Classic-Castle.com

[leafan]

http://www.classic-castle.com/

Has anybody that posts here ever been an active member of the above website forum?

I ask because I became aware of this site when it was mentioned off-handedly in discussions here, and after taking a look, it seems to be a very interesting, useful but ultimately dead and outdated site and forum.

I'm interested to hear what the perception is on what that [forum in particular] was and what it has become. I'm interested because I can see that it's all but dead, in terms of both user activity and administration, but was seemingly once a very active place focussed on a niche in the Lego community.

This is relevant for me because I can see the same thing happening here in this specific sub-forum, regarding user activity and castle discussion, rather than moderation/admin. This is doubtless down to the lack of new Castle themed Lego items, but it seems a shame to go down without a fight.

So, what's the consensus on classic-castle.com? Dead as a doornail? In hibernation until new Lego Castle? Have most members already migrated here?

Would it be worth reaching out to the administration of that forum to make a post sending new members (and old) here instead? That would help both communities. If so, I have some ideas on how best to do that.

Thoughts?

[fhomess]

I've been a longtime lurker there.  Obersvationally, the activity was much greater when Lego was still producing actual castle sets.  Nexo Knights kind of made things slow down, but I also think that Guilds of Historica has shifted some of that content here.  The Colossal Castle Contest (or CCC) is still run annually, and IMO, one of the best Lego contests around.  The MOC's that get submitted for that are truly wonderful.  It runs in the fall and you've seen some of those MOC's get cross posted here.

[leafan]

Interesting, thanks. I suspect that many members find their way here.

[zoth33]

I'm not a member but the CCC contest just ended and entries were way down this year.  It is a good website and has a lot of content on it you just have to look through the forum section and the CCC contest entries of old have some very good builds.  Some of the members of classic-castle are on here to like soccerkid and his brother little john.  

[Grover]

When I came out of my dark ages a few years back, I originally found classic castle.  I was excited and thought the forums were a great place, even if they were low traffic.  Then the CCC began, and I thought it would be a lot of fun to build an entry.  I built a couple, and thoroughly annihilated by the other entries.  Not surprising, as my collection was old, the best builders in the genre entered, and I was new to advanced building.  However, the one aspect that I did not like was that there were no feedback mechanisms.  My goal with building is to get better.  Even if the forums are low traffic, I would like to know what the judges thought.  The opaque judging procedures were hard to understand as well.  What were the criteria?  Were points assigned?  Did judges just rank which ones they subjectively liked the best?  Even if I were to get a score, and they said "75/100, well done on these categories and poor in these", it would be something, but nope, nada.  I need some kind of feedback to get better, and there was none to be had there, so I stared looking around and found the GoH here.  Classic castle is now pretty much just the CCC annually (their front page didn't have any updates since the CCC last year), and even that appears to be slowing down as well.  Because of the lack of feedback, it's basically a competition of hall of fame builders, and there's almost no novices entering (and no point to their entering since they won't win and won't get any feedback).  I still have a login and check back once a year, even shared a build a couple of years ago, but once I found eurobricks and the GoH, I found a much more supportive, active, and helpful community, so here I am.  If I ever feel that I might make a real run at one of the CCC categories, I may enter, but my skill level is not that high yet, so I feel it would be a waste of my time.  I think that the contest this year had fewer entries because of the delay in its start, but also probably the decline in novice castle builders (see below).

To more directly answer your question, I doubt many of those members would come here to our Historic Theme forums, and those that would will probably go to the GoH.  The GoH is most directly related to Castle, as the historic themes also covers the Wild West, etc.  I try to get out of GoH from time to time, but spend the vast majority of my time there, and try to make sure I provide feedback for people on their builds there, as that is what I find most valuable.  When I see some stuff that is great out here on the main forums, I try to comment on it, but I usually only browse the Historic Forums about 1/20th as much as the GoH.

