Mylenium

Not to dismiss your argument, but it is well-known that for instance Italian luxury fashion brands have some of their stuff produced in offshore sweatshops just as well and then only slap on their logo. Should we show more respect to them? As so often, this point can be argued from both sides. And not to put too fine a point to it, but big companies chasing down smaller ones over alleged copyright/ trademark issues does not necessarily look good from a PR perspective. A good example for this is Apple catching a lot of flak a few years ago because they came down on the „Apfelroute“ logo (a public association of regional communities maintaining a bike trail network) just because the logo featured an apple. We're quickly approaching this "Big companies aren't always right just because they're big." thing here, i.e. huge corporations usurping common items and trying to control them. Mylenium

That point can be argued both ways. Would not LEGO MOCs drown out potential MOCs created with alternate brands? What happens to models/ sets/ discussions that do not fit into a specific theme? Personally I'd rather have a dedicated top-level forum per brand as a first stop option. The rest should be handled with the tagging system, which brings me to the next issue... Not really. Rarely used tags would simply fizzle out and at some point the admins could consolidate them at the back end. The tag suggestion system would also only bring up the most used tags based on its internal statistics, pushing unused tags further down the list. That's at least how WordPress works. Kind of defeats the purpose of tagging at all, I guess? Not sure how to read your post. At this point we know at least four or five major alternative brands by name. Are you suggesting that we do not give them each an individual forum? Unless we already start out with separated Pantasy, Lumibricks, COBI etc. forums, your suggestion of adding more sub-forums later also wouldn't work. Who would even remember those threads that need to be moved after a few years or months even? I'm with you on keeping it simple and not overthinking it because it's a loser one way or the other (you just cannot accommodate all potential scenarios and make everyone happy), but we shouldn't be too loose about it, either, and instate some basic framework that at least reflects the current state of affairs. Mylenium

I don't think there are any alternatives. These compound bases are, after all, pretty much only found in 4+ sets. I also think they're glued at the top instead and not just being fixated with snap tabs. Mylenium

Well, as Ron Burgundy so brilliantly said: That escalated quickly!. I'm baffled by the divide and it seems some of the LEGO-loyalists are indeed out to pasture and just rage-baiting, unable to provide a rational argument as to why The One Brick should rule them all. It's almost a good thing my CFS-addled brain in conjunction with the heat is not able to retain memory of some points for longer than ten seconds... Anyway, it seems that this discussion has gone so far off the rails it has become useless for basing a decision on it. It would probably be best to just create that sub-section and see how it works. Harvesting more opinions is only going to become even more confusing. Mylenium

And there the wheels come off your argument. They are not newly patented (with few exceptions like Smart Brick), but rather their designs are being registered. You cannot get a patent for something that exists (the system as a whole), but you may register specific designs within this system. However, each of these designs can be contested under the assumption that it is only one solution out of many and in order to be compatible with the system it has to meet specific criteria. After all, a 1 x 1 element will always turn out pretty square, no matter whether you round off the corners a lot or just a tiny bit. I'd also be cautious to accuse alternate brands of stealing designs. Designs are registered "as is" and slight changes move it outside of the realm of copy. Many brands have different underside patterns for plates for instance already. In reverse, alternate brands have had elements for years that LEGO is only introducing now. So who's copying who? It's really more complicated than just to say "Brand X is evil." Also keep in mind that the law is different in different parts of the world. Anyway, it's quite messy, but I would stay away from such generalized statements. LEGO aren't always the good guys in this... Mylenium

Exactly the point. Most people demonizing alternate brands are probably just upset that "LEGO did all the hard work (on their own dime)" and should somehow be reimbursed and super respected for it while others are just leeches profiting off this work. Arguably that could be true if you watch the timeline of developing the system(s) and elements, but then again we're probably quickly touching upon economic theory. I'm sure there are some smart books about it, but ultimately the truth is that LEGO did it all to establish and further their business, so they had to swallow the cost no matter what. Whether or not someone else also took this idea and ran with it afterwards therefore becomes secondary - outside the regulations and protections provided by patents, trademarks, design registrations and specific laws in a given country. Mylenium

