Brickshelf up, down..who knows!

[WhiteFang]

Anybody out there who knows what's the matter with brickshelf? it's down third time since some weeks and now already for more than 3 days...

In the meanwhile it's quite unuseable... unfortunately brickstore is not an alternative for me, because it's impossible to register - no action takes place when pressing this button (at least not for me)...

Which alternatives could you recommend?

Topics merged.

[Kumbbl]

I don't like to self promote, but it seems like I just have to at this point!

I created Bricksafe.com which offers free storage for LEGO files similar to Brickshelf. You can store any type of LEGO related files you like. I created it as a modern LEGO file sharing site and have future plans for some great API capabilities.

I have just upgraded the default quota from 2GB to 5GB and retroactively upgraded all existing accounts too!

It has some great features - eg you can choose to scale your images to any resolution just by modifying the URL parameters, perfect for embedding into Eurobricks posts.

There are no ads, I make no money from it, I hope to keep it free forever. I can afford to do this as I also created Rebrickable and the revenue from that site is enough to run Bricksafe too.

It has been in place for a year now and sure there were some outages. I like to think I fixed them fast and improved the reliability in doing so each time. I have now added a page http://bricksafe.com/outages which lists all outages that I will keep up to date to provide 100% transparency into what has happened.

yes, i believe all that - but my problem is, that its impossible for me to register - simply nothing happens when i press the register-button - no email is sent to me - simply no actin takes place...

do not understand what i could have done wrong...

EDIT: Hmm, have just tried it again - now it works... all datas the same as in my failed trys.. anyway, i will try bricksafe

Edited August 28, 2014 by Kumbbl

[dr_spock]

BrickShelf is working again.

[miguev]

There are no ads, I make no money from it, I hope to keep it free forever. I can afford to do this as I also created Rebrickable and the revenue from that site is enough to run Bricksafe too.

It has been in place for a year now and sure there were some outages. I like to think I fixed them fast and improved the reliability in doing so each time. I have now added a page http://bricksafe.com/outages which lists all outages that I will keep up to date to provide 100% transparency into what has happened.

I hope this thread is not too old to reply to (this one is older)... Brickshelf was down again, close to the end of November, making it hard to review TC5 contest entries.

Looking at Brickshelf and Bricksafe with a critical eye, I see you're doing very well at making Bricksafe a lot better of a choice, at least in terms of reliability.

From the details I see at http://bricksafe.com/outages it sounds like it's "just you running one server". As a regular user with years using Flickr, I'm very much spoiled by their uptime / SLA, so this made me wary of your uptime / SLA. But you're not alone in this, right? You're hosting your server in CloudFlare and they do a whole lot of work to keep your server reachable, and they are very transparent in their post-mortems!

So, I think I'll move to Bricksafe. Good work, please keep it up (literally).

I'd love to see an issue tracker to file bugs and feature requests though.

[Wolfolo]

I'm moving to Bricksafe too, Brickshelf doesn't even allow to use symbols (even comma and hypen if I remember correctly) on descriptions, and I was sure in the past it allowed them. And it's down again :(

[dr_spock]

BS is working. Weird, Flickr was not for a brief period earlier. Something screwy with Internet routing?

[jamesster]

(I'm not sure which forum this would belong in, please move if needed. I also thought I remembered some sort of ongoing topic on Brickshelf's status, but I couldn't find it, even with the search... Maybe I missed it, or am just misremembering?)

Sometime today, Brickshelf went mostly offline, with only a simple "down for maintenance" message on the homepage. Everything else 404s.

http://www.brickshelf.com/

Brickshelf going offline is of course nothing new - what's got me worried this time is that its sister site, Majhost, has been "down for maintenance" for at least six months now:

http://www.majhost.com/

A friend of mine tried contacting the owner of the sites about the status of Majhost a while back, and never got a reply.

Brickshelf and Majhost are quite antiquated by now, and there's definitely better image hosts available these days. But Brickshelf was the go-to site for LEGO image hosting for quite a while; they host tons of content going back... What, 15 years or so?... And losing all that would be quite a blow.