I, for one, would love to see Classic Castle revitalized, but I suspect unless Lego releases a new castle theme, it will continue to die.  There are security issues with the age of the site logins, and without a lot of dedicated enthusiasm and without fresh blood there both in users and admins (who appear weary from holding up a slowing site, much to their credit for doing so!), it faces an uphill battle.  Eurobricks at least has enough peripheral traffic that people will stop in occasionally and may get interested.  If you notice, most of the builds on GoH are pretty advanced.  Some of the other forums that still have active themes, such as Town, you see a mix of advanced, intermediate, and novice builds.  I suspect that the novice builders are attracted due to buying these themes in the stores, which means they need new Lego sets to bring them in.  Some fraction of them decide to push their skills and develop over time into master builders (to borrow a term...), but without a current theme to usher in new builders, I fear that only those of us who grew up with the castle themes will continue it and we will grow old.  I would also add that I speculate that the lack of current Lego sets in the castle them provides little in the way of usable castle parts and thus makes the entry barrier to novice castle builders high: parts are old, expensive on bricklink, or simply not available.  I was lucky in that I grew up with the old castle sets and had a bunch of legacy figures and parts, but not everyone is that lucky (or that old).

[BrickJagger]

When Lego refuses to make Castle sets for young kids for a sustained period, they skip an entire generation's worth of potential AFOLS. We are currently feeling the effects of that, and since CC was pretty much always just a tributary into this forum, it was going to dry out first. CC is also dying because no one wants to use a site that looks the same as it did in '07 when they could use a modern forum like EB or Reddit that caters towards younger users. I personally think the site design is charming and unique at this point in time but I'm sure others don't feel the same way. CC is currently the second best archive of Castle discussion on the entire internet (aside from this very subforum) but Lego is getting very close to completely shutting out the Castle genre. We simply can't keep it going in the absence of an actual theme, try as we might. This "Leaf" theme is the last chance that I'm giving Lego to get it right (and they're certainly taking their sweet, sweet time announcing it) because if they don't, I think that CC and this section will die out unfortunately. Up to you, TLG.

Until then, I strongly encourage y'all to make accounts and post on CC, more specifically in the "Lego Castle Sets" section. It would be a massive shame to see that forum die out, and the staff there are some of the longest tenured Castle fans on the internet 

[KotZ]

19 minutes ago, BrickJagger said:

This "Leaf" theme is the last chance that I'm giving Lego to get it right (and they're certainly taking their sweet, sweet time announcing it) because if they don't, I think that CC and this section will die out unfortunately. Up to you, TLG.

I agree with you for the most part, aside from this sentence. Fantasy awareness and interest in medieval-esque things has been growing thanks to shows/games/media like Game of Thrones, The Witcher, Wheel of Time, etc. While there certainly will be a tick down (or many) of builds of things like castles and fantasy, I don't think this subsection of the board will die completely. Nor will fantasy-historical builds in the larger world. LEGO is definitely not percieved as your "normal" or "average" adult hobby, and I'd venture to guess that many of the fantasy/history nerds have crossover interests through LEGO, tabletop gaming, etc. I'm making broad strokes here, of course, but I think it's a distinct possibility.

[Aine]

That site is dead. Or close to that. I had troubles joining, and there's no one to contact, as most of the contacts are defunct, outdated, or what.
It'll be nice forum, but it's in stupor.

[leafan]

On 1/25/2020 at 6:05 AM, BrickJagger said:

We simply can't keep it going in the absence of an actual theme, try as we might. This "Leaf" theme is the last chance that I'm giving Lego to get it right (and they're certainly taking their sweet, sweet time announcing it) because if they don't, I think that CC and this section will die out unfortunately. Up to you, TLG.

I certainly hope you stick around here @BrickJagger. I hate to see like-minded people disappear and I remember you being one of the first ones to welcome me here, so there's that too.

On 1/25/2020 at 3:59 PM, Aine said:

That site is dead. Or close to that. I had troubles joining, and there's no one to contact

They've been decently quick on accepting my sign-up over the weekend.

Thanks for all your feedback ladies and gents. I will need to consider if it's worth making any posts over there.

I wonder how open they'd be about their own situation.

[Hive]

Considering that LEGO hasn't given us an actual Castle theme in 7 years (with the last one being quite poor as well), I think this forum has a remarkably high participance.

But even with another Castle theme, I don't think Classic Castle will ever blossom into something huge again.

[TomSkippy]

Classic castle isn’t dead, I think a lot of users/lurkers there are here and on Reddit. Users migrate to active forums. It comes alive for the yearly classic castle contest, which as mentioned doesn’t really include feedback, but is fantastic.

Not sure why this year didn’t draw as many builds... I didn’t submit anything this year simply due to time and the categories didn’t inspire me (last year I had six builds planned but only finished 1 )