text:
Where can I find an updated & maintained list of CAD software?
Every so often, I want to view a set of MOC instructions that exist in a CAD/digital format. But then, I conclude (perhaps incorrectly) that I can’t view it on my iPhone. However, maybe I could on my Mac, but only if I download some now-obsolete software, such as Lego Digital Designer (LDD).
When this happens, my feelings of excitement turn into feeling stuck and uninspired.
Bleh
Truth is, I have considered dabbling with CAD software as a way to play with LEGOs, but I feel uninformed and overwhelmed by the technical aspects. (I’m comfortable with computers & programming, but CAD seems like another animal.)
I’ve also noticed that CAD options can vary quite a bit and the choices can come & go from year-to-year. So, I worry that I could start down a dead end.
Examples:

TLG’s Design byMe service ended in 2012.
I read online the Lego Digital Designer, while still in use by many, is no longer supported by the company.
I’ve read discussions about how certain elements/parts might be available in software X, but not in software Y.
There are relatively new options, such as stud.io, with — presumably — new competitors getting ready to rear their head.

I know I’m just scratching the surface here.
This has left me wondering: Is there a good, single resource, such as a updated & maintained web page, that meets all (or most) of the following criteria?

It is a list of current & obsolete LEGO CAD software options (or authoritative recommendations), along with benefits, trade-offs, compatibility considerations, proprietary vs. open-source considerations, long-term viability, etc.
It is written for a more general audience, and not just for folks that already know a lot about MOCs and CAD software.
It includes software options for simply viewing a set of instructions without the software that created it.
It addresses different operating system or online/browser options, such as noting which ones are cross-platform or which are ideal for a smartphone, e.g., an iPhone.

So, is there such a resource? Or is it just a pie-in-the-sky idea?

I considered posting my question to the main Bricks site, but I thought it could be off-topic. If you think it belongs there — or somewhere else — please let me know.

It's certainly on-topic here - we have the following question with some answers - and hopefully we'll keep the accepted answer up to date (I updated it when Stud.io came out of beta for example):

LEGO Digital Designer Alternatives

However I don't know if it goes into enough detail for you - in which case you could either:

Offer a bounty on the question to get more indepth answers
Create a new question that references the existing one and stating that you'd specifically like the details you're after.

That said, you might still run into a bit of a pipe dream:

"It includes software options for simply viewing a set of instructions without the software that created it."

Unless someone has exported the instructions as a PDF or similar, you will probably need to have the software that created the model, or a similar one that can understand the file format.
The advantage that most of these tools have over traditional 3D tools is that they work from a parts list, and the files can therefore store just a reference to the part, it's translation and colour (see for example the LFXML format), so you'll need something installed that has the parts catalogue and can understand the file you're trying to view - thankfully many of the tools use the same base parts database, so this isn't too hard.


text:
New recognition status with TLG
Lego has begun to roll out its new model for Recognized Communities.
The gist is that there are now two tiers of recognition and three categories (Traditional LUGs, Fan Media, and Online Communities). There was previously no tiers and no distinct recognition for Online Communities.
I received the following email regarding our status:

As a key component of this model, all Recognized Communities will be
  placed into two tiers to fit both the growth of the Fan Community as
  well as the different levels of ambition and desire. This tiered
  approach will allow us to better engage and support the individual
  needs of each community, in other words put the most effort where it
  has the biggest impact on the community.
By evaluating Bricks SE based on the activity report and the past
  records, we believe your community is more locally oriented and focus
  on a fair amount of activities, contents, or traffic to stabilize the
  members participation and development. Therefore, we recommend you to
  be Tier ONE.
Please note that we will have regular evaluations based on the
  criteria of Presence, Activity, Value Creation, Compliance, Structure
  and Engagement of each Recognized Community.
In addition, to embrace the trend of digitalization and support the
  increasing activities based on online platforms, LCE is opening a new
  category in the LEGO Ambassador Network called Recognized LEGO Online
  Community (RLOC). Based on the nature that your group is mainly
  operating on Facebook/forum/Flickr/Naver and has the focus of digital
  interactive activities, we suggest transferring you from RLUG/RLFM to
  RLOC to remain your strength and stay on where your group’s interest
  is. Also, by doing that, the RLOC will have the access to the support
  which aims at facilitating the online activities mentioned above.
If you disagree to our Tier placement or your new community type,
  please reach out to us via CommunitySupport@LEGO.com and explain
  carefully where, how and why you find the placement not to be aligned
  with your needs and expectations. We will then bring your feedback to
  the first evaluation during the first quarter of 2018 and reevaluate
  your placement.

The tier placement makes sense to me. While we are a successful community, we have about an order of magnitude less activity and traffic than some of the larger sites such as Brickset and Eurobricks.
I did want to get some feedback on the distinction between Online Community and Fan Media. Which do you think is a better fit for us?
While we are certainly an online community, at the core we have a small group of highly active contributors producing content that is consumed by a much larger audience (e.g. page views outnumber posts 1000 to 1). In addition, we actively discourage using this site as a place for discussion. Other sites exists for this purpose, and our focus here is on producing high quality Q&A content. Should I advocate for us to be recognized as Fan Media, or does Online Community make sense for us?

I think we fit into the RLOC category (see below) but what I don't get is the "local impact" part of the first two bullet points in the model. How can an online community have local impact? Is it because most members are from the US (are they)? Or is the impact local around each member?

Some online communities are based primarily in certain regions or countries although this site has a very international audience.

The distinctions stated in the document are not too big. However, bullet three in the LOC brick of tier one is what Bricks SE is about: "Forum traffic mirrors activities
and is perceived as valuable by
the Community".
We mostly don't spread press releases or other fan media related material. Therefore, the category chosen by LEGO is fitting, or the other way round, we fit into the category.
I am also glad that we are considered a stable community.

Thanks for the feedback. That's very helpful. I'm also encouraged that we are considered to be a stable community.

I'm very pleased with the tier we have been assigned. I think it's a fair assessment of the current state of the site.
Bricks Stack Exchange is in an unusual fit as it is neither primarily journalistic (fan media) nor a traditional discussion forum.
I think Bricks SE is closer to the definition as a LEGO community as the content is driven very much by the community, even the less active users do contribute with voting, editing, commenting, etc...
We very rarely have articles written on this site (Events, LEGO Meetups) and they only make up a very small amount of our content.

I don't disagree that the content is driven by the community, but I wasn't sure if we were in a different place than a community like Eurobricks. It at least feel different to me, as our content is primarily consumed via search traffic and non-members.

