Trekkie99 Posted September 10, 2023 Posted September 10, 2023 What is the state of Brickshelf? Are there backups? Are all the models on there safe??? I'll admit to rarely visiting Brickshelf in my early years as a fan, never appreciating the old aesthetic. Now, I love it. And more importantly I love some of the models I'm finding. I was just saying elsewhere I wish I could find some cool mocs that look like old Lego sets, well there's plenty there! On this note and case in point, What happened to all the models on mocpages?! As of writing this, creating a new account is disabled and password recovery is broken according to the home page. Has it been like that for long? Does anyone know if they could be going into some sort of preservation/archiving mode? Quote
Murdoch17 Posted September 10, 2023 Posted September 10, 2023 (edited) Re: MOCpages - Everything on that site was lost when Sean Kenny wiped it from existence, unless the Wayback machine has it... which is doubtful the entire site would be there. If we ever lose Brickshelf like we lost MOCpages, God help the LEGO fan community. A lot of valuable history will be lost... again. Edited September 10, 2023 by Murdoch17 Quote
Mylenium Posted September 11, 2023 Posted September 11, 2023 On 9/10/2023 at 10:10 PM, Trekkie99 said: Are all the models on there safe??? Expand As safe as anything hosted on a private domain that barely seems to scrape by... And it's clearly not helping that there's a new one opening every few months.. Mylenium Quote
SD100 Posted September 11, 2023 Posted September 11, 2023 When Brickshelf started hosting "other than Lego" pics for a bit I used it for a ton of stuff... One day I got on and it was all gone. Don't trust it for long term storage. SD Quote
Trekkie99 Posted September 11, 2023 Author Posted September 11, 2023 Then I guess the next question is does anyone know of anyone scraping/archiving brickshelf? I tried searching a little like on r/datahoarder (a subreddit), reddit as a whole, and general google (not helpful as always as of lately thanks google you pos), but found nothing. Quote
vijv Posted September 29, 2023 Posted September 29, 2023 You can still find Brickshelf via The Wayback Machine. .https://web.archive.org/web/20230927204729/https://brickshelf.com/https://web.archive.org/web/20230314164444/https://brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/customview.cgi?include=Train The site does work, more or less. Many images are gone. Quote
Baldios Posted December 22, 2024 Posted December 22, 2024 Is there a chance they'll ever reopen account registration? It's such a comfy site. Quote
Murdoch17 Posted December 22, 2024 Posted December 22, 2024 (edited) On 12/22/2024 at 6:37 PM, Baldios said: Is there a chance they'll ever reopen account registration? It's such a comfy site. Expand Not likely @Baldios. It seems to be on borrowed time to be honest, and Brickshelf will an even greater loss than MOCpages (R.I.P.) when it goes. Over twenty years worth of AFOL history is on that site. Edited December 22, 2024 by Murdoch17 Quote
KotZ Posted December 23, 2024 Posted December 23, 2024 On 12/22/2024 at 6:47 PM, Murdoch17 said: Not likely @Baldios. It seems to be on borrowed time to be honest, and Brickshelf will an even greater loss than MOCpages (R.I.P.) when it goes. Over twenty years worth of AFOL history is on that site. Expand Yeah, links will be broken everywhere that links back there, etc. I know I have some photos on there that I don't have on my personal drives and should probably download them soon. Quote
spotfrog Posted January 25 Posted January 25 The landing page now reads this: Quote !! NOTICE !! Notice: Brickshelf.com will be disabled on or about 3/1/2025. This applies to all brickshelf domains including .com, .info, .me, .net, .org, .us. The owner of Brickshelf, Kevin Loch, passed away. The Kevin M Loch Estate will be shutting down Kevin's websites in the near future. Inquiries for purchasing brickshelf may be sent to support@brickshelf.com. Click this link to continue on to brickshelf.com Expand https://www.brickfanatics.com/tributes-for-founder-lego-website-brickshelf/ R.I.P. to Kevin Loch, the website is a remnant of the old internet and served the Lego community well for years. Quote
Murdoch17 Posted January 25 Posted January 25 (edited) On 1/25/2025 at 6:28 PM, spotfrog said: The landing page now reads this: https://www.brickfanatics.com/tributes-for-founder-lego-website-brickshelf/ R.I.P. to Kevin Loch, the website is a remnant of the old internet and served the Lego community well for years. Expand @Jim can you frontpage this info about Brickshelf? So everyone who uses it knows that it's no longer going to be around and they should get everything they can off the site? @KotZ now would be a good time to get your stuff off there. Edited January 25 by Murdoch17 Quote
SpacePolice89 Posted January 25 Posted January 25 R.I.P Kevin Loch. This is very sad. I have used Brickshelf since 2000. First I was only looking at all the amazing Lego pictures and in 2003 I started uploading my own pictures. It is still my primary website for storing Lego pictures. Quote
Peppermint_M Posted January 25 Posted January 25 Oh dear. That is sad to hear. I hope the family know what a huge and positive impact he had on the online LEGO community. It is too bad there is probably no interested parties to keep it online. I know many threads of the past will lose images (many of my own included). Quote
Autumn Posted January 25 Posted January 25 (edited) I lost access to my account long ago but two mocs I uploaded 2005/2006 are still there for now. Debating whether to save them or not, they're not exactly from very happy times. Still, it's sad news. I remember finding all kinds of creations on there that amazed me as a kid. Will spend some time looking around and seeing if there is anything exceedingly interesting worth saving that might otherwise get lost. Edited January 25 by Autumn Quote
