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| | | Author: | azbricker  | | Posted: | Jul 5, 2021 23:51 | | Subject: | Lack of Features and UI Design / Difficult | | Viewed: | 159 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | | Status: | Open | | Vote: | [Yes|No] | |
|
| I have been using BrickLink for about a week or so now and as a software developer
and systems engineer and someone who grew up building with Lego's I have
to honestly say, what Dan Jezek build was good and what he family has done since
then has been decent and I applaud their efforts however, the site appears to
be owned by Lego Group now and I think it's time that they dump some real
money into it. The site is extremely difficult to use (others on the Internet
have the same sentiments that I do) and it lacks a ton of features. For example,
looking through the gallery I would like to add them to my wanted list or "save"
them somewhere but I cannot do that. For the ones that have the studio files
available, I can download the files however, most of the ones that I have looked
at (I am into the City-type sets) do not so I would like to reach out to the
creators to see about purchasing their files so that I can build their models
as well but again, this is extremely difficult to do and requires a lot of clicking.
At times, the site is also extremely slow (I see it's also written in ASP
which is a very old language). I know there are some competitors out there but
to be honest, building another one with the community behind BrickLink and Dan's
legacy, just isn't really an option. I would love to help (even for FREE)
build a new website using more modern languages and frameworks to make the site
cleaner, easier to use and have more functionality. Likewise, the Discussion
Forum is absolutely terrible. I still has the UI design of a message board /
news group from the 1990s. I am not trying to be rude and I apologize if I am
but I see so much more potential here. It wouldn't take long for someone
to build another competitor website that works better and has more features though
it would be extremely difficult for them to get the following that BrickLink
has but, it can be done. Please let me know if I can help in anyway. Thank you!
|
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| | | | | |
| | | | | Author: | wildchicken13 | | Posted: | Jul 6, 2021 00:21 | | Subject: | Re: Lack of Features and UI Design / Difficult | | Viewed: | 56 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | |
|
| In Suggestions, azbricker writes:
| | I have been using BrickLink for about a week or so now and as a software developer
and systems engineer and someone who grew up building with Lego's I have
to honestly say, what Dan Jezek build was good and what he family has done since
then has been decent and I applaud their efforts however, the site appears to
be owned by Lego Group now and I think it's time that they dump some real
money into it.
|
Agreed.
| | The site is extremely difficult to use (others on the Internet
have the same sentiments that I do) and it lacks a ton of features.
|
Don't even get me started on the seller side of things. Impossible to manage
a medium- to large-sized store without third-party software.
| | For example,
looking through the gallery I would like to add them to my wanted list or "save"
them somewhere but I cannot do that.
|
MOCs that are full access can be saved directly to your Wanted List.
| | For the ones that have the studio files
available, I can download the files however, most of the ones that I have looked
at (I am into the City-type sets) do not so I would like to reach out to the
creators to see about purchasing their files so that I can build their models
as well but again, this is extremely difficult to do and requires a lot of clicking.
|
Some designers have reasons for making their MOCs display only, but in many cases,
they have been set to display only by BrickLink due to copyright infringement.
I'm not sure if this prevents designers from being able to share the .io
file through other means, but you may want to be careful with that. Perhaps someone
else with more expertise in this area can chime in.
| | At times, the site is also extremely slow (I see it's also written in ASP
which is a very old language). I know there are some competitors out there but
to be honest, building another one with the community behind BrickLink and Dan's
legacy, just isn't really an option.
|
Agreed.
| | I would love to help (even for FREE)
build a new website using more modern languages and frameworks to make the site
cleaner, easier to use and have more functionality.
|
Same. I'm not much of a web developer, but I'd be more than happy to
help out any way I can (feedback, suggestions for new features, catalog stuff,
etc.)
| | Likewise, the Discussion Forum is absolutely terrible.
|
Agreed. At least it works, though.
| | I still has the UI design of a message board /
news group from the 1990s. I am not trying to be rude and I apologize if I am
but I see so much more potential here. It wouldn't take long for someone
to build another competitor website that works better and has more features though
it would be extremely difficult for them to get the following that BrickLink
has but, it can be done. Please let me know if I can help in anyway. Thank you!
