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Category: Community (Page 3 of 158)

The Brick Fan 2023 Recap

It took a while but I’ve finally had some time to do a 2023 recap for The Brick Fan. Some of you guys might not be interested but it’s for my reference since I love stats.

Our post count went down again last year, down to 885, however, we almost hit the 30 million page view mark. We barely missed it by just 100,000 views which sounds about right since we had less posts. Last year, it was more family time for me as I was taking care of my mom more after her cancer surgery and I prioritized that a little more than what happened LEGO-wise. I expect that’ll be about the same this year as well.

The highest traffic day was on May 1 with 251,277 page views when a lot of the summer 2023 sets were revealed that day. The higher traffic trend continued for the next seven days with over 100k views each day.

Unique visits and returning visits were also down due to me posting less which is understandable. Some days were just low volume postings simply because there was no LEGO news to cover. I didn’t want to post just to post unlike some of the more prolific sites. We should be hitting the 200 million page view mark early this year so that’ll be something to celebrate.


Our social media accounts are just chugging along with some small increases in followers. Again, the numbers could grow a lot more but I don’t advertise too much for them. I could … Continue

Merry Christmas from The Brick Fan

Merry Christmas from us here at The Brick Fan and I hope that Santa got what you wanted on your LEGO wishlist. It’s been a long but quick year and I want to thank all the readers who take time to visit the site each day or have interacted with us in any way. We’re only a week away from the new year and we’ll do our usual site recap shortly after. Have fun building by yourself or with family and friends and stay safe.

-Allen

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LEGO Masters Season 4 Winners Announced

Last night was the finale of LEGO Masters Season 4 and we now have two new LEGO Masters as well as the set that will be made into an official LEGO set in the future. If you didn’t know, the winners will be flown to Billund to meet with LEGO designers with the winning build be turned into a new set. Before you read on, there are spoilers if you didn’t watch the show.

The team of Christopher (DuckBbricks) and Robert are your newest LEGO Masters and their 8ft by 8ft build of the World Wonderliner will be displayed at the flagship LEGO Store in New York. Their build features a plane with three core icons of their most memorable travel experiences which include the Kenyan baobab tree, the Forbidden City, and the Colosseum.

The release of the set won’t be out for at least another year or two but expect it to be scaled down to a more reasonable price. Since there’s a lot of details in the final build, it’ll probably come in at a few thousand pieces.

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BrickLink Designer Program Series 3 Finalists Revealed

BrickLink has revealed the five sets that will be available as part of the Series 3 BrickLink Designer Program crowdfunding. These models were chosen by fans as well as input from BrickLink out of 185 designs. Crowdfunding for these sets will begin in October 2024. Details about the sets and pricing will be announced around that time.


Harbormaster’s Office


The Art of Chocolate


Forest Stronghold


Camping Adventure


Lost City

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LEGO Modular Building Collection Add-Ons on Pick a Brick

Yesterday during LEGO’s Black Friday 2023 preview livestream, they showed off a new feature for the LEGO Pick a Brick system with the Modular Building Collection add-ons. Here you can build some small add-ons for the modulars and they have provided all the parts for that particular model. As of right now, you can’t order the the parts yet as a set but you can still get the pieces individually and LEGO has even provided the building instructions for free.

Construction Site – 150 pieces/$25.72
Winter Scene – 148 pieces/$24.95
Vending Stand – 172 pieces/$31.20

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BrickLink Back Online After November 3 Incident

After a few days of downtime, BrickLink is now back up and running with operations seemingly back to normal. As confirmed, they did get a ransom letter and from their investigations and they’ve been looking into some suspicious activity on the site since October. At this point, they suggested that it was a credential stuffing event in which cybercriminals use stolen usernames and passwords from another site to access BrickLink. As a result, you’ll have to change your passwords when you access the site and suggest not using the same ones as for other sites.

Welcome back and thank you for your patience. We were down for longer than anyone would have wanted. Now that we’re back up and running, we can share with you what’s happened.

As many of you will know, we received a threat and ransom demand on Friday, November 3rd. We’d been aware of and actively managing some limited suspicious activity since mid-October, with unauthorized sellers offering products at huge discounts and fraudulently accepting payment from buyers.

As soon as we were aware of the potential escalation on November 3rd, we put the site into maintenance mode out of an abundance of caution. We did this to protect our members and keep complete control of the platform while investigating.

We found that a relatively small number of BrickLink accounts may have been accessed. It is important to note that there is no evidence so far that our systems were compromised.

At this stage we believe this was a ‘credential stuffing’ incident, where

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BrickLink Confirms Site Accessed by “Unauthorized Individuals”

Last Friday, BrickLink went into maintenance mode and users on the site weren’t able to access it. The reason they gave was they were investigating some “unusual activity.” Many people speculated that the site may have been hacked and some users were given ransom messages.

After a day or so of radio silence, BrickLink finally started giving some updates and today they confirmed that their investigations revealed that a small number of accounts have been accessed by “unauthorized individuals.” This pretty much confirms that the site was hacked mostly likely due to old coding that’s still in use.

There’s still legitimate fear that some store inventories may have been wiped out which could be damaging to one’s livelihood. Even the site being down for a few days surely have impacted sales for many already as well as for buyers.

As of right now, BrickLink is still down and will be offline for the foreseeable future. Hopefully, they’ll keep up with the regular updates.

Friday November 3rd, we temporarily closed the BrickLink site due to unusual activity.

Since then, the team has been working super hard to make sure we can reopen as soon as possible – and we’re getting closer to doing that.

Our investigations so far suggest that a very small percentage of our accounts may potentially have been accessed by unauthorized individuals. We’ll be in contact with people directly soon with more details.

Thank you for your patience and support – the kind posts we see from all of you on social media make

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