Toastie Posted January 25 Posted January 25 Oh my - this is really so sad. Giving and serving for more than 2 decades ... "Far away, across the field The tolling of the iron bell Calls the faithful to their knees To hear the softly spoken magic spells" ... Time, Pink Floyd A deep bow to Kevin Loch and his family Thorsten Quote
Celeri Posted January 26 Posted January 26 This is sad news indeed. I was not a fan of this site's design, but the data within it is just priceless and should definitely be kept alive somewhere! I am currently testing a way to download whole galleries from the site and it seems to work, but I cannot be sure it will work for each of them... So if you want to help me test it and get full local backups of specific galleries, please send me their URL and I will (try to) get it for you — preferably a gallery that you know quite well, so that you can check that everything is downloaded in the backup! Quote
Qahne Posted January 26 Posted January 26 On 1/26/2025 at 1:48 AM, Celeri said: This is sad news indeed. I was not a fan of this site's design, but the data within it is just priceless and should definitely be kept alive somewhere! I am currently testing a way to download whole galleries from the site and it seems to work, but I cannot be sure it will work for each of them... So if you want to help me test it and get full local backups of specific galleries, please send me their URL and I will (try to) get it for you — preferably a gallery that you know quite well, so that you can check that everything is downloaded in the backup! Expand Would you be interested in sharing your method once it's been tested a bit ? Possibly we could crowdsource some kind of backup of notable galleries on the site. Personally, MisaQ and Nabii's stuff stands out as worthy off the top of my head, there's dozens and dozens more. It was such an amazing site, I remember spending hours as a kid staring at everything, trying to copy models and learning techniques, it's such a brilliant archive of the evolution of the online Lego community. RIP to Kevin and to Brickshelf. Quote
SpacePolice89 Posted January 26 Posted January 26 I have used Bricksafe as a backup but now I have to move all my picture there. I have previously thought about doing that but I always found Brickshelf very user friendly so I have never actually done it before now. Or maybe I am just so used to Brickshelf and its functions? Quote
Sebeus I Posted January 26 Posted January 26 This is bad, what about all the old archived MOCs here at EB? I imagine a lof of those depend on Brickshelf for pictures... Quote
Celeri Posted January 26 Posted January 26 (edited) On 1/26/2025 at 2:37 AM, Qahne said: Would you be interested in sharing your method once it's been tested a bit ? Expand Of course I can share if it is confirmed to work well. I have downloaded 3 galleries as a test : MisaQ, Nabii and Nico71 (I just love his works). They can be reached here : https://www.celeri.net/_public/brickshelf.com/ If someone wants some other galleries to be downloaded, let me know! Another idea, more global, to preserve BrickShelf's assets, would be to have BrickSafe import all the galleries within their own engine... I do not know if this could be done before the March 1st deadline, but who knows, maybe its creator has already thought that this situation could happen? Does someone here know BrickSafe's creator to ask him? Edited January 26 by Celeri Quote
SpacePolice89 Posted January 26 Posted January 26 On 1/26/2025 at 1:02 PM, Celeri said: Another idea, more global, to preserve BrickShelf's assets, would be to have BrickSafe import all the galleries within their own engine... I do not know if this could be done before the March 1st deadline, but who knows, maybe its creator has already thought that this situation could happen? Does someone here know BrickSafe's creator to ask him? Expand The creator of Bricksafe is Nathan Thom and he writes on Bricksafe: "Websites always seem to hide behind a "we" or "us" these days. In this case, it's just me! I am Nathan Thom, and am also the creator of Rebrickable. Contact Me! You can reach me about anything to do with Bricksafe at support@bricksafe.com." Quote
aFrInaTi0n Posted January 26 Posted January 26 Created me a script which is running already to create backups of all files with the original structure.. scraped 55k files in 20 minutes already - if my guessings are right it may get a total size of ~5TB (est would be ~1MB per file for the 5 millions..) Quote
KotZ Posted January 26 Posted January 26 On 1/26/2025 at 10:49 PM, aFrInaTi0n said: Created me a script which is running already to create backups of all files with the original structure.. scraped 55k files in 20 minutes already - if my guessings are right it may get a total size of ~5TB (est would be ~1MB per file for the 5 millions..) Expand That's impressive! Quote
aFrInaTi0n Posted January 26 Posted January 26 It it somehow "easy" when one knows how to do - all the images are having a unique id - just wrote me a script to start from 1 to 5 million to iterate over and then do some fancy selection stuff to get me the original URL of the picture, as this contains username + folders, then downloading the picture and saving it to a database.. as it starts from the beginning, I guess the average filesize may grow from the current 106kb (times 109483 equals the already 12 GB in disk space...) :D Quote
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