|
Another thing that annoys me about BrickLink is daily maintenance. BrickLink
is the only website I know that regularly goes down for maintenance. Sure, ten
minutes a day is not that bad, but it can be annoying when you are trying to
do something on the site during that time.
|
|
|
| | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | Author: | azbricker | | Posted: | Jul 6, 2021 01:15 | | Subject: | Re: Lack of Features and UI Design / Difficult | | Viewed: | 48 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | |
|
| In Suggestions, wildchicken13 writes:
| | In Suggestions, azbricker writes:
| | I have been using BrickLink for about a week or so now and as a software developer
and systems engineer and someone who grew up building with Lego's I have
to honestly say, what Dan Jezek build was good and what he family has done since
then has been decent and I applaud their efforts however, the site appears to
be owned by Lego Group now and I think it's time that they dump some real
money into it.
|
Agreed.
| | The site is extremely difficult to use (others on the Internet
have the same sentiments that I do) and it lacks a ton of features.
|
Don't even get me started on the seller side of things. Impossible to manage
a medium- to large-sized store without third-party software.
| | For example,
looking through the gallery I would like to add them to my wanted list or "save"
them somewhere but I cannot do that.
|
|
I did see one out of the 10+ or so that I am really interested in that I was
able to download the Studio file and load it however, I was unable to actually
see the build steps. I am not sure what I was doing wrong but for the life of
me, I could not get it to show me the build steps.
| | MOCs that are full access can be saved directly to your Wanted List.
| | For the ones that have the studio files
available, I can download the files however, most of the ones that I have looked
at (I am into the City-type sets) do not so I would like to reach out to the
creators to see about purchasing their files so that I can build their models
as well but again, this is extremely difficult to do and requires a lot of clicking.
|
Some designers have reasons for making their MOCs display only, but in many cases,
they have been set to display only by BrickLink due to copyright infringement.
I'm not sure if this prevents designers from being able to share the .io
file through other means, but you may want to be careful with that. Perhaps someone
else with more expertise in this area can chime in.
| | At times, the site is also extremely slow (I see it's also written in ASP
which is a very old language). I know there are some competitors out there but
to be honest, building another one with the community behind BrickLink and Dan's
legacy, just isn't really an option.
|
Agreed.
| | I would love to help (even for FREE)
build a new website using more modern languages and frameworks to make the site
cleaner, easier to use and have more functionality.
|
Same. I'm not much of a web developer, but I'd be more than happy to
help out any way I can (feedback, suggestions for new features, catalog stuff,
etc.)
| | Likewise, the Discussion Forum is absolutely terrible.
|
Agreed. At least it works, though.
| | I still has the UI design of a message board /
news group from the 1990s. I am not trying to be rude and I apologize if I am
but I see so much more potential here. It wouldn't take long for someone
to build another competitor website that works better and has more features though
it would be extremely difficult for them to get the following that BrickLink
has but, it can be done. Please let me know if I can help in anyway. Thank you!
|
Another thing that annoys me about BrickLink is daily maintenance. BrickLink
is the only website I know that regularly goes down for maintenance. Sure, ten
minutes a day is not that bad, but it can be annoying when you are trying to
do something on the site during that time.
|
So in my world, 10 minutes per day could be literally thousands, tens of thousands
or even hundreds of thousands of dollars lost. The world that I come from (not
corporate, software as a service - SaaS) we strive for what we call five 9's
(99.999%) uptime. That allows for approximately 6 minutes of down time PER YEAR!
