Sean's blog

Upgrade 1 of 2, tomorrow

2009-03-11T13:46:00.001-07:00

Hi everyone. MOCpages will be down tomorrow morning for about 5 or 10 minutes while we do the first of two upgrades.

Downtime #1
12-March 2009
9:00 am to 9:10 am
EST (New York)

During this downtime we'll be performing software upgrades to the server. The web site will still be slow during this time.

After the software upgrades are in place and running properly, I'll announce a second downtime when we install the new computer hardware.

For those of you wondering why this is taking so long, I'll just answer that with a screen capture of my Inbox (right). :)

MOCpages slowdowns

2009-03-04T13:23:00.000-08:00

I wanted to apologize for the slowness of MOCpages these past few weeks. At first, the slowdowns seemed to be caused by the ad networks... but it turns out that the site is getting too popular for our servers to handle!

The slowness is driving me bananas, too.

So don't worry... this week we're upgrading the servers. More efficient servers with more memory and more storage will mean more MOCpages for everyone! Yay! The site will go down for a half hour (likely during a weekday between midnight and 7:00 am, Eastern USA) while we put the new servers in place.

Hang tight! Soon the site will be nice and spiffy fast again!

Announcing the new MOCpages

2008-12-29T07:48:00.000-08:00

Hi, everyone!

I'm super happy to announce that MOCpages is sporting a fresh new facelift, a pile of great new features, and will hopefully be a lot more fun (and a lot less frustrating) for all of you.

So check out what's new, join some groups, upload a buddy icon, catch up with your favorite builders, and have fun!

Some highlights:

Groups bring together people, conversation, and LEGO creations.

Track your favorite creations and favorite builders so it's easy to find the stuff you like. We'll even tell you what your favorite builders are up to.

Get activity updates about you and your friends.

See what's new, what's popular, what's being discussed, or browse great creations from the past.

The new rating system prevents spamming and attacks. Anonymous visitors must first validate their e-mail address before leaving comments. And no one can "rate down" your creations anymore, thanks to changes in how we show who likes your creations.

A great new look for your home page makes it easier for people to browse your creations.

Two new photo upload layouts, "grid" and "full size" (plus the older 3 layouts) let you arrange pictures in lots of ways.

Super dooper 2009! A whole new MOCpages!

2008-12-04T11:32:00.000-08:00

As promised, I've been hard at work on a whole new set of coolness for MOCpages. Everything's nearly ready and I wanted to give you a sneak preview of what's coming.

Soon you can get together, stay updated, find the cool stuff, track your favorite builders, join groups, create contests, prevent spamming... and of course, share your LEGO creations. Over 50 new features. Still 100% free.

Sneak preview

What do you think? Leave a comment.

Can I do this? What about that?

2008-10-30T18:24:00.001-07:00

OK... a LOT of people have been e-mailing me about "Can I put this on my page?" "Can I do that?" "What if I do this instead?" "Why did you delete my page?"

It's really simple, and I'm not trying to be some kind of evil MOCpolice... I just want to make sure that MOCpages doesn't turn into a sort of digital junkyard full of all kinds of different things. People like MOCpages because it's a place to see cool LEGO creations, and I want to make sure it can stay that way!

Basically, when people visit MOCpages and click on a page, they expect to see a LEGO creation. Anything other than than is bothersome and distracting.

Think about it this way. Imagine you went to YouTube and searched for "LEGO Indiana Jones Video". You see a lot of results, and click on one called "Best Indy Stuff". But instead of seeing a great video, all you get is a slide that says "go look in the comments for links to my favorite videos". That might be a little annoying, but so what. You go back and click on another one. But it's the same thing, by someone else! After you keep clicking on more videos and getting the same kind of stuff, you'll get pretty frustrated. "How can I tell which videos are really videos? Where's the actual STUFF ??"

That's what happens on MOCpages when you create pages that don't showcase your LEGO creations.

So, can you do other things with your pages? Sure!! Sometimes people sell photos of that creation, or sell that creation itself. Sometimes people link to real-life inspiration for that creation. Somtimes you can download LDD files of that creation. Sometimes people link to other people's creations that they used as inspiration for that creation. The subtle difference is that the MEAT of the page is still all about the LEGO creation.