I think from the point of view of TLG, they want to give RLFMs the chance to interview set designers and review unreleased sets. When we do rarely post articles on Meta we don't have nearly as many views as even the smallest LEGO blogs. My trip report from Billund for example, has been viewed 45 times over the past six months.

Although I wonder how Brickset and Eurobricks are categorised when they can be both be considered to be big online communities as well as fan media.

I think it's right for where we are currently - we don't really have "Activities [that] extend far beyond their circle of members/subscribers potentially with a global impact" for example - and our members here who do exhibit at events tend to do so under their LUG rather than as Bricks I think.
Interesting that we get/had access to LUGBULK - although that would be more of a nightmare to organise than for a LUG I imagine ;) However we will lose the Fan Media days, which is a shame.

That makes sense. I was thinking more along the lines of the bulk of our traffic not coming from members (e.g. 85% of traffic is from search engines).

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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

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

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

When is the drawing happening? End of winterbash?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: SE Data query

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

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

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


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

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

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


text:
When to accept?
I  participated on two  Stack  sites extenively:

Drupal - you accepted as soon as your problem  was solved. Switching accept mark was normal.
Worldbuilding - it  is highly  discouraged to accept before 24 hours passed, to give people from all over  the globe fair chance  to answer and provide best idea without feeling neglected. Switching accepted answer is unusual.

What are customs about accepting on this stack?

I think it depends a little on the question type:
If you're asking for piece or set identification, and someone has found the answer for you, then accept as soon as you're happy - it saves people from clicking through to an ambiguous question.
If you're asking for building techniques however you may want to leave that open for a while as it's possible that you'll get a few different ways to approach your problem - feel free to vote and comment on answers as they come in, this also encourages participation as people can see you're actively involved in the answers.


text:
#WhatWillYouBuild
TLG is putting together an initiative to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the LEGO brick! Many communities, blogs, and review sites will be participating by building creative models and posting to social media using the #WhatWillYouBuild hashtag.
From the Ambassador Network:

We would like to celebrate the 60th Anniversary with you and the AFOL
  Community!
You can build anything – show us your creativity! Build with friends
  or family, include your kids, build with 60 bricks, green bricks or
  whatever comes to your mind – we just want you to be part of the
  celebration!
Take pictures – take many pictures and share on Social Media using the
  #WhatWillYouBuild hashtag.

You can use any parts that you like, but the focus is around the following Classic sets:

10401 Rainbow Fun
10402 Fun Future
10403 World Fun
10404 Ocean’s Bottom
10405 Mission to Mars
40290 60 Years of the LEGO® Brick

TLG has generously offered to provide us with some of those sets, and I plan to put together some alternate models and post them on Rebrickable and elsewhere on social media to build support for both the 60th anniversary and our community. I feel bad that there isn't a good way to "share the wealth" with this opportunity in ways that are easy for traditional LUGs, but hopefully there will be more opportunity for that in the future.
Feel free to share your own designs here and on other social media!

I plan to do this with 10404 in the near future (it's the only set I have from this series). I'm also thinking of writing a review, though I'm not sure where I'll publish it, or if it'll just end up on my blog.

We got our bricks yesterday, and I put a quick model together using the parts from 10405:

I was trying to keep things imaginative and childlike while honoring the history of Lego as these sets do.
Does anyone here have access to post directly to our Twitter account, or is it just a question reposting bot?

It is just a Q posting bot. Contact the team in the TL, I know they changed how the BSE bot worded our questions, so maybe they can do something for you all here.

I wrote a review for 10404 Ocean's Bottom last week, which you can find on my site.
After building the six featured models in the set, there were a large number of pieces left over. I built two custom models: a nudibranch fitted with an engine so it can go faster:

And a sand dollar:

Very cool! Nice work!

I was going to make a conventional set using 10405, but of course my little brother stepped in...

"Who says ducks can't take over the world? Ducks can do anything!"
 - Conspiracy Theorist

This is my first post, please tell me if anything needs to be fixed. Kindly, not like this one.


text:
Do we want a parts-database or parts-library tag?
I noticed that there a lot of questions that mention a "part library", but we don't have a tag like "part-database" or "parts-library" to include those.
We have a set-database tag, but that doesn't seem to fit since parts are not sets.  Am I missing something or is there an opportunity for a useful tag here?
I got started on this while trying to find better tags for jncraton's question.  I don't think we have enough on 3D rendering for a tag that specific yet, but the "parts-database" aspect of it seems worthy of a tag to me.
I prefer "part-database" for consistency with "set-database", but "parts-library" is how people seem to use it and should at least be an alias if not the primary tag.

I added the part-database tag and created parts-library as a synonym.

That makes sense to me. I like part-database with parts-library as an alias.


text:
Ideas for our Annual Support package from TLG
Some of you may be aware that as a TLG-recognized community we receive an annual support package. This is a box of LEGO sets that belong to our community to use for events, projects, promotions, and marketing. These are frequently used by LUGs and other communities for building events, prizes, or other giveaways.
Annual Support comes with a number of stipulations. The key ones are:

Any LEGO element or LEGO product (purchased or free of charge) acquired through the LEGO Ambassador Network Support Programs is offered solely for the use of the Recognized Community and its members and cannot be sold, resold or handed over to the public.
Support in any capacity, is offered solely for the personal use of participating RLUG/RLFM/RLOC members; discounted and/or free of charge items are under no circumstances to be resold or given to the public.

Many communities have several things that we do not that make it clearer what to do with these items:

In person meetings making it easy to use these items for group purposes.
In person events making it free and easy to give these items away.
A popular public-facing web space to use for reviews that drive traffic and interest for the community.
A budget that can be used for staffing and/or shipping to send out these items as contest prizes, giveaways, or other purposes.

Basically, I'm soliciting ideas for what to do with a box of LEGO sets that was given to us.
Update: Here are the sets we were given if it's helpful:

Ideas: Fishing Store (21310), Women of NASA (21312)
Architecture: Sydney (21032), Shanghai (21039)
Brick Headz: Rey, Kylo, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, Flash
Technic: 42074, 42077
Creator: 31072, 31075, 31080, 31074
Classic: 10712, 10715

Update 2: We're going to run with Phil's suggestion. I've created a separate question for specific proposals here: 2018 Annual Support Proposals

First of all, your second point regarding what we don’t have in comparison with other groups is not valid, as the rules clearly stipulate that items are not to be handed out to the public (so we cannot use them as give-aways and neither can other groups).
My suggestions is this:

Offer the sets up to the top contributers/most active users (one per user)
Condition for acceptance is that the set (or its pieces) need to be prominently featured in a future question by that user on this platform. The question to be answered should be part of the request to receive a set.
You, as the admin, determine which users and which questions qualify, and distribute sets accordingly.
Postage is paid for by the person receiving the set
The question needs to be posted within a month of receiving the set.
The question can be self-answered by the poster (actually, it most likely will be and needs to be).