Too lazy to read through all the backlog that has built up those last two days I wasn't here, but I seriously have an issue with your take. I mean, among other things, I'm a graphics designer/ motion graphics guy/ 3D animator and I'm fully aware that all of this is ephemeral. It lasts until the next design trend walks around the corner next week. Likewise, if I put on my engineering hat the situation is not much different. Machines need to function and there's only so many ways to drill a hole to put in a screw. Now imagine if artists and engineers would be upset to the end of eternity just because someone copied their solution or at least came very close to it. We'd all be depressed all day and not enjoy life and nothing would get ever done. And that's no different with your unsustainable claims about LEGO designs. Sure, it may suck to see your design ripped off after a few months, but being pissy after decades over your favorite Bionicle sword blade? C'mon, get a life and be real! If you're that kind of designer you've picked the wrong profession and perhaps you should retire to some remote farm and paint pictures that are only discovered posthumously! Sorry to be so blunt, but your argument makes no sense whatsoever. Not on a technical level, not from an artistic POV, not where patents and design registrations are concerned... Mylenium

Not sure what you are trying to say and I feel it would be useful to get away from this line of argumentation. Those brands are not ruthlessly copying something they are not allowed to copy. All they use are pieces that serve the same function and thus intrinsically must share some of the same solutions and properties. LEGO being total dicks about it and hunting down every slope they may or may not have registered a design for is a whole different discussion and I'm sure just by my choice of words you can determine which side I'm on. This ridiculous situation is just to the detriment of all of us as costumers. In my view it's really time to establish a centralized authority that manages brick designs neutrally and companies allow mutual licensing under FRAND conditions at least for generic parts. Nobody is asking for LEGO to give away their special designs, but being all pissy about some 1 x 2 slopes or a Technic frame and paying lawyers to hunt down competitors is just a waste of everyone's time and money. Mylenium

Most of the time it's not people consciously releasing stuff prematurely, though, just glitches in the system. Misunderstood release schedules, LEGO themselves releasing images too early, people scraping unprotected sources on servers and so on. All that said I don't need Eurobricks to get in on the game. You don't even have to be idealistic about it. It simply happens. I certainly don't go out of my way to find leaks and I'm not even active on notorious places like Reddit and X, yet simply scrolling through my Facebook feed or participating in an activity has made me come across a leaked product many times. It just doesn't have much practical value. As long as I cannot even buy these products, why even bother to have lengthy speculative discussions about it? Just for bragging rights? It gives a certain satisfaction to say "Yes, I knew it was coming already two months ago." once something is released, but that's about it. Well, for me, anyway. Mylenium

But are there enough influencers with a meaningful audience? True, there's a gigazillion people doing LEGO, but most of them basically serve only their own village, meaning they typically only reach a few thousand people. Not sure if that is what LEGO considers efficient marketing... And because there aren't that many real big influencers to begin with you'll soon be scraping the bottom of the barrel. Mylenium

Definitely. Yeah, but that power is always one "Your post goes against our Community Guidelines" away. Your favorite influencer could go out of business any day of the week. You can control the person, but not the platforms. Perhaps this is part of the major misunderstanding management has here. Mylenium

I only do LEGO since a) I started out this way and I don't want to muddle up my pieces repository and b) I don't have space to keep most models around forever so that nice Pantasy or whatever building would just get in the way, but I have no problem if other brands get a home here. Everyone with half a brain cell should recognize that the brick building landscape is drastically different than it was ten years ago. There are more high quality brands, more brands overall and LEGO doesn't have the market all to itself despite their efforts of keeping the others down by weaponizing trademarks and design protections. I'm pretty sure there are many people out there who are at least a bit curious and having a place to ask questions and getting advise from peers can never be a bad thing. Mylenium