Imagine if you created a page that was "here are my inspirations" and listed all sorts of stuff that you like (cars, favorite car LEGO creations, car movies... etc...) Who cares? No one would be happy clicking on that page because they'd expect to see a creation, but just get a bunch of other stuff. BUT! ... what if ALONGSIDE your LEGO creation you said, "here is my inspiration for THIS creation"? Suddenly it has meaning and relevance and can be interesting to visitors. Visitors can see what you think and what interests you. They can get interested in what you're interested in!

It's a subtle but important difference. I hope it makes sense.

By my ally!

2008-10-30T09:32:00.001-07:00

I know it's cool to form alliances and legions and brotherhoods and gangs and groups and clubs and gaggles and stuff... but MOCpages "pages" are for sharing your LEGO creations.

If you want to link to your friends or allies or enemies or pets or noodles or anything else that is not a LEGO creation, why not put it on your home page?

As I've said in the past, MOCpages will soon have new features that will allow you to link up with friends, mark your favorite builders, and other goodies. In the meantime, lots of folks complain about these alliance pages cluttering up the site, so please stop adding "LEGO creations" that aren't LEGO creations.

Thanks for understanding.

Small tweaks to "comments you've made"

2008-10-15T11:48:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone... I made some minor tweaks to the Comments you've made page.

The page is now sorted reverse-chronologically, so that your most-recent comments are at the top.
I banged around at the moving parts. The page now loads a lot faster than it used to!

Enjoy. And let me know if you find any bugs.

Featured creations

2008-10-07T09:09:00.000-07:00

Lately, a lot of you have been e-mailing me with questions or complaints about the daily creation that is featured on the homepage. How is it chosen? Why are creations featured more than once?

The short answer is: the creation is chosen programatically, based on ratings, comments, popularity, and so on.

The longer answer is that the creation was never intented to be a "best of MOCpages" or a "MOC of the day" as most of you call it... it was just something to spice up the homepage so that you wouldn't see the same old boring stuff everyday. And it also was meant to show you something that you might not have ever seen before... maybe from a long time ago.

It used to be chosen completely at random. But people fill my inbox with complaints (and alternate suggestions) when the creation isn't very good. So I added criteria that considers the creation's popularity before randomly choosing it. By selecting creations that have a lot of positive ratings and comments, the creation is likely to be something that everyone visiting MOCpages will like.

So for now, just understand that the home page features a creation that the community, as a whole, really likes... Even if you don't, and even if you've seen it before.

How to get your stuff deleted

2008-08-25T09:07:00.000-07:00

What the heck, guys? Lots of you have been adding tons of pages that have nothing to do with LEGO creations. I delete this stuff as soon as I see it ... so why are you bothering?

I used to delete a bad page once every few weeks. Now I have to delete about 10 pages every day! What's going on?

How to get your stuff deleted

Talking about stuff that isn't LEGO. Sample
Uploading photos of things that aren't LEGO. Sample
Asking for allies or friends or enemies or cheese. Sample
Writing stuff that has no pictures of anything, no links to anything, or ... anything...
Uploading drawings or other things you did that are very cool but still not LEGO.
Roblox isn't your LEGO creations. It's Roblox.
Complaining about someone else.
Racist or pornographic stuff. Even if it is LEGO.
Uploading other people's creations and claiming they're your own. You think we don't know?

It's really easy: MOCpages is for sharing your LEGO creations. Anything else will be deleted.

Upload bug: fixed!

2008-08-18T09:06:00.000-07:00

Many of you have noticed that when you uploaded pictures to your pages, sometimes you would end up with doubles of every other photo, instead of each unique photo.

I'm happy to say that the bug has been fixed! (It turns out that sometimes, the MOCpages server would process your images so fast that they'd finish two at a time and overwrite each other. Bah! Computers!)

Let me know if you're still having problems.

(And don't forget to check out the image uploading tips.)

Searchy goodness

2008-08-12T09:05:00.000-07:00

As of today, (August 12, 2008) MOCpages now has over 68,000 LEGO creations! It can be hard to find what you're looking for sometimes, so I've added a new feature that lets you sort your search results. (Just like you could in the directories.)

By default, your searches return "all matches", which is what you always used to get. Now you can also choose to sort by "most popular", "newest", and "oldest". And these new searches only look through the titles of everyone's LEGO creations -- not the summaries or the contents -- so you can find a good match even easier.

Those new fangled moving pictures

2008-07-30T09:01:00.000-07:00

You can now add videos of your LEGO creations to your pages!

