've done that now.


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2020: a year in moderation

As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the past 12 months.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:

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

That doesn't eliminate the need for having moderators altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.
So as we welcome 2021, and in keeping with tradition, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some exciting stats. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Bricks over the past 12 months:

Action
Moderators
Community¹

Users suspended²
1
4

Users destroyed³
1
0

Users contacted
1
0

User suspensions lifted early
1
0

Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue
71
494

Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue
5
24

Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue
8
170

Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue
5
89

Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue
55
384

Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue
7
277

Tag synonyms proposed
0
1

Questions reopened
1
1

Questions protected
1
11

Questions merged
5
0

Questions flagged⁵
0
78

Questions closed
28
53

Question flags handled⁵
40
37

Posts undeleted
3
12

Posts locked
3
2

Posts deleted⁶
154
111

Posts bumped
0
50

Comments flagged
7
81

Comments deleted⁷
281
211

Comment flags handled
64
24

Answers flagged
3
368

Answer flags handled
334
38

All comments on a post moved to chat
1
0

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

Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: 2019: a year in moderation

You can also check out this report on other sites

Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites

A big thank you to Shog9 for writing the queries and script to facilitate fetching and posting this data to all the sites in the network, and to Brian for the subsequent work making the whole thing more user friendly.
Wishing everyone a happy 2021!


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Does anyone still have a clean shot of our old logo?
Since moving to the new site layouts, we've lost our old brick logo. I've finally found the time and inclination to update my own avatar image to a cleaner, crisper one, and I'd like to drop on the Bricks logo for SO/SE at least.
I'll recreate it if not, but wanted to save myself 5 minutes.
All in all, this will teach me to not save out my original sources.

I'm not sure I understand which logo you are looking for. Is it this one? https://cdn.sstatic.net/Sites/bricks/Img/apple-touch-icon@2.png

Cheers, yeah, that will do - I was after the blue on white like you can see on my profile pic, but I can work with that :)

I see. I don't have the white one anywhere.


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What does “user was removed” mean?
I saw a notice in my Achievements suggesting that I was removed as a user from the Bricks group. As far as I can tell this isn’t true, but I’m still wondering what to make of the notification. Can anyone shed light on why i received the notification or what it means? See screenshot.

This is one of the most demotivational features of StackExchange for me.  I see the need for it, but it doesn't work out too nicely sometimes.  On a few sites I don't have any knowledge to make answers, but I've made tons of edits.  So SE comes along and removes 10-50 rep because of a user deletion.  That's 5-25 edits that I wrote and got approved by somebody too.  The reviewers don't lose credit, but the writer of the edit doesn't.  Oh well.

It means that another user that voted on one of your questions or answers was removed from the site. When this happens, the system reverts all the reputation changes that happened when that user upvotes or downvotes on posts.
There are a number of reasons that an account might be removed ranging from the user requesting it themselves, through to the account being linked to spamming or sock puppets.
For more details, please see this help topic: Why do I have a reputation change on my reputation page that says 'User was removed'?


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

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

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

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

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


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2021 Q2 Activity Support Proposals
I've been thinking about how to use our Q2 activity support from TLG. Last summer, we compiled proposals from a number of users for the use of this support. That seemed to drive great content and was well-received by the community, so I'd like to do that again.
I will be accepting proposals here until Friday, June 11th. I'm very open to input from anyone on this process. However, because I have to report back to TLG how these sets were used, final decisions over what is approved will be at my discretion. Important factors for me will be community feedback for a user's proposal (via comments and votes here), as well as the quality of content that a user generally creates.
Users submitting proposals must meet the following requirements:

You must have earned at least 200 rep in 2021 or 1k rep total.
You may not resell these sets. This is a TLG requirement.
The requested set(s) need to be prominently featured in at least one question. Your question(s) should be part of the proposal to receive your set(s). The question will likely be self-answered by you and should be tagged as activity-support. Alternatively, I'm open to other non-Q&A creative uses of these sets as well (social media campaigns, etc) as long as they serve the core purpose of our community.
You must be committed to completing your proposed work within 1 month of receiving your sets.