For example, good questions could be about the particular use of a special piece, or the differences between a current and past mold of a piece, or the compatibility of a set with another set, etc.

That's good clarification on giveaways. My understanding is that these can be used as prizes and given to members of our community, they just can't be given out to non-members. This was clarified by TLG on LAN: "We offer support on community level and then the community decides how to put it to good use within the rules stated above. As an RLOC I would assume you put your support up as prizes in competitions or raffle within your community and its members. Which is in line with the rules of use."

Thanks for the additional detail. I think we should use these gifts as a way to drive more relevant content/participation. A give-away is easy to do (even a contest) but it doesn’t really drive the usage/viewership of this site much.

That sounds reasonable to me.

I unboxed everything and added the set list to my question if that is helpful.

I could definitely come up with some questions re: 42077 ... but let me know if my suggestion is what you want to go with ....

This seems to be the way to go. I've created a separate question for specific proposals here: https://bricks.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/432/2018-annual-support-proposals

Reposted on proposal Q&A here
I have an idea for 42077 Rally Car, which I think LEGO would appreciate.

How can I motorize 42077 Rally Car with LEGO Power Functions?
The Rally Car set looks really nice, and even has a built-in steering system which can be controlled by a gear on the top. There's also a fair bit of extra room inside, is there a way to add Power Functions elements to make it remote controlled?

And then the answer would be instructions on how to rebuild the set to accommodate adding Power Functions, which I'm confident can be done fairly easily.
I have lots of Power Functions elements on hand, and would definitely be willing to write both the question and answer, and I could probably come up with some other Q&A's while at it. I also think this could potentially be beneficial to LEGO as it advertises a way to use both this set and their Power Functions elements (and a reason to buy them).

Assuming you mean 42077, not 42074, that was also what I had in mind :)

I've created a separate question for specific proposals here: https://bricks.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/432/2018-annual-support-proposals

I've added some details to the tag wiki for annual-support - feel free to edit/update as appropriate.

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


text:
2018 Annual Support Proposals
It's time to divide up our Annual Support from TLG as discussed here.
Here are the sets that we were given:
Ideas: Fishing Store (21310), Women of NASA (21312)
Architecture: Sydney (21032), Shanghai (21039)
Brick Headz: Rey, Kylo, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, Flash
Technic: 42074, 42077
Creator: 31072, 31075, 31080, 31074
Classic: 10712, 10715

I will be accepting proposals for using these sets for Bricks.SE purposes here until June 8th.
Users submitting proposals must meet the following requirements:

You must be in good standing with Bricks.SE and must have earned at least 125 rep in 2018 or 1k rep total.
Shipping costs will be paid by you to me via PayPal. I'll ship USPS and invoice you the actual shipping cost including anything I spend on shipping materials.
Sets may never be resold or given to non-members. This is a TLG requirement. Sets will be shipped unboxed to further discourage resale.
The requested set(s) and/or elements need to be prominently featured in at least one question by you. Your question(s) should be part of the request to receive your set(s). The question will likely be self-answered by you and should be tagged as annual-support. Alternatively, I'm open to other non-Q&A creative uses of these sets as well (social media campaigns, etc).
Depending on the number of proposals we have, I may be including some of the "leftover" sets in your shipment. These will not be required to be used directly for answering questions, but they certainly could be.

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 who gets what will be at my sole discretion.

Hmm I'm a little worried if the shipping costs would add up depending on the size of the set (not that I'm interested in any of the bigger sets), as well as where I live (Singapore). I hear shipping sets unboxed reduces that a bit, is that true? Also, if costs can only be ascertained by preparing the shipment, I'm not sure if I'll be prepared for it.

Shipping would likely be quite expensive to Singapore, unfortunately. USPS has a shipping cost calculator if that is helpful: https://postcalc.usps.com/

Thanks, sadly it does look like it'd cost as much if not more to get a set like 31080 or 10715 shipped than it would to just buy it locally (and boxed) :(

Have all the sets been sent out?

@Ambo100 They've all been sent out, except for the handful of Creator and Classic sets that I'm using.

@jncraton I have finally posted my annual support question and given an answer as well. Apologies for the delay.

I would like a chance to review 21310 Old Fishing Store and answer the question:

How big is the color inconsistency problem of Sand Green colored LEGO bricks?

Sand Green has historically been a color with significant color shade differences, and since Old Fishing Store has a lot of these bricks and tiles, it will be a good set to review this.

I like that. Would I be correct in assuming that you have older sand green parts hanging around so that you can compare consistency over time as well as within a single large set?

My LEGO collection only goes a few years back, but I will try. I can also ask some local LUG members to assist me if needed.

No worries if that doesn't work out. I was mostly just curious.

I'd like to move forward with sending this out to you. Please send an email to my SE username at gmail with your shipping details.

Done and done...

I have an idea for 42077 Rally Car, which I think LEGO would appreciate.

How can I motorize 42077 Rally Car with LEGO Power Functions?
The Rally Car set looks really nice, and even has a built-in steering system which can be controlled by a gear on the top. There's also a fair bit of extra room inside, is there a way to add Power Functions elements to make it remote controlled?

And then the answer would be instructions on how to rebuild the set to accommodate adding Power Functions, which I'm confident can be done fairly easily (I'm thinking servo and L motor would do nicely).
I have lots of Power Functions elements on hand, and would definitely be willing to write both the question and answer, and I could probably come up with some other Q&A's while at it. I also think this could potentially be beneficial to LEGO as it advertises a way to use both this set and their Power Functions elements (and a reason to buy them).
For LEGO's benefit, I can also post instructions to social media.
UPDATE: Q&A posted.

I'd like to move forward with sending this out to you. Please send an email to my SE username at gmail with your shipping details.

I think I could do something with the brickheadz

Can two or more Brick Headz be combined to create a figure on a larger scale that is similar to Brick Headz or at least is humanoid in appearance?