Right now at 10 minutes per night, they are seeing approximately 3650 minutes
of downtime per year which is about 61 hours which equates to about 99%. If the
website does $1,000 per minute in revenue, that means they are potentially losing
$3,650,000 (Million) USD per year. If it were only $100 per minute they are still
losing some $365,000 USD per year in potential revenue. I do not know ANY company
that would stand for that especially in the current world that we live in. It
really is ridiculous and there are tons of ways, especially with cloud technologies,
to not have to take sites down for "maintenance" especially every night.
|
|
|
| | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | Author: | wildchicken13 | | Posted: | Jul 6, 2021 01:35 | | Subject: | Re: Lack of Features and UI Design / Difficult | | Viewed: | 40 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | |
|
| In Suggestions, azbricker writes:
| | I did see one out of the 10+ or so that I am really interested in that I was
able to download the Studio file and load it however, I was unable to actually
see the build steps. I am not sure what I was doing wrong but for the life of
me, I could not get it to show me the build steps.
|
Not every MOC has building steps; the designer has to add them manually. For
MOCs that do have building steps, you can see them by switching to instruction
mode. If the designer was kind enough to do all the layout and formatting stuff,
then all you have to do is export them and you will have a nice PDF instruction
manual.
| | So in my world, 10 minutes per day could be literally thousands, tens of thousands
or even hundreds of thousands of dollars lost. The world that I come from (not
corporate, software as a service - SaaS) we strive for what we call five 9's
(99.999%) uptime. That allows for approximately 6 minutes of down time PER YEAR!
Right now at 10 minutes per night, they are seeing approximately 3650 minutes
of downtime per year which is about 61 hours which equates to about 99%. If the
website does $1,000 per minute in revenue, that means they are potentially losing
$3,650,000 (Million) USD per year. If it were only $100 per minute they are still
losing some $365,000 USD per year in potential revenue. I do not know ANY company
that would stand for that especially in the current world that we live in. It
really is ridiculous and there are tons of ways, especially with cloud technologies,
to not have to take sites down for "maintenance" especially every night.
|
Agreed. I'm not sure how much BrickLink actually loses because of daily maintenance;
I, for one, will wait until it's over to make a purchase, but that's
just me. What's worse is the monthly maintenance, when the site goes down
for a whole hour.
|
|
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| | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | Author: | yorbrick | | Posted: | Jul 6, 2021 05:16 | | Subject: | Re: Lack of Features and UI Design / Difficult | | Viewed: | 43 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | |
|
| | | So in my world, 10 minutes per day could be literally thousands, tens of thousands
or even hundreds of thousands of dollars lost. The world that I come from (not
corporate, software as a service - SaaS) we strive for what we call five 9's
(99.999%) uptime. That allows for approximately 6 minutes of down time PER YEAR!
Right now at 10 minutes per night, they are seeing approximately 3650 minutes
of downtime per year which is about 61 hours which equates to about 99%. If the
website does $1,000 per minute in revenue, that means they are potentially losing
$3,650,000 (Million) USD per year. If it were only $100 per minute they are still
losing some $365,000 USD per year in potential revenue. I do not know ANY company
that would stand for that especially in the current world that we live in. It
really is ridiculous and there are tons of ways, especially with cloud technologies,
to not have to take sites down for "maintenance" especially every night.
|
I doubt they revenue per minute is equal throughout the day. It is timed when
most users are not busy, presumably to minimise disruption.
A bigger issue for me is when something goes wrong during the night for USA,
as they have no engineers in other locations ready to fix things and everyone
has to wait until the USA wakes up again.
|
|
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| | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | Author: | macebobo | | Posted: | Jul 6, 2021 12:38 | | Subject: | Re: Lack of Features and UI Design / Difficult | | Viewed: | 40 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | |
|
| In Suggestions, azbricker writes:
| | So in my world, 10 minutes per day could be literally thousands, tens of thousands
or even hundreds of thousands of dollars lost. The world that I come from (not
corporate, software as a service - SaaS) we strive for what we call five 9's
(99.999%) uptime. That allows for approximately 6 minutes of down time PER YEAR!
Right now at 10 minutes per night, they are seeing approximately 3650 minutes
of downtime per year which is about 61 hours which equates to about 99%. If the
website does $1,000 per minute in revenue, that means they are potentially losing
$3,650,000 (Million) USD per year. If it were only $100 per minute they are still
losing some $365,000 USD per year in potential revenue. I do not know ANY company
that would stand for that especially in the current world that we live in. It
really is ridiculous and there are tons of ways, especially with cloud technologies,
to not have to take sites down for "maintenance" especially every night.
|
Sorry, had to vote no for the following reasons:
Five 9's is expensive! These costs are incurred from buying more servers,
whether as physical infrastructure or in the cloud. In addition you’ll likely
involve more software components and configuration complexity. And here’s a hard
truth, with all that complexity also comes more risk. More moving parts means
more components that can fail. Those additional components can fail from bugs,
misconfiguration, or interoperability issues.