For those of you unaware, TLG has updated the way activity support works this year, so we can now request the following each year:

3 total support requests (Q1, Q2, Q3/Q4 submitted by October)
667 EUR per request
10 items total, up to 5 copies of the same set
Maximum of 5 addresses on the request

I look forward to seeing all of your creative ideas here.
Update:
We're moving forward with both of the proposals below.

Out of curiosity would the activity support scheme apply to answering existing questions on the site? I am really proud of the fact the site has such a low rate of unanswered questions and there are some questions here that might be interesting to answer

@Ambo100 Absolutely. I'm not sure what questions you have in mind, but it would be excellent to deliver a great answer to an unanswered question.

I was curious about this question but I found what I think would be a good enough answer without needing to get the set. I was also curious about your question about road plates but I am not sure if I could find an answer even if I had the set.

I'm trying to find more ways to demonstrate and showcase LEGO building in our community. I'd like to propose that each interested participant this quarter receive a copy of 80022 in addition to their own proposed set. The set includes multiple copies of the following new elements:
72869 (9x black, 2x purple)

73230 (4x)

70681 (8x)

Interested participants would each share an answer for a question such as "What new building opportunities are created using the new 1x1 brick with axle hole?". I would expect answers to include building ideas, table scraps demonstrating techniques, and/or MOCs prominently using the new elements. This would be similar in concept to what New Elementary and other communities have done with their parts festivals. These questions would be asked one at a time over several months to create more content over a longer period of time and to not overwhelm participants.
I know that not everyone is a builder, so folks can opt out of the new parts challenge and still put forth a proposal.

I like this idea. 80022 set is priced at 99.99€. If we get maximum number (5) of ideas selected and everyone chose to receive this set, we have just 167.05 euro left to split.

@Alex That's a good point. If we get 5 people interested, it might make sense to pick a less expensive set for some of them to explore. I also considered 41449 for the new curved window element.

I know this is possibly too much to ask for, but I’d like to review set 10278 Police Station (EUR 179.99) with a copy of 60304 Road Plates (EUR 19.99) to answer the question: what are different ways I can use the new road plates for my modular city?
If both together are too much, I am okay in dropping 60304 as I can easily obtain a copy myself.

I love this idea, but it would be tough to justify 200 EUR if we get other great submissions. New Elementary did cover this to some extent already in their review: https://www.newelementary.com/2020/12/lego-city-review-mocs-60304-road-plates.html

I’ve got some additonal ideas to what newelementary suggested, but I’ll check and possibly put in another suggestion for a review.


text:
Announcing a “Graduation” election for 2021
Bricks Stack Exchange will begin the nomination stage for an election on 27 September 2021, as your “graduation” election (as a result of having lost your beta label a while back).
The timeline:

Next week, I'll post a question collection post on Meta, so that the community can post questions they'd like to see the candidates answer.

Starting on 27 September, users can nominate themselves. The top questions collected the previous week will be compiled into a questionnaire on the election page, so that potential moderators can answer them.

On 4 October, if there are four or more candidates, we'll run an election. If not, I'll extend the nomination period for a week. If, at the end of that extension period there are still less than four candidates, I'll simply appoint the candidates who've nominated (and aren't already pro-tem mods) and we'll default to considering this a "pro-tem election" (for full details of the process, see the announcement on Meta Stack Exchange). (There's a small chance we'll need to remove a nomination, but I doubt that will come up.)

If there is an election, I'll announce the results on meta on 12 October (or 19 October, if we need to extend the nomination period).

The existing moderator team will need to run in the election if they wish to keep their positions.

If you have any questions about the process, please stick them in an answer here.

How long is the term of newly elected moderators? Is it until next election or longer? How often are the elections?

Moderators here don't have terms. They serve until they wish to step down or they become inactive. Elections are held on an as-needed basis. :)