I don't have any of the donated brick headz but have about a dozen of the older ones, I have also the Brick Me set to add pieces.
I would answer something like "Yes, I combined Brick Headz X and Y and pieces of Z to get: " followed with a picture of the result. If the question/answer is well received I would attempt instructions as a follow up...

I'll happily send all of the Brick Headz to you. Please send an email to my SE username at gmail with your shipping details.

I'd like to hang on to a few of the Classic and Creator sets. I'm assuming that these will be a bit less popular among our AFOL userbase.
I don't have precise questions in mind since I haven't looked at the parts yet, but I'd like to do something along the lines of:

What are some uses for {part}?

I like to make alternate models, and these themes are usually brilliant for that. I'd likely post many alternate builds to Rebrickable and hopefully that experience would give me ideas for good building or part identification questions along the lines of this or this.

Nah I just don't meet the requirements since I haven't been active in the past year.

@BoltClock I've updated the requirements to be either 125 rep in 2018 (so we can include new and active users) or 1k total rep (so that we can include folks like you who have contributed a lot in the past but haven't been active recently). The goal of these requirements is to prevent people from creating an account just for the purpose of getting a free set. :) I don't want to exclude legitimate participants.

I'm reading this while in a LEGO Certified Store checking out the new stuff... I gotta get home stat.


text:
Can we change the icon of the Brick community
Is it possible to set a custom icon / favicon for the Bricks community ?
if yes, is there any guidelines for the icon (provided by SE or can be any copyleft icon, …) ?

Our icon is already slightly customised compared to most of the other "non-graduated" Stack Exchange sites. As we haven't fully graduated, we're using the standard "speech bubble" icon, however instead of having the site initials in it, we have a 1x1 brick (which is close to, but doesn't impinge on) LEGO's 2x2 brick favicon.
Once we graduate, as per the recent Theme Update announcement, we may well qualify for further enhancements such as custom badge icons, updated favicon, etc.

you already changed it right?

True, and the graduated designs have mostly been deprecated anyway.


text:
Criteria for losing "beta" status
In this question about changing the BRICKS icon it was mentioned that we have not fully graduated yet. I guess this means that we are still labelled "beta".
What are the criteria to be a graduated site? Are we close to that goal?
Edit:
I just noticed this question about boosting graduation qualification in which a screenshot of criteria was posted. Where can we find this list of criteria and how well we are doing currently?

The easiest place to track our progress (and where that screenshot came from) is on the original "Area 51" proposal:

LEGO - Area 51

As of today (11 September 2018), we're showing:

The key metric that we're down on is questions per day - we're fairly slow to generate new content, and this is now the key driver of a site's consideration for graduation (emphasis from the original):

from now on, when a site starts to consistently receive ten new questions every day, we'll consider it for graduation. This is not 100% automated; CMs will still be manually checking on how individual communities are doing, and some sites might still graduate "earlier" or "later" than their question activity alone would suggest; but it's an effective rule of thumb.

It used to be that sites that didn't meet the criteria were closed fairly swiftly, however as you can see from Shog9's answer here - with our high answered rate, and the dedication of our users, we're in a stable, good place.
See also this answer to "How do I know if a beta Stack Exchange site is growing well?":

Graduation needs a body of expert content, and a community to maintain and expand it. It's much harder to quantify that - there are some stats that can be manually generated by the SE developers, such as the number of high-rep users who visited in the last few weeks, and so on. And there are publicly-visible indicators such as the liveliness of the site meta and its chat. As more and more sites come through Area51 to graduation, we're all learning more about what indicators work, and what don't.

2018-10-03 - Edit to add:
The new StackExchange Theme includes the following module in the right bar on the homepage of the main site (and other Beta sites):

2019-08-01 - Edit to add:
As part of the revamp of the graduation process, we're no longer in beta!


text:
The Element Quality Team wants our feedback
The following was posted on the LEGO Ambassador Network yesterday:

The Element Quality Team reached out to us [the Community team]
  because they realize that AFOLs use LEGO elements in new and creative
  ways and if there is a concern it is likely that a member of your
  community could find it.
Please continue to report set specific errors to LEGO Consumer
  Services but if your community finds an element concern or element
  limitation post your concern here and we will make sure it is passed
  on to the Element Quality Team!
We will consistently share your community member’s feedback with the
  team which could create follow up steps like the request for pictures
  or videos and we will share any feedback the Element Quality Team
  provides.

This represents a welcome change giving us a more direct channel to report quality issues with elements. I'll report any specific issues that come up organically in questions here, but if you have noticed anything specific that you believe would be helpful to share with the team now, feel free to let me know.


text:
How can one ask for LDD File recommendations without the fear of being off-topic?
A bit of context
So I am busy working a diorama of the Pacific Rim Shatterdome in Lego Digital Designer, and am struggling to build the scenery normally associated with the Jaeger docks/hangars, as opposed to building the Jaegers themselves.
This question
Given my current predicament, can one ask for LDD file recommendations on the Bricks Stack Exchange, (of course the recipient taking all the risks when downloading said files)? If so, how can one go about doing so without the thread be closed for whatever reason, primarily off topic? Would a new tag be needed to ask such a question?

I'd recommend trying to focus your question on techniques for building that you're struggling with rather than "can someone build this for me" type questions - try to describe the problem you're having, examples of what you're trying to achieve, that sort of thing and you'll probably get a good answer, that helps everyone.
So for example:

I'm trying to build a Jaeger dock from Pacific Rim, but I'm struggling with getting the pipework to look good - what parts do I need?

or

How can I efficiently create greebles on my industrial hanger?

With examples of what you've tried, the sort of scale you're looking for etc.
Peter Reid's Scenery album on Flickr might be a good place to start for some further inspiration on what's possible ;)


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

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

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

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

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


text:
Winter Bash 2018 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!
While this is a "just for fun" activity, there are also a few different prizes available this year.

The user with the most hats will win #10263 Winter Village Fire Station. Any ties will be resolved randomly. You can track your hat progress on the Bricks SE leaderboard. Bricks mods are excluded from this portion of the competition for fairness reasons.

3 winners will be selected randomly from everyone who earns at least 3 hats. They will each win #10259 Winter Village Station.

A winner will be selected from the 2018 Winter Bash building competition. The winner will be selected by community vote. Ties will be resolved randomly. The winner will receive #10262 James Bond Aston Martin DB5.

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. I'm willing to be flexible if winners would prefer a different set of equal value if they already have the prize.
The contest is 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.
New users are welcome and encouraged to participate. You may even have a slight advantage thanks to the "Still Fresh" hat. :)
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 useless edits to posts or participate in similar shenanigans just to earn hats. :) Your actions should still provide value to the community.
Go earn some hats, and have fun building!