What’s more, pushing for that marginal 0.999% increase in high availability means
you’ll require more people and create more processes, and all the added costs
that those entail.
A better area to focus on, to gain some inexpensive reliability, is working to
eliminate operator errors. These questions can help that process...
o Are you testing servers?
o Is network wide monitoring in place?
o Do you verify (and test) backups?
o Are you monitoring disk partitions?
o Are you watching load averages?
o Are you monitoring your server system logs for disk errors and warnings?
o Do you have server analytics? Do you collect server system metrics?
o Are you performing regular scheduled fire drills?
o Are you learning from unplanned outages by doing after action reports?
Having the system down for 10 minutes a night is frustrating, but if it keeps
the fees at 3% or less, then it is okay with me. Additionally, it gives me a
chance to take a break, stretch my legs and get away from the computer for a
few minutes.
It is not a perfect system, but it fulfills 95% of my requirements.
-- John
|
|
|
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | Author: | azbricker | | Posted: | Jul 11, 2021 00:16 | | Subject: | Re: Lack of Features and UI Design / Difficult | | Viewed: | 35 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | |
|
| In Suggestions, macebobo writes:
| | In Suggestions, azbricker writes:
| | So in my world, 10 minutes per day could be literally thousands, tens of thousands
or even hundreds of thousands of dollars lost. The world that I come from (not
corporate, software as a service - SaaS) we strive for what we call five 9's
(99.999%) uptime. That allows for approximately 6 minutes of down time PER YEAR!
Right now at 10 minutes per night, they are seeing approximately 3650 minutes
of downtime per year which is about 61 hours which equates to about 99%. If the
website does $1,000 per minute in revenue, that means they are potentially losing
$3,650,000 (Million) USD per year. If it were only $100 per minute they are still
losing some $365,000 USD per year in potential revenue. I do not know ANY company
that would stand for that especially in the current world that we live in. It
really is ridiculous and there are tons of ways, especially with cloud technologies,
to not have to take sites down for "maintenance" especially every night.
|
Sorry, had to vote no for the following reasons:
Five 9's is expensive! These costs are incurred from buying more servers,
whether as physical infrastructure or in the cloud. In addition you’ll likely
involve more software components and configuration complexity. And here’s a hard
truth, with all that complexity also comes more risk. More moving parts means
more components that can fail. Those additional components can fail from bugs,
misconfiguration, or interoperability issues.
What’s more, pushing for that marginal 0.999% increase in high availability means
you’ll require more people and create more processes, and all the added costs
that those entail.
A better area to focus on, to gain some inexpensive reliability, is working to
eliminate operator errors. These questions can help that process...
o Are you testing servers?
o Is network wide monitoring in place?
o Do you verify (and test) backups?
o Are you monitoring disk partitions?
o Are you watching load averages?
o Are you monitoring your server system logs for disk errors and warnings?
o Do you have server analytics? Do you collect server system metrics?
o Are you performing regular scheduled fire drills?
o Are you learning from unplanned outages by doing after action reports?
Having the system down for 10 minutes a night is frustrating, but if it keeps
the fees at 3% or less, then it is okay with me. Additionally, it gives me a
chance to take a break, stretch my legs and get away from the computer for a
few minutes.
It is not a perfect system, but it fulfills 95% of my requirements.