I'm hoping that Brickshelf going "down for maintenance" means that whoever owns the sites is back to working on them, and that hopefully he'll finish whatever "maintenance" has kept Majhost offline for about half a year, and get both sites up and running again. But as far as I know it's been total silence. Does anybody here have more info, or know whoever runs these sites?

Edit: Ooh, it changed! Galleries and files are now loading instead of giving 404 errors, though the homepage is still the same message. Majhost is still totally down though. I'm a bit relieved that it appears actual maintenance is being done, unlike on Majhost.

Edited May 9, 2015 by jamesster

[Legocity2713]

Yeah, I've noticed a few problems, good to see they're being worked on and hopefully fixed.

[Andy D]

Brickshelf works for me today.

Andy D

Edited May 10, 2015 by Andy D

[Rick]

(I'm not sure which forum this would belong in, please move if needed. I also thought I remembered some sort of ongoing topic on Brickshelf's status, but I couldn't find it, even with the search... Maybe I missed it, or am just misremembering?)

Merged.

[TheOneVeyronian]

Anyone still having problems with Brickshelf? Yesterday it was working fine, today I keep losing connection to it and am getting "webpage unavailable" errors, though sometimes I'm able to access it briefly (though it loads extremely slowly). But the webpage unavailable error just returns when I try and log in, so it's unusable anyway. Very frustrating since I'm trying to do some official sets in LDD work that I can't use any other host for (tried registering for Bricksafe, and the register page got stuck in a perpetual loading loop).

Anybody know what's going on? Using latest version of Google Chrome if that matters.

[dr_spock]

It's working again. They seem to be having some intermittent problems.

[TheOneVeyronian]

It's working again. They seem to be having some intermittent problems.

It's working for me too, at least for the moment. Seems to be cycling between working and not working all day so far

[Phoxtane]

I've been using Bricksafe (made by the same guy that does Rebrickable) for almost a year now and it seems to just work - there's no wait time for images to be moderated or anything, unlike Brickshelf, and it seems to be very reliable. The interface I feel is a bit clunky in some places - I'd love to be able to create folders and such like Brickshelf, unless that's already implemented and I'm missing it somehow - but it's all very smooth and nice to use.

[TheOneVeyronian]

^ I originally wanted to register with Bricksafe quite a few months back, but for some unknown reason registration for me failed. I put in my details, then it just sat perpetually loading for 2 hours (until I cut the connection when I got bored). It never went anywhere. It never sent me a confirmation email either, and I couldn't find out what to do or who to contact if I had trouble registering (which I did).

Shame, if only it'd worked, I wouldn't be relying on the much more unreliable Brickshelf to host my LXF's

[technicmad]

I've been using Bricksafe (made by the same guy that does Rebrickable) for almost a year now and it seems to just work - there's no wait time for images to be moderated or anything, unlike Brickshelf, and it seems to be very reliable. The interface I feel is a bit clunky in some places - I'd love to be able to create folders and such like Brickshelf, unless that's already implemented and I'm missing it somehow - but it's all very smooth and nice to use.

Thanks, I spent a lot of time (and money!) making sure the site remains available, especially the deep linked files. I agree the interface could be improved and there are still some features I need to add. You can actually create folders (called pages) by going to a page and clicking the 'Edit Page' button at the top right, then select 'Add new page here' :) Rebrickable keeps me very busy, but I have plans for a big overhaul of Bricksafe within a few months.

^ I originally wanted to register with Bricksafe quite a few months back, but for some unknown reason registration for me failed. I put in my details, then it just sat perpetually loading for 2 hours (until I cut the connection when I got bored). It never went anywhere. It never sent me a confirmation email either, and I couldn't find out what to do or who to contact if I had trouble registering (which I did).