Lost Fire Station with one position.

Here are the top users for this years Winter Bash

Winter Bash 2018 has come to a close! We had 376 users earn 552 hats this year.
Alexander O'Mara earned the most hats, and also won our building competition, so he will be receiving the Aston Martin and Fire Station.
The following 32 users earned at least 3 hats and were eligible for the prize drawing (excluding myself):
Alexander O'Mara
Ankit Sharma
Ambo100
Eran
zovits
jncraton
Rin Rio-Oki
LegoSonicBoy
chicks
David
Phil B.
Zhaph - Ben Duguid
Aziraphale
blockhead
John Slegers
Joost
connie
Craig
lee
Laura Prendergast
DRS
I NEED HELP
Larry
Peregrine
WELZ
TheBrickBlogger
Katie
X-27
Fulltime Mom
Glorfindel
Rory Alsop
Roger Hill

The randomly selected winners from that list were:

Rory Alsop
chicks
Aziraphale

They will each receive the Winter Village Station.
All winners have one week to reach out to me via email (my username at Gmail) with shipping details.
Congrats to the winners, and thanks to everyone for participating! Happy New Year!

It might be a good idea to ping the winners in chat or something, as they might not see this answer.

That's a good idea. I'll make some effort to reach out if I don't hear from everyone.

Congratulations to the winners!

Congratulations to the winners. It was fun nonparticipating even when I miss the mark :D

Wow, what a wonderful start into 2019. Happy New Year!

Congrats everyone, and double congrats to @AlexanderO'Mara

One more shout-out to @AlexanderO'Mara: he is one of 3 people to earn 30(!) hats this Winterbash, the most hats awarded to anyone on the entire StackExchange network. https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/01/04/adios-to-winter-bash-2018/?cb=1

Wow, that's so nice!  Thanks so much.  I hope everyone had a festive holiday.

Brilliant - many thanks! Alexander's rockin around the Christmas tree, well, rocked!

Few questions I have and they can be too much for a comment so asking in answer:

Any restriction for any country due to shipment issues etc.
New contributors will be considered?
only hat activity counts or other things will change the probability in the case of a tie?

Great questions. I've updated the original post to include a few restricted countries and explicitly state that new user contributions are welcome. What did you have in mind to resolve ties? I considered giving ties to the newest account. I don't like the idea of higher rep winning, as established users already have quite an advantage already due to knowledge of how our community functions.

@jncraton: What about shipping costs? Who will bear those? (Yes, I'm asking again, surprise surprise...)

@LegoSonicBoy TLG will be handling and paying the shipping.


text:
Winter Bash 2018 Building Competition
This is the thread where we'll be tracking and voting on submissions for the 2018 Winter Bash building competition. This year, we're asking you to recreate a scene from a holiday song. This can be any song you like, just be creative and try to capture the theme of the holiday season.
Here's an example that could have been a nice submission to this competition from JKBrickworks:

Rules

Builds must be original content that has not been shared in any venue previously.
Builds may only use genuine LEGO elements.
Digital submissions are acceptable.
Builds should not use more than 1000 elements. We want this to be a relatively open competition based on creativity, and not an opportunity for you to show off that you have enough elements to build a life-sized reindeer. :)
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.
All submissions must be submitted to this thread before the end of Winter Bash (January 2nd).

Let me know if you have any questions, and happy building!

Regarding the second rule, are digital submissions allowed (LDD for example) and when does the competition end?

Digital submissions are fine. I've updated the original post with the end date.

Don't rules "Builds may only use genuine LEGO elements" & "Digital submissions are acceptable" kind-of contradict each other? Also, why aren't blocks from clone brands allowed? Considering this is & "bricks" community rather than a "LEGO" community, why discriminate people who prefer or who own mostly bricks of other brands?

@JohnSlegers My guess is that only LEGO is aloud because TLG is the one providing the prizes.

Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree

(with Rock Monsters, naturally)
Detail shot:

Features:

A drummer with a mohawk
A keyboard player with an Afro (I call him Rockmaninoff)
A guitar player channeling Kiss
Two singers
One crazy-difficult-to-build Christmas tree

This is brilliant. Nicely done!

P.S. Is anyone is interested in how to build that tree, I'd be happy to post an answer on a question about it.

I'd certainly be interested in how you did that. Personally, I'd build an (extremely fragile) tree like that by stacking Travis bricks and then building out from there. It'd be cool to see exactly how you did it.

@AlexanderO'Mara - you got there too fast for me. I was going to use the lego versions of my band: https://scontent.fman2-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/11173372_858257724221431_3061592973924650721_n.jpg?_nc_cat=102&_nc_ht=scontent.fman2-1.fna&oh=3ceeccd736a79e3a4101b2c333067d16&oe=5CA7CBDC

A 1968 Ford Mustang reborn as a Christmas tree
The accompanying lyrics (with some minor changes to the original...):

Last Christmas, I gave you a car
But the very next day you took it apart
This year, to save me from tears
I'm building you something special

This little build is an exercise in creativity in a constrained environment born out of necessity, as we're spending the holidays at my father-in-law and this 75884 is the only LEGO set nearby. So I started wondering how else could it be used and suddenly the inspiration struck me as I was looking at this part.
I've been always rooting for the scrawny "underdog" trees on the market, so this build was intended to depict one of those trees: a bit sparse, a lot asymmetrical, the ornaments are either too big, too small or too clumped, but still full of love and holiday spirit.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


text:
Part Identification vs Set Identification
While going through old question I came to this edit where set-identification tag is changed into part-identification. To me it look previous tag was more fitting but before intervening I wanted to know when to use set-identification vs part-identification.

It's a good question - in general "set identification" is more useful when there's clearly only one set a collection of parts would come from (i.e. a picture of a sealed bag, or half built models) - if you only have one element, unless it's very custom, it's likely to have been in more than one set in which case we can't say which set it's from definitively.
In the case of that question, the parts were in about 5 sets in different quantities, and at least 2 sets had both of them in the quantity shown - in which case changing it to Part Identification was probably correct, because we typically link to BrickSet or BrickLink, from where you can easily get to the sets that contained a particular element, and compare with other elements in your collection to narrow it down.


text:
How many TAG tags we need in meta?
I was searching tags for my meta question and it feels tags and tagging both are applicable but do we even need to have them separately ?
Also tag-synonyms and interesting-tags can be made synonym of it too.