-- John
|
John, I see your point but I respectfully disagree. Sure, adding more servers
and what not adds to the complications however, more and more things can be automated
and in all honesty, the cloud makes it much easier to spin up new servers and
automate the entire process. Couple that with automated software deployments
and you're set up for success. There are tons of way to minimize downtime
and risk without adding more man power when adding more computer power. But in
all honesty, the downtime is minimal impact for me it's the over all usability
and design that are at the top of my priority list.
|
|
|
| | | | | |
| | | | | Author: | Teup | | Posted: | Jul 6, 2021 06:55 | | Subject: | Re: Lack of Features and UI Design / Difficult | | Viewed: | 70 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | |
|
| In Suggestions, azbricker writes:
| | I have been using BrickLink for about a week or so now and as a software developer
and systems engineer and someone who grew up building with Lego's I have
to honestly say, what Dan Jezek build was good and what he family has done since
then has been decent and I applaud their efforts however, the site appears to
be owned by Lego Group now and I think it's time that they dump some real
money into it. The site is extremely difficult to use (others on the Internet
have the same sentiments that I do) and it lacks a ton of features. For example,
looking through the gallery I would like to add them to my wanted list or "save"
them somewhere but I cannot do that. For the ones that have the studio files
available, I can download the files however, most of the ones that I have looked
at (I am into the City-type sets) do not so I would like to reach out to the
creators to see about purchasing their files so that I can build their models
as well but again, this is extremely difficult to do and requires a lot of clicking.
At times, the site is also extremely slow (I see it's also written in ASP
which is a very old language). I know there are some competitors out there but
to be honest, building another one with the community behind BrickLink and Dan's
legacy, just isn't really an option. I would love to help (even for FREE)
build a new website using more modern languages and frameworks to make the site
cleaner, easier to use and have more functionality. Likewise, the Discussion
Forum is absolutely terrible. I still has the UI design of a message board /
news group from the 1990s. I am not trying to be rude and I apologize if I am
but I see so much more potential here. It wouldn't take long for someone
to build another competitor website that works better and has more features though
it would be extremely difficult for them to get the following that BrickLink
has but, it can be done. Please let me know if I can help in anyway. Thank you!
|
Of course everything you say is 100% correct, but keep in mind you're trying
to apply logic to a website that does not have timezones, that solved large partout
timeouts by recommending users to do the part out in two halves, ie. manually
selecting 500+ checkboxes, submit, part out again and again select 500+ checkboxes....
 And that does not apply dimensions of parts to printed variants, meaning the
community has to manually submit data for all, etc... I could go on.... Best
solution is to stop thinking about these things 
|
|
|
| | | | | |
| | | | | Author: | jennnifer | | Posted: | Jul 6, 2021 11:33 | | Subject: | Re: Lack of Features and UI Design / Difficult | | Viewed: | 57 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | |
|
| I love when brand new people come through... look at stuff for 5 minutes, and
then decide they know everything they need to know.
Really, the site is built on ASP, a really old language? No way! I bet none of
the owners, developers, contributors, volunteers, and members had any idea. Now
we can fix it!
{Insert sarcasm emoji here}
Sorry, just had to rant. Of course, we all want to see better design, bug fixes,
and updates where appropriate. But, if you take away my ancient-looking really
awesome Forum, we are going to have some words.
Jen
|
|
| | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | Author: | SylvainLS | | Posted: | Jul 6, 2021 11:47 | | Subject: | Re: Lack of Features and UI Design / Difficult | | Viewed: | 46 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | |
|
| In Suggestions, jennnifer writes:
| | I love when brand new people come through... look at stuff for 5 minutes, and
then decide they know everything they need to know.
Really, the site is built on ASP, a really old language? No way! I bet none of
the owners, developers, contributors, volunteers, and members had any idea. Now
we can fix it!
{Insert sarcasm emoji here}
|
It has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
| | Sorry, just had to rant. Of course, we all want to see better design, bug fixes,
and updates where appropriate. But, if you take away my ancient-looking really
awesome Forum, we are going to have some words.
Jen
|
Where can I buy tickets?
“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”
|
|
|
| | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | Author: | Teup | | Posted: | Jul 6, 2021 11:58 | | Subject: | Re: Lack of Features and UI Design / Difficult | | Viewed: | 46 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | |
|
| In Suggestions, SylvainLS writes:
| | In Suggestions, jennnifer writes:
| | I love when brand new people come through... look at stuff for 5 minutes, and
then decide they know everything they need to know.
Really, the site is built on ASP, a really old language? No way! I bet none of
the owners, developers, contributors, volunteers, and members had any idea. Now
we can fix it!