Shame, if only it'd worked, I wouldn't be relying on the much more unreliable Brickshelf to host my LXF's

I have had some email/registration problems in the past which I've fixed. If you'd like to try again, let me know if you have any further issues. I can be contacted at support at bricksafe.com or support at rebrickable.com.

[Staslegomaster]

I'm a new member, vassal with 17 posts. I have an account on Brickshelf. Why can't I log in to upload my MOC? - They always write "log in failed" how can I get through? Please explain.

[Alexander The Great]

BS is constantly down for about a week. What's the matter?

[LEGO Historian]

Well I got in late last night, but it was very slow going.

Just out of curiosity, what is wrong with using FLICKR... yeah it's kinda goofy with all their upgrades, but they no longer have a 200 pic free posting limit... I alread have over 700 images out there. Now granted it's more than just LEGO images (way more)... but I and many of my friends can add text, comments and questions to our images... and also they can be viewed in many different sizes.

I'm sure there must be a reason that folks aren't using it as an alternative, but besides it being available for more than just LEGO pics, please someone enlighten me why? Thanks.

P.S. Having groups (for sharing group pics) and album capabilites, those become nice additional features to have.

[dr_spock]

Since the changes, Flickr has been slower than molasses for me. Brickshelf images load fast when their servers are working. Trying to view images on Flickr is almost unusable on my Internet connection. The old Flickr was quick.

[LEGO Historian]

Since the changes, Flickr has been slower than molasses for me. Brickshelf images load fast when their servers are working. Trying to view images on Flickr is almost unusable on my Internet connection. The old Flickr was quick.

Thanks dr_spock .... I can understand your frustration.... that was the one thing about FLICKR I didn't care for.... it tries to load an entire looooong page worth of pics out there and that can be a hassle for slower internet speeds. Although I have Comcast Xfinity.... (not sure the rate at the moment), but I too have to wait sometimes for loading entire pages of images. I do believe that they now have "film strip" function available where you don't have to wait that long.... but it;s relatively new, and I'm not completely sure on navigating it.

But the really nice thing about Flickr, is that you can create public or private groups to share your images in with like minded images (such as I belong to 2x4 brick group... where the discussion is all the mold types, colors and test strikes of nothing but 2x4 bricks since 1949)... and then you can post comments on each pic, or cross reference (along with an image) to another pic's thread. Some nice new features.... but some features are dependent on fast internet speed.... the 800 lb. Gorilla.

Thanks for answering my question!!

Edited June 21, 2015 by LEGO Historian

[TheOneVeyronian]

Recently, both Brickshelf and Flickr have been causing me much grief... I'm assisting the Action Figures staff with working on their MOC index, and every single time I try and do something related to that, it's either Brickshelf is down or Flickr is down, which slows everything down. It's starting to get on my nerves, it's always Brickshelf down so I can't download pictures, or Flickr down so I can't upload resized versions of those pictures

But anybody know what's going on with Flickr especially? Up until about a week ago, I've never had any problems with it. Now it goes down at least once a day, without warning, often for over half an hour at a time, and always when I want to do something on it. It was down when I began typing this, and it's still down as I finish this post... anyone else been having problems?

[ZeldaTheSwordsman]

Seems like Brickshelf's uploader is currently broken - you can select a file and click upload, but it doesn't appear it actually uploads the file, it just takes you to a page that says "UPLOAD" in large type.

[LEGO Historian]

Besides the "bad Panda" message I get periodically (can't bring up the image requested).... I've not had any Flickr downtime. Perhaps Flickr is divided (some are at a more current release/functionality level) into separate databases, and some countries/areas are having issues that I'm just not seeing here in the USA with the most current version of Flickr.... unless other folks here are having issues as well. But I've not encountered any serious issues with Flickr, and I use it daily.

[Phoxtane]

Looks like it's down again. There's a lot of pictures missing in threads previously posted in the Technic forum that have Brickshelf URLs.

Out of curiosity, what happens when Brickshelf goes down for good? All of those broken links and images lost forever... I think that at some point the community will have to move on though.