We could probably merge tags and tagging here, which would simplify things, even though you could argue there are some minor differences (nouns versus verbs, etc.).
I disagree that tag-synonyms (valid) and "interesting-tags" should be merged either into that or together, they are different things - we seem to be using the tags and tagging to discuss use of a particular tag, whilst tag-synonyms should be specifically for requests to combine tags.
I think I've burnt "interesting-tags".

Sound pretty fine to me.


text:
Is it not adhesive better name for the tag rather then glue?
It might be more personal but adhesive sound like a better tag to me than glue. Also, the adhesive word is quite popularly used here.
If not tag rename then at-least adhesive can be a synonym.

It really depends. Different adhesives have different properties and hence uses. You wouldn't use tape for something that hot glue is a better fit for. To that end, [adhesive] might actually be ambiguous.

I will call broader not ambiguous @LegoSonicBoy

This definition I found explaining the difference seems quite helpful.

What Is Glue?
Glue is a substance that allows two surfaces to be bonded together.
  The term is commonly used interchangeably with “adhesive”. Glues are
  often marketed for specific applications—wood glue, thread lock,
  etc.—rather than being marketed based on their chemical compositions,
  such as polyurethane or epoxy.
What Is Adhesive?
An adhesive holds materials together. There are many different types,
  but the different types all describe essentially the same thing.
  Cement, glue and other terms all refer to adhesives of one sort or
  another.

There are 18 glue questions, 12 of them use 'Glue' in the title, most of the others refer to glue in the posts as well. I think the word glue is more commonly understood and used in the context of LEGO constructions.
I have added adhesive as a synonym of glue.


text:
Is it not cleaning part of care not vice versa?
Right now care is the synonym of cleaning but is it not cleaning part caring? I mean to say care sound more like the master tag to me in this regard.


text:
A clarification request regarding rejected edit suggestion
I suggested this edit removing commentary and relevant information from the given link. However this suggestion was rejected.
The text "best" followed by user's name is just a noise and can be removed according to this meta.
Second edit was to add relevant part of the link. It is always advised to add a relevant information information from that link in case it becomes invalid in future. There is even a delete reason in the popup that appears when you hit delete button in LQP review queue.
The reason for rejection was as follows.

This edit was intended to address the author of the post and makes no sense as an edit. It should have been written as a comment or an answer.

This reason is kinda ambiguous and doesn't really work in this case.
Though, I don't have any issue regarding this matter, but I would like to get a proper explanation for rejected edit suggestion so it can be helpful in future.

I am very sorry for the inconvenience, this was my mistake.
I misunderstood the intention of the edit. I would have approved the removal of the 'Best, X' part but it appeared as though someone had added their answer to the post. After looking at the link again I understand the context.
If you would like to make the same edit suggestion again, I will make sure it gets approved immediately.

No problem. :) Thanks for the clarification.


text:
2018: a year in moderation
It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:

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

While there certainly are Moderators here, a significant amount of the moderation is done by ordinary people, using the privileges
they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.
As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together.
To that end, here is how the moderation done here on Bricks breaks down by activity over the past 12 months:
                 Action                  Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended²                                  0          5
Users destroyed                                   3          0
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue            83        174
Tasks reviewed³: Reopen Vote queue                2          4
Tasks reviewed³: Low Quality Posts queue         65         29
Tasks reviewed³: Late Answer queue               72         14
Tasks reviewed³: First Post queue               214        138
Tasks reviewed³: Close Votes queue               13         46
Tag synonyms proposed                             2          0
Tag synonyms created                              2          0
Questions reopened                                2          0
Questions protected                               4          4
Questions merged                                  1          0
Questions flagged⁴                                1        150
Questions closed                                 34          5
Question flags handled⁴                          16        135
Posts undeleted                                   0          6
Posts locked                                      1         25
Posts deleted⁵                                  108         82
Posts bumped                                      0         32
Comments flagged                                  1        181
Comments deleted⁶                               148        223
Comment flags handled                            71        111
Answers flagged                                   1        181
Answer flags handled                            157         25

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 This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 3 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 3, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁴ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁵ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁶ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Wishing you all a happy new year...

Cheers Shog9, Happy New Year to you too ;)


text:
LEGO related software
I just read the tour page and in the section Get answers to practical, detailed questions, it's written Don't ask about ... General support for LEGO related software (i.e. LDraw/LEGO Digital Designer/NXT alternatives). I wonder why and to me, they are about the only thing I might have question, I guess others too. Where should I ask these question ?
This site is in beta, if our questions are considered impractical, it'll close soon.

Possible duplicate of Are questions on 3rd party software on-topic?

The issue is that we are not actually affiliated with LEGO or any of those applications, we're a bunch of enthusiasts, AFOLs, etc. and as such have no greater access to the official support channels than any other customer (it's possible that we have members from the LDraw/Stud.IO, community here, but this isn't their preferred support channel as far as I know).
This is why we rule out "General support" questions - if you've found an issue with those programs you're best off directing your requests at the official channels - for example:

LDraw: https://forums.ldraw.org/ and most likely the "Help" forum.
LEGO Digital Designer: https://www.lego.com/en-us/ldd/support
Mindstorms/NXT/EV3: https://www.lego.com/en-gb/mindstorms/support

However, we are quite good at questions about how to use those programs: Can't get gears to mesh in LDD? We can help. Issues with loops in your EV3 program? We've got you covered.


text:
Congratulations, you're no longer in Beta!
This site started private beta before July 2012, so it is no longer "beta", it is a full site by our definition. We've removed the word "beta" from your site banner because we believe that you aren't really a beta site any more, even if you don't get ten questions per day.

What this means for you:

the "Beta" is removed from your banner
the site is moved to the "Launched" sites list on Area 51 - which will also remove the A51 info box from the right sidebar
retain beta reputation levels
full-site elections will be delayed but will be scheduled eventually

This is the start of a process that we are already discussing internally and will be bringing to the network for public discussion once the plan is finalized. My hope is that this will mean the end of the monolith we currently refer to as "Graduation" in favor of a well-defined set of small targets to achieve the various elements that made up "Graduation".
I'm sure you have many questions, please feel free to ask and I'll answer what I can. It helps me out a lot if you can limit answers to focus on a single question/subject rather than asking a dozen questions in one answer.
Please feel free to follow the MSE discussion for more background on this decision. You can ask questions either here or there; I'll try to keep up with all of them. Your mods also have some info, so they may be answering in my stead.
Thanks so much for your patience and stay tuned!