Doubtful. Influencer marketing isn't anywhere as efficient as everyone believes. Perhaps selling garbage from Temu on TikTok kind of works, but I see a lot of more legit influencers struggling with more serious products. Unless you have millions of followers, those measly conversion rates don't amount to much. I personally can see it working even less in the LEGO realm. Most influencers in that niche are small fish compared to other stuff. Not sure what LEGO hope to get out of it. Mylenium As per above - probably not. At least not in the strict sense of LEGO as a product. You may get occasional bursts of a e.g. Harry-Potter-centric creator recommending a set, but I don't think you could generate a steady flow this way. And with regards to the cost - let's be real. It basically costs them nothing beyond the internal write-off of the actual manufacturing and shipping costs. Mylenium

Trust me, there's nothing democratic about software development. I've been on many software Betas in my life, but at the end of the day we're all just little worker ants. The developers "vision" always takes precedent no matter how good an idea you have. Public feature requests are usually implemented very slowly way down the line, if at all. In my world that meant that even the best ideas sometimes took three or four versions of program X in-between to come to fruition. Web development should of course be more dynamic, but no doubt there's an endlessly long to-do list already. If you file a feature request today, it will also only show up months or years from now. If it isn't considered important enough it will never show up at all. And as @MAB already pointed out - just like we can't agree on many things around here, so people can argue on software forums all day. Mylenium

Fair enough, but is a review of some small Friends set popping up on Brickset nine months after the release really that useful? You know, some sets barely are sold for a year and you can't put off a decision forever. It's the same with some hobbyist reviewing a set on YouTube when it may no longer be available for purchase through regular channels. I tend to lean towards the OP's opinion - a lot of sets are left out because in particular sites with privileged early access are way too focused on only reviewing the big and juicy new sets. Mylenium

Your argument would probably make some sense if you had thrown in a "created for a specific set" commentary somewhere. All the same, even if you did, it becomes an apples vs. oranges discussion. A purpose-printed element is just another dedicated custom part of a set whereas a generic printed tile would be equally treated as a generic component. This distinction makes all the difference for manufacturing and logistics. It could be as trivial as the factory in Vietnam for instance producing such stuff all day without the other factories even being aware of what is currently being manufactured beyond it being listed in the SCM software with its actual availability. By the same token, they may be much more observant when their custom tiles for a given set aren't produced in time. We had this argument a million times. Saying that the logistics are too complicated is like saying your favorite Home Depot can't have the screws you need because managing a gigazillion screws, nuts and bolts across hundreds of different sizes and head shapes is consuming too many resources to make a profit. This is of course on no level true and thus a BS argument. Companies ferry around stuff all the time and surprisingly very little stuff gets lost. When it does, it's mostly due to human error or unforeseen events, not necessarily the logistics of the supply chain. Mylenium

That's actually one of the few points you make I would agree on. Keeping track of LEGO's release madness is hard enough as it is and fishing for reviews that are actually useful is another challenge in itself. I always tried to cater for that exact scenario, but of course my little blog is completely drowned out by the gazillion useless YouTube LEGO channels and other blogs. That and of course I'm taking a break to save my sanity. Mylenium

That's cute, but unfortunately completely not true. Companies will only provide the info that is a) mandated by regulations and b) looks positive in the marketing materials. Nobody would for instance buy smartphones if there was an endless list printed on the box about how terrible Android and iOS are in some of their aspects. Sure, you can do endless research on this, but would you? That is the same as with your original argument. Consumers do not necessarily want TMI, they want to hang on to their already made up picture in their mind. Confirmation bias is a real thing, you know. I'm afraid therefore adding info about stickers vs. prints and their contribution to any model/ package won't do much to change the situation. Not having prints won't steer away the majority people from a model they really, really want even if they may put up with stickers only begrudgingly and in reverse having everything hard-printed on the pieces isn't the beacon marketing feature that will lure in people that cannot be convinced one way or the other. That doesn't mean that such info couldn't be included, but I see it just as another piece of insignificant additional info that's only relevant for a handful of people. And taking your thought to its inevitable conclusion how about we add info on how many small, medium and large pieces are in a set? How many "Gold" parts are Pearl Gold vs. Metallic Gold? It becomes an endless fur ball of more and more threads unraveling and if we wanted to be this way, we could request LEGO publishing their internal planning documents. Makes no sense to me. It may be a bit of a pain to only find out these things after the fact once sets have been released, but at least we have ways to find out with Bricklink and all that good stuff. Mylenium