{Insert sarcasm emoji here}
|
It has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
|
Weeelll let's not be mean and take it out on the new guy. Usually it's
extremely helpful to have a pair of fresh eyes look at such things. I think this
is more an acclimatizing process where new users learn to leave their conceptions
about what is generally normal UI and functionality at the door in order not
to go crazy here
|
|
|
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | Author: | jennnifer | | Posted: | Jul 6, 2021 12:07 | | Subject: | Re: Lack of Features and UI Design / Difficult | | Viewed: | 60 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | |
|
| In Suggestions, Teup writes:
| | In Suggestions, SylvainLS writes:
| | In Suggestions, jennnifer writes:
| | I love when brand new people come through... look at stuff for 5 minutes, and
then decide they know everything they need to know.
Really, the site is built on ASP, a really old language? No way! I bet none of
the owners, developers, contributors, volunteers, and members had any idea. Now
we can fix it!
{Insert sarcasm emoji here}
|
It has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
|
Weeelll let's not be mean and take it out on the new guy. Usually it's
extremely helpful to have a pair of fresh eyes look at such things. I think this
is more an acclimatizing process where new users learn to leave their conceptions
about what is generally normal UI and functionality at the door in order not
to go crazy here
|
My apologies! My tone came off as way too rude.
Yes, sorry I was not trying to be mean, only to express that this seems to be
a regular and frustrating occurrence. I just think you should understand what
a thing is and how a thing works before you demand it be changed. The old ASP
parts of this site have a far more efficient design and workflow than anything
the new site or [[yuck]] XP has to offer. I work here, I need to work efficiently,
and the fact that things look out of date is not a problem unless aesthetics
are your main concern.
Jen
|
|
|
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | Author: | SylvainLS | | Posted: | Jul 6, 2021 12:18 | | Subject: | Re: Lack of Features and UI Design / Difficult | | Viewed: | 50 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | |
|
| In Suggestions, jennnifer writes:
| | […]
| | Weeelll let's not be mean and take it out on the new guy. Usually it's
extremely helpful to have a pair of fresh eyes look at such things. I think this
is more an acclimatizing process where new users learn to leave their conceptions
about what is generally normal UI and functionality at the door in order not
to go crazy here
|
My apologies! My tone came off as way too rude. […]
|
I didn’t thought so… but then, I agree with your sentiment, so if anyone received
it in a bad way, I’m joining you in offering apologies m(_ _)m
|
|
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | Author: | azbricker | | Posted: | Jul 11, 2021 00:24 | | Subject: | Re: Lack of Features and UI Design / Difficult | | Viewed: | 35 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | |
|
| In Suggestions, jennnifer writes:
| | In Suggestions, Teup writes:
| | In Suggestions, SylvainLS writes:
| | In Suggestions, jennnifer writes:
| | I love when brand new people come through... look at stuff for 5 minutes, and
then decide they know everything they need to know.
Really, the site is built on ASP, a really old language? No way! I bet none of
the owners, developers, contributors, volunteers, and members had any idea. Now
we can fix it!
{Insert sarcasm emoji here}
|
It has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
|
Weeelll let's not be mean and take it out on the new guy. Usually it's
extremely helpful to have a pair of fresh eyes look at such things. I think this
is more an acclimatizing process where new users learn to leave their conceptions
about what is generally normal UI and functionality at the door in order not
to go crazy here
|
My apologies! My tone came off as way too rude.
Yes, sorry I was not trying to be mean, only to express that this seems to be
a regular and frustrating occurrence. I just think you should understand what
a thing is and how a thing works before you demand it be changed. The old ASP
parts of this site have a far more efficient design and workflow than anything
the new site or [[yuck]] XP has to offer. I work here, I need to work efficiently,
and the fact that things look out of date is not a problem unless aesthetics
are your main concern.
Jen
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What do you mean you "work here"? Like, you're a seller or you actually
work for BrickLink? I am just curious. By the way, XP? Do you even know programming
languages? "XP" would be referring to an operating system, not a programming
language though I am surprised that you got the connection between ASP and XP
(both having been developed by Microsoft). I understand what it takes to write
an application/website like BrickLink. I also underestand what it takes to rewrite
or rebuild portions of it at a time. The question is, do you? The fact that you
compared ASP to XP tells me that you do not understand what it takes. Again,
I am not trying to be rude and to be honest, if there are more comments from
others like me then clearly I am not the only one that believes the site is extremely
outdated and can be done better.