Amazing! This incredible community really deserves it! :D


text:
Winter Bash 2019 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!
While this is a "just for fun" activity, there are also a few different prizes available this year.

The user with the most hats will win 75253 Droid Commander:

Any ties will be resolved randomly. You can track your hat progress on the Bricks SE leaderboard. Bricks mods are excluded from this portion of the competition for fairness reasons.

3 winners will be selected randomly from everyone who earns at least 3 hats, excluding the user with the most hats, as they already get a prize. They will each win 10267 Ginger Bread House:

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. I'm willing to be flexible if winners would prefer a different set of equal value if they already have the prize.
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!
Update
The winners have been announced here.

I feel the stated goal ("The goal here is to facilitate positive engagement on the site") conflicts with the observed reality. See my question on meta for the details and please share your opinion.

"3 winners will be selected randomly from everyone who earns at least 3 hats" so that includes the user with the most hats, meaning there is a very small chance of getting two sets?

@David Good point. I've changed this to prevent the top user from winning a second prize.

I assume this only includes hats earned specifically on this site?

@ChrissaysReinstateMonica Correct. This is the hat count from the Bricks leader board linked above.

I qualified for the Copy Editor gold badge before WB ended, but it looks like it hasn't been awarded yet, and I don't know if it will before WB ends. Does that count for anything? https://i.imgur.com/RDX6ZoW.png

How do I provide you with a shipping address? I'm not very good at figuring this kind of stuff out.

@technicguy1 I'll ask the winners to send me info via email after I draw the names.

@jncraton Oh ok

I have a suggestion for next year: perhaps we can make the lottery draw for the prizes weighted? So everyone who gets at least three hats gets as many entries as they have hats. This would stimulate further participation, as it is fairly easy for a regular Bricks.se member to get 3 hats, but getting beyond 5-6 hats requires several secret hats, which can typically only be gained through very active engagement. And the more you participate, the higher the chance are that you win a prize, as your name gets entered multiple times.
As a slight variation we could award people extra entries for each hat they have over the required minimum 3 hats, so basically #entries = #hats - 2, with #hats >= 3 to qualify.

I think this is a good suggestion, and I was thinking about this myself.

This sounds like a good change to me.

I was planning to make this suggestion as well, maybe with an additional restriction on the maximum number of "lottery tickets" one can receive, to discourage the kind of cutthroat competition observed this year (and to a lesser degree yesteryear).

@zovitssupportsGoFundMonica: the change I propose is to counteract the fact that there is an initial surge in participation which then levels off when people have reached the 3 hats, as competing for the top spot requires a whole different level of dedication :). With my proposed change, hopefully some people will continue to interact to gain more hats and increase their chances of a prize. That said, if we make the maximum high enough (getting 10 hats is quite difficult) that could work, or perhaps we say 1 ticket for every 3 hats, with a max of 4 tickets per person?

@PhilB. "competing for the top spot requires a whole different level of dedication" You're absolutely right, and in my opinion if somebody has this level of dedication then being on the top spot should be it's own reward. - "That said, if we make the maximum high enough (getting 10 hats is quite difficult) that could work, or perhaps we say 1 ticket for every 3 hats, with a max of 4 tickets per person" I'm completely on board with this, 10 seems attainable but only through work and dedication.


text:
Are all these edits really necessary or even helpful?
I'm all for having fun with competitions, but adding prizes increases the stakes further in a game which already causes much unnecessary noise. See for example the flood of trivial edits from users of all reputation levels (some of whom are inactive on this site outside of Winter Bash) bumping old questions to the "active" page only to get the "Werewolf hunter" hat:

Or this example, where a clearly unanswerable question that was closed as a duplicate got edited and voted to reopen without any significant changes. All for another hat (180°).

I'd like to ask the opinion of the community, is such behaviour helpful enough to warrant awarding prizes for?
NOTE: I have explicitly avoided mentioning any users and it is just a coincidence that both the above examples are from the same user - I could have included other trivial edits from other users as well. The question is NOT about one user or two but the generic behaviour.

EDIT The answer to the Meta.SE post pointed out by Eran in the comments promises a rework for next year and changes the triggers for this year's event:

For this year, to reduce the disruptiveness that the original hat definition has introduced, we have

Reduced the requirement from 5 to 3 edits
Changed the hat to trigger on editing of 3 questions on either meta or main sites

Which has propagated the phenomenon to Bricks.meta as well (this time the examples are from another user):

And here:

cross sire duplicate : https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/340049/retire-werewolf-hunter

To be fair, while all fairly trivial in those examples, they are correcting typos, grammatical issues and brand capitalisations...

While I would prefer that this didn't create noise for us, I believe that it is a beneficial trade-off.
Our site isn't very noisy, so a few more edits to review probably isn't a big deal. The noise also primarily impacts our most active users who are managing review queues while not harming the experiences for new users who are interacting with our community for the first time. I want to be clear that I value all the hard work that our most active users put in, but I'm working under the assumption that we're all willing to put in a bit of extra work to facilitate growth of this community into the future.
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.
I'm certainly open to suggestions on how we can run this better. This is our community, so if there is consensus that it would be better not to offer prizes for Winter Bash you will get no argument from me. Offering prizes for this creates work for me during a busy season and provides no benefit for me personally, as I obviously exclude myself from winning anything.

I agree that these edits are helpful and needed. But they shouldn't be done in such odd fashion. It just looks a little strange, at least, to see multiple questions from many years ago bumped in short period of time. I believe this kind of reviews should happen gradually during all the year, not just during Winter Bash.


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

five minutes later:

five more minutes later:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could be that it looks fishy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for taking the time to conduct this investigation!

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


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

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

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

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

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

Wishing you all a happy new year...


text:
Winter Bash 2019 Winners!
I want to say a big thanks to everyone who participated in Winter Bash this year! We had a total of 170 users earn 367 hats!
We added 200 new users to our community this December, more than in any month since the initial spike when we entered public beta in 2011. We also had more new visits and total page views than we've ever had. 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.