Sometimes yes, but rarely always. It's a weird mix of actual photos hacked to death with Photoshop and 3D renders created using different programs. In fact lately there have been a lot of photos with preliminary prototype stickers created using a at-home printer since apparently they worked on them to the last minute and couldn't get actual production stickers. All of this is compounded by LEGO's inconsistent handling of digital imagery. Everything else is neither here nor there. When it comes to prints vs. stickers there's a lot of myths being thrown around and it's treated like print technology stopped evolving 50 years ago and UV and sublimation printing doesn't exist. It always ends up being endlessly intertwined loops of "Yes, but..." and it can basically be bent out of shape to fit any argument. And then of course there's way too many quality issues with LEGO's stickers and actual direct prints, so there's basically zero value in spelling it out even for marketing. I don't see how your transparency initiative would be of any use to an average customer, no matter how much we may obsess about it here. Mylenium

I noticed this, too. It's somewhat random, though. Some GWPs have a code, other's don't. Perhaps they're still working on something behind the scenes and there is some sort of logic behind it that isn't obvious. Mylenium

I use BL only twice or thrice a year when I really don't want to buy a set, but may want to add a few rare-ish parts to my collection, but yes, in those ten years I do LEGO the site has barely evolved. Unfortunately it seems nobody really thinks clearly over there and their top priority is to LEGO-fy everything like with the recent, totally unnecessary branding overhaul announced a few days ago. And to a large degree I tend to disagree with some previous replies. Does the site work for them? Sure! But it works because you have used it before and are fully aware of the quirks and shortcomings plus you know what you are looking for. Otherwise it's pretty much a nightmare from the illogical way things are categorized and named, endlessly long lists, bad quality images and worst of all a search function that stopped adding any advancements in search technology 25 years ago or so. I'm only a buyer, but similar issues no doubt apply to sellers as well. I've heard about busted inventories way too often. Unfortunately alternative sites haven't really taken off in the way it would be necessary and so for better or worse we all have to use BL at some point, but I sure wish they'd instate someone with a clear vision and technical expertise and throw some money at it to bring it up to snuff. Mylenium

There's no shame in laziness. God only knows how many times I winged my projects with half-baked stuff that could have been better. But there's always a deadline and a budget... My problem with this stuff is that it's outright misleading and well, if people can't even bothered to correct their spelling errors, then I don't know why we even use AI. Well, there was an uproar on Bluesky recently over the event promoter creating an AI poster for a "special interest" (if you know what I mean) event instead of hiring one of the many great artists that are also there and would have gladly done it for reduced rates as a favor to the community. And that is really where things begin to suck. There are a few acceptable uses for generative AI, but clearly this isn't one of them. The poster wasn't even particularly good and looked like every other AI slop thing. That's where I draw the line. Mylenium

I never installed Creative Cloud, either, even if I got free licenses. ;-) They lost the plot after CS 5, anyway. Too much garbage and hardware acceleration nonsense that never worked reliably. Mylenium

Depends on where you're looking. AI is for instance eating Adobe's lunch. Nobody is going to sit there spending hours and days creating web banners or online ad videos in Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere for a lot of money when you just can type in a prompt and pay a fraction of the cost. This shift is already happening. I would agree that the days of when everyone could create their AI memes for free are perhaps over, but it's definitely not going away when paying for it has always been part of the plan. Mylenium

Amen to that. No need to lose too much sleep over it beyond that statement. Had this wave of alternate manufacturers entering the market happened two decades earlier, the whole situation would be different, anyway. This forum apparently isn't like anything in the software world where communities go dark within three months when a company declares a product dead, but you can never plan for these things one way or another. The future is always the next month and I'd see just take things one step at a time. As far as LEGO is concerned I don't particularly care. Their involvement here seems to be limited to a random review or contest every once in a blue moon and it likely won't affect anyone if that limited support disappears. It's not like this is Brickset, New Elementary or other sites whose whole existence and relevance is dependent on LEGO sending them free sets ahead of time. Mylenium