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| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Author: | azbricker | | Posted: | Jul 11, 2021 00:29 | | Subject: | Re: Lack of Features and UI Design / Difficult | | Viewed: | 41 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | |
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| In Suggestions, azbricker writes:
| | In Suggestions, jennnifer writes:
| | In Suggestions, Teup writes:
| | In Suggestions, SylvainLS writes:
| | In Suggestions, jennnifer writes:
| | I love when brand new people come through... look at stuff for 5 minutes, and
then decide they know everything they need to know.
Really, the site is built on ASP, a really old language? No way! I bet none of
the owners, developers, contributors, volunteers, and members had any idea. Now
we can fix it!
{Insert sarcasm emoji here}
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It has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
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Weeelll let's not be mean and take it out on the new guy. Usually it's
extremely helpful to have a pair of fresh eyes look at such things. I think this
is more an acclimatizing process where new users learn to leave their conceptions
about what is generally normal UI and functionality at the door in order not
to go crazy here
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My apologies! My tone came off as way too rude.
Yes, sorry I was not trying to be mean, only to express that this seems to be
a regular and frustrating occurrence. I just think you should understand what
a thing is and how a thing works before you demand it be changed. The old ASP
parts of this site have a far more efficient design and workflow than anything
the new site or [[yuck]] XP has to offer. I work here, I need to work efficiently,
and the fact that things look out of date is not a problem unless aesthetics
are your main concern.
Jen
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What do you mean you "work here"? Like, you're a seller or you actually
work for BrickLink? I am just curious. By the way, XP? Do you even know programming
languages? "XP" would be referring to an operating system, not a programming
language though I am surprised that you got the connection between ASP and XP
(both having been developed by Microsoft). I understand what it takes to write
an application/website like BrickLink. I also underestand what it takes to rewrite
or rebuild portions of it at a time. The question is, do you? The fact that you
compared ASP to XP tells me that you do not understand what it takes. Again,
I am not trying to be rude and to be honest, if there are more comments from
others like me then clearly I am not the only one that believes the site is extremely
outdated and can be done better.
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Disregard. I now what you mean by "XP" (a new revision of the site) however again,
the development language used does not make up the UI - LoL - So part of my last
message still stands. It does not matter what you use to write the server side
code (ASP. PHP. JavaScript, RoR, GoLang, Erlang, etc) the entire frontend is
now and always has been, written in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS with some imagery
sprinkled in where needed. So again, ASP is extremely out dated and very insecure.
I hope that they are rewriting portions of the backend as I plan to purchase
more products from sellers here on BrickLink (unless I am banned for this comment
thread which seems to be pretty common on platforms nowadays).
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| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Author: | qwertyboy | | Posted: | Jul 11, 2021 00:35 | | Subject: | Re: Lack of Features and UI Design / Difficult | | Viewed: | 46 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | |
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| I can't help but notice how Jen apologized when her message could have come
over as rude, and you just say "disregard" after your uninformed lecturing. Hm.
Niek.
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| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Author: | randyipp | | Posted: | Jul 11, 2021 00:32 | | Subject: | Re: Lack of Features and UI Design / Difficult | | Viewed: | 36 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | |
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| In Suggestions, azbricker writes:
| | I am just curious. By the way, XP? Do you even know programming
languages? "XP" would be referring to an operating system, not a programming
language though I am surprised that you got the connection between ASP and XP
(both having been developed by Microsoft).
|
Wow... this is XP: https://www.bricklink.com/r3/main.page
See also: https://www.bricklink.com/v2/community/newsview.page?msgid=1195669
Since you know websites so well I assumed you'd search for this...