Now for the contest results:
We had a tie for most hats between @NeverForget and @AlexanderO'Mara. They've agreed to split the grand prize rather than flipping a coin for it, so they'll each get a set of their choosing up to a 100 EUR value. Congrats to both of our winners!
The following 32 users earned at least 3 hats:
Alexander O'Mara (22 hats)
Never Forget (22 hats)
zovits supports GoFundMonica (18 hats)
Rin Rio-Oki (12 hats)
Phil B. (9 hats)
Ambo100 (8 hats)
Chris says Reinstate Monica (8 hats)
Dan1138 (6 hats)
Ankit Sharma (6 hats)
Eran (6 hats)
jncraton (6 hats)
O. R. Mapper (5 hats)
Henrik - stop hurting Monica (5 hats)
Alex (5 hats)
Joe Slater (5 hats)
technicguy1 (4 hats)
lee (4 hats)
X-27 wants to Reinstate Monica (4 hats)
Zhaph - Ben Duguid (4 hats)
user13489 (4 hats)
Scott (3 hats)
Shootforthemoon (3 hats)
PeterJ (3 hats)
Michael Verschaeve (3 hats)
chicks (3 hats)
Joost (3 hats)
WELZ (3 hats)
Robert Columbia (3 hats)
Tonny (3 hats)
Makyen (3 hats)
SkyPaul (3 hats)
Daron Senior (3 hats)

I've excluded the two grand prize winners and three mods from the drawing as stated in the contest rules. The three randomly selected winners are:

Chris says Reinstate Monica
O. R. Mapper
Ankit Sharma

Congrats to our winners! Each of you will receive a Ginger Bread House:

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.
Thanks everyone!

Congrats to the winners!

Wow, I really won \o/

Wow, that's amazing! I just got back into LEGO (after about 20 years) a few months ago and the Gingerbread House seems really nice, I'm super happy!

This year's Winter Bash was a Smash!

Congratulations to the winners and a happy new year for everybody :)

Thanks and I just wanted to confirm that I received it last week.

@AnkitSharma Great! I hope that you've enjoyed it!

I know it can take a while, but should I be concerned that I have not yet received it?

@AlexanderO'Mara I'm sorry to hear that this hasn't arrived. The lead times are very long after the holidays as you know. There may also be an impact from Coronavirus at this point due to shipping and supply chain delays. The Billund warehouse is closed for at least the next two weeks for example. I've asked for an update from TLG, but I'm not anticipating a quick response with everything else going on.

Well it arrived today after all.

@AlexanderO'Mara Wow. Sorry about the delay. I hope that you are enjoying it! Congrats again!

Thanks! I know it's not your fault.


text:
Are questions about the in-universe lore or history of sets or themes on-topic?
Are questions about the in-universe lore or history surrounding LEGO sets or themes, especially non-licensed ones (ones not based on existing stories such as Star Wars, but invented wholly by LEGO) on-topic? For example, one might ask about the political structure of Heartlake City, how many planets Blacktron controlled at the height of its power, what the training regime is like for new Imperial Soldiers recruits in the Pirates universe, how one becomes an Ultra Agent, or the names of Jack Stone's parents. Answers might cite original advertisements, box blurbs, tie-in media such as books, or official staff interviews.
LEGO themes, factions, or sets that have clear science fiction or fantasy elements (e.g. Classic Space, Lego Elves, Ninjago, Exo-Force, Castle Dragon Masters, Time Cruisers, etc.) are obviously on-topic at Science Fiction and Fantasy.SE, but LEGO themes that have little to no SFF content such as Pirates, Friends, or Western wouldn't be allowed there. A brief review of LEGO-related questions on SFF.SE also shows that a large percentage of the "LEGO" questions there are actually about tie-in media such as films and shows rather than sets themselves, leading me to believe that set-based questions might not get good answers there.

I'm not aware of us making a decision about this topic specifically, but I have no problem with us fielding these questions as long as they are specific, answerable, and not opinion based.
If these questions are better suited for SFF, we can certainly move them there, but I have a hunch that our community is better equipped to answer them given the amount of source material many of us have in our closets.


text:
How old is [vintage]?
I recently noticed the vintage tag. The tag wiki simply specifies, "Used for old vintage LEGO sets and pieces."
How old is old enough for a set or piece to qualify as "vintage"? For example, would Paradisa and Blacktron be considered vintage? 4.5 volt trains? Classic Space (mid-1980's)? Fabuland? The Yellow Castle? Only stuff from before 1970? Only the very early years?
My personal opinion would be that anything before my "dark age" (circa 1995) feels vintage, but I recognize that many people will have a different perspective. Is there anything approaching a consensus on what is and what is not vintage?
I'm not really asking for an exhaustive or scientific answer, and don't need an adjudication on a borderline case. What I want to avoid is, say, tagging a bunch of monorail questions as vintage and then getting stern messages that vintage means pre-1980 and not just discontinued.
Possible answers:

It's based on a set number of years (e.g. 20) elapsing since the piece, set, and/or theme was released and/or discontinued.
It's based on a holistic judgment based not only the passage of time, but on the use of parts, themes, or practices that have been obsolete for so long that the part, set, or theme just has the feel of belonging to a bygone era, yea, even the days of fluorescent jewelry, New Coke, and the 386.
The tag lacks sufficient meaning to differentiate questions in any meaningful sense and should be burninated.

My thoughts on the above is that #1 seems reasonable, but would imply that being vintage is a moving target. That is, every year, another year's worth of media, pieces, sets, can now have the tag added to it. For example, if we use a target timeframe of 20 years since release, it would be appropriate for me to spend the year 2024 bulk-tagging questions about sets released in 2004 as vintage, and do the same next year for sets released in 2005. That seems like quite a mess and a lot of questions being unnecessarily bumped. On the other hand, #2 above seems difficult to adjudicate, and could result in edit wars based on personal perspectives of whether something is or is not vintage "enough" to be tagged.

Looking at the questions we currently have tagged vintage it does seem to imply "early 80s" at the latest - however as with cars and furniture, this is likely to be a moving target: would you consider the pre-realistic skin tone licensed sets as "Vintage LEGO Star Wars" for example, or just "Classic"?

To second Alex's timeframe, the urban dictionary definition for vintage states:

An item of age, usually from around the 1920's to [approximately] 20 years ago. The items could be anything from furniture, children's toys, to clothing and household bits and pieces.

So that'd be anything before 2000 at this point.  I wish Zhaph's answer was closer to the usage I'd heard, but it seems like I'm going to go feel old for a while now.

If we had to pick an arbitrary cutoff I think 20 years ago is reasonable.

For me personally, vintage seem to be pre-1995 too (as this is where I got into Dark Age). This was 25 years ago, which is quite some time ago.
However I could think of a good point of time in LEGO history which could be considered a turning point here - change of Light/Dark Gray [BL] to Light/Dark Bluish Gray [BL] (and few other colors). It wasn't just a color change, but also quite drastical change in set designing approach as well as designers themselves.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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