While you can't upload videos directly to MOCpages, you can now embed them.

First, upload your video to a video hosting web site. Supported sites:
- YouTube
- Google Video
- Yahoo Video
- Photobucket
- Dailymotion
- Myspace
- Facebook
- Vimeo

After the video is uploaded, create a new page on MOCpages. (Or edit an old one.)

Copy and paste the <embed> tag from YouTube or Google Video into your new page.

(For more help embedding videos, go to the "help" section on your video hosting web site.)

And for you brickfilmers out there, there's a category in the MOCpages Directory called Movies, where you can add your LEGO films.

And remember, MOCpages is for showcasing your LEGO creations -- only. Pages that have videos of other things will be entirely deleted. (And your account could be deleted too!)

Play well!

Spamming and ratings

2008-07-24T08:58:00.000-07:00

A lot of people have been e-mailing me about problems with people "attacking" their creations with low ratings and other similar rudeness.

It's a shame that a select few are ruining things for the whole. I'm aware of these "spamming" problems and have been working on broader improvements to the rating system that will be implemented in the coming months.

Did you know that MOCpages is the biggest LEGO fan community in the world? One in ten people visiting LEGO.com also come to MOCpages! More people visiting means, sadly, more people that can abuse the system.

When the rating system was created in 2003, blogging and social communities didn't even exist. The only thing similar at the time was Amazon.com's product rating system, and MOCpages' was modelled after that. But a lot has changed on the internet in 5 years, and with blogs and social communities everywhere, people are more and more accustomed to "flying in", hiding behind an anonymous shield, and doing whatever they want, nice or not.

Web sites like digg.com and flickr.com are now a much better model for how to request the opinions of millions of people... Instead of "rating" a LEGO creation, you'll be given a way to mark creations that you like. This way you'll be able to easily find creations you like (and builders you like). At the same time, the builder of the creation will be able to see how many people (and who) likes their work.

Update 19-Aug 2008

Many (many, many) of you have suggested these same two things:

"people should be forced to create an account to leave a comment or rate a creation"

That won't work. People will just create secondary dummy accounts when they want to be rude. More importantly, it will only discourage the hundreds of thousands of anonymous visitors that come to MOCpages every day. Remember that in addition to being a community of LEGO - lovers, we're also a window to the world of LEGO creations to the millions of people that aren't LEGO fans.

"People should be forced to leave a comment when they rate a creation."

TRUST me, you do not want to see the things people write when they rate a creation 1-out-of-5. I delete dozens of them every day, before any of you even see them... they're usually vulgar, rude, attacking, foolish, or just plain stupid. But besides that, whille 1 out of 10 people rate a creation, only one out of 100 leave a comment. By forcing someone to leave a comment, they simply won't leave a rating. That means you won't get 90% of the feedback you get today.

The bottom line? Forcing people to do things they don't want to do is never useful. No one will create an account or write a comment just because you're forcing them to. The real solution is to come up with a way for people to interact civilly and to build web applications that cater to what people are really doing already.

Start commenting!

2008-06-05T08:56:00.000-07:00

By popular request, the MOCpages "review" system has been changed to a "comments" system. It's less restrictive and will behave more like the commenting features you're used to elsewhere.

Now you can:

comment on a creation as often as you want.

comment on your own creations.

Adding comments works exactly like writing a review. As always, rating a creation will only count once, even if you write lots of comments or change your rating.

We've tested it out, but it's pretty complex stuff, so we hope we've got all the bugs ironed out. Contact us if you're having problems

Moderation changes

2008-06-04T08:55:00.000-07:00

MOCpages has changed the way it handles moderation. MOCpages used to delete inappropriate comments automatically, right after you wrote them. Now, MOCpages lets you know what you're doing wrong so that you have the opportunity to write a good comment instead.

Read why these changes were made
Learn tips for writing good comments

Your favorite LEGO creations

2008-06-03T08:53:00.000-07:00

We've added a new page, Your favorite LEGO creations. It's linked under "Your opinions" on Your account and shows you some of the LEGO creations that you have rated the highest.

Deleting your account

2008-06-03T08:16:00.000-07:00

A lot of you have asked for a way to delete your MOCpages account. We'd be sad to see you go, but it's linked under "Account settings", on Your account .

Deleting your account is VERY PERMANENT so please don't do it if you're not sure.