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| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Author: | azbricker | | Posted: | Jul 14, 2021 06:12 | | Subject: | Re: Lack of Features and UI Design / Difficult | | Viewed: | 31 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | |
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| In Suggestions, randyipp writes:
Um, exactly how would I know to search for "XP" or "Updated UI" or something
like that? LMFAO
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| | | | | | | Author: | zorbanj | | Posted: | Jul 6, 2021 12:22 | | Subject: | Re: Lack of Features and UI Design / Difficult | | Viewed: | 55 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | |
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| In Suggestions, jennnifer writes:
| |
Sorry, just had to rant. Of course, we all want to see better design, bug fixes,
and updates where appropriate.
|
In the meantime OP can play with Bricklink XP:
https://www.bricklink.com/r3/main.page
| | But, if you take away my ancient-looking really awesome Forum, we are going to have some words.
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I do wish there was more participation in the forum.
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| | | | | | | Author: | azbricker | | Posted: | Jul 11, 2021 00:19 | | Subject: | Re: Lack of Features and UI Design / Difficult | | Viewed: | 29 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | |
|
| In Suggestions, jennnifer writes:
| | I love when brand new people come through... look at stuff for 5 minutes, and
then decide they know everything they need to know.
Really, the site is built on ASP, a really old language? No way! I bet none of
the owners, developers, contributors, volunteers, and members had any idea. Now
we can fix it!
{Insert sarcasm emoji here}
Sorry, just had to rant. Of course, we all want to see better design, bug fixes,
and updates where appropriate. But, if you take away my ancient-looking really
awesome Forum, we are going to have some words.
Jen
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I love how you use the "5 minute" exaggeration. Whatsmore, I really love that
you can reply and basically say that I know nothing about what I am talking about.
I've been building website, web applications, mobile applications, enterprise
applications and server farms for 20+ years now, I think I know a little about
what I am talking about. I am not trying to get into an argument here so please,
keep the feedback constructive and not rude.
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| | | | | Author: | cosmicray | | Posted: | Jul 6, 2021 14:19 | | Subject: | Re: Lack of Features and UI Design / Difficult | | Viewed: | 46 times | | Topic: | Suggestions | |
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| In Suggestions, azbricker writes:
| | I have been using BrickLink for about a week or so now and as a software developer
and systems engineer and someone who grew up building with Lego's I have
to honestly say, what Dan Jezek build was good and what he family has done since
then has been decent and I applaud their efforts however, the site appears to
be owned by Lego Group now and I think it's time that they dump some real
money into it. The site is extremely difficult to use (others on the Internet
have the same sentiments that I do) and it lacks a ton of features. For example,
looking through the gallery I would like to add them to my wanted list or "save"
them somewhere but I cannot do that. For the ones that have the studio files
available, I can download the files however, most of the ones that I have looked
at (I am into the City-type sets) do not so I would like to reach out to the
creators to see about purchasing their files so that I can build their models
as well but again, this is extremely difficult to do and requires a lot of clicking.
At times, the site is also extremely slow (I see it's also written in ASP
which is a very old language). I know there are some competitors out there but
to be honest, building another one with the community behind BrickLink and Dan's
legacy, just isn't really an option. I would love to help (even for FREE)
build a new website using more modern languages and frameworks to make the site
cleaner, easier to use and have more functionality. Likewise, the Discussion
Forum is absolutely terrible. I still has the UI design of a message board /
news group from the 1990s. I am not trying to be rude and I apologize if I am
but I see so much more potential here. It wouldn't take long for someone
to build another competitor website that works better and has more features though
it would be extremely difficult for them to get the following that BrickLink
has but, it can be done. Please let me know if I can help in anyway. Thank you!
|
How about this ...
Think of BL as a little bit steampunk and a little bit bohemian. That's what
gives it it's je ne sais quoi. While it has never been OSS, it has
been, and is a result of, user input. It wasn't designed behind closed doors
by a marketing team. That is (probably) rather unique. For a very long time,
the base level browser support included IE 3 and NS 4.7. So there is (or was)
a lot of hacks to keep everyone working.
It has been an evolutionary development process over a 20 year period, involving
input from hundreds (if not thousands) of users.
Peace
Nita Rae
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USA, Arizona
United Kingdom, England
Netherlands, Utrecht
France, Nouvelle-Aquitaine
Canada, Alberta
