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We have introduced some changes intended to improve your ability to promote your MOCs and engage with your followers.
Workbench
The new Workbench page is your own personal blog that you can use to document your LEGO builds. This might include work-in-progress designs for MOCs that you are working towards publishing; or official sets you might be building; or anything else related to LEGO building.
There is no denying that the barrier for submitting MOCs on Rebrickable is pretty high. Every MOC must have building instructions and an inventory of parts. For the casual builder this is not an easy thing to do, although with tools like BrickLink Studio it has gotten easier over the years. However, this is what makes Rebrickable unique - you know that every MOC you see here has instructions allowing you to build it.
The Workbench feature is a compromise. It allows more casual designers to showcase their creations, and hopefully receive the encouragment they need to put in the effort to publish it as a MOC. Although, sometimes even the most experienced designers will just want to post a photo with a few words and move on :)
For MOC designers, this gives you one more way to build up a following and engage with your audience. You can use it to tease upcoming MOCs, get feedback on partial designs, get ideas for future designs, commiserate over failed designs etc. I see this as the primary use of this new feature.
For MOC builders, this allows you to build up a following that was previously only possible by publishing MOCs you designed yourself. Designing your own MOCs isn't for everyone, plenty of people prefer to build other people's MOCs instead - this is where I personally fit in. Your Workbench could be used to document your building progress, or your reviews of MOCs you have built. Building up a following for your Workbench if you do not have any MOCs published will be more difficult however.
I will look at adding more discoverability/search and advanced blog-like features such as tagging/categorising soon once I get a better feel for how it's being used.
Following/Notification Changes
The Follow/Notification settings have also been extended. When you Follow someone, you can now opt to receive notifications at a per-designer level instead of all or nothing. In addition, you can choose to receive notifications for MOCs and/or Workbench posts separately.
Notifications from designers you are currently following will be enabled by default.
Custom Profiles
You can now customise the contents of your profile page. You can pick and choose which sections to add, and in what order they should display. The sections available for now include:
- Welcome Message
- MOCs - Most Liked
- MOCs - Recently Added
- MOCs - Best Selling
- MOCs - Photos
- Recent Comments
- Best Badges
- Recent Workbench Post
The old "Message to visitors" setting is now displayed in the "Welcome Message" profile section. It is no longer inside the quotation formatting and can accept of your own custom bbcode-based formatting. This includes support for embedding images, making it a great place to promote your MOCs, offer coupon codes, etc.
Take the time to look at your Account > Profile page and customise it to suit.
115 COMMENTS
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Ok, das ist interessant! Ich bin zwar neu hier, freue mich aber über solch wichtige Informationen!
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Rebrickable is my favorite Lego site out there! Thank you so much to the super hard working staff!
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Nice lambo
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Yes!
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The example pics are hilarious XD
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I like the new profile features (ok, not so new now, I know). There is a lot of overlap between my best selling, most liked, most viewed, etc. Would it be possible to add a section that just shows all MOCs? Ideally, I'd like to have "Best Selling" and then a section with all the rest (or just simply all). Thanks!
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One proposal:
Would it be possible to have workbench posts compiled in one place so users can search and browse these posts? Currently, to my knowledge, you can only really view workbench posts from designers you know or are following; it would be nice to be able to search a topic (Ex. Four link suspension) and have a list of related workbench posts come up, kind of like how it is for MOCs right now. I know that this would probably make the already complex systems of RB even more complex, but it would be a cool feature to have.-
Menu: MOCs -> Workbench
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My bad, I missed that. Thanks.
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I know it is late, but there is a bug in the email notification, here is an example from one workbench of brikdlego :Another small update on my "Battle Tank" alternate build for set 42140, I'm currently working on the turret/main gun, making some progress. It obviously won't be functional, but capable of rotating 360º and elevating the main gun (both manually).
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<deleted>
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probably photo shop
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Great addition! The only thing I'm really aching for is a better way to search for alternate builds. That's my primary interest, but in the alt builds section I can basically only sort by set year and quantity of alts. I really would like to sort by "new" and maybe also filter out whether or not the alt build includes multiple sets combined or only a single set.
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Next, we need a mobile app for this to make browsing on smaller mobile devices easier. :D
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making an app might sound simple which it can be but how do you fund it for the free users? I can see it being accessible to premium users but you gotta realize, you have to pay the app store to publish your app via a monthly fee which in some cases is paid for via ads.
The better and cheaper solution is to make the site HTML5 compatible and make it so it can make a web app, it would still function like an app but not a device specific one since it doesn't get installed.-
I have no idea about the Apple App Store, but Google Play only charges $25 USD for your first app, all after that are free. If the mobile app would not be free, I would still pay
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It's not about the monetary cost, it's the thousands of hours required to build and maintain the app that prevents it from ever happening.
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Very true. If one day Rebrickable becomes big enough for that, it would be something that many would enjoy. Keep working hard on improving Rebrickable :D
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Another argument against apps is that both Apple and Google insist on taking a cut of every transaction made through an app installed through their storefronts.
This is why the Amazon app, for example, no longer lets you make purchases through the app.-
Also a valid reason.
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but Rebrickable is already huge
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So after getting a couple workbench notification emails, I would like to suggest that you add in the workbench posters profile picture next to the text of their post, like how it’s shown in these comments. I follow many designers and sometimes it is a lot easier to recognize them by profile pic then just username alone. This would also help organize multiple posts on the 1 email today that others suggested here.
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I think the Workbench feature is good idea to promote MOC and add some additional information about MOC.
However, I haven't created my Workbench post yet.
But as a user who follows a lot of designers, I've noticed that notifications about Workbench posts and new MOCS are very frequent now.
I would like to be able to change frequency of notifications about Workbench Posts and new MOCs.
I think one notification per day about Workbench posts and new MOCs is optimal.-
I made it more often to try and give posters faster feedback, but I can see your issue. I'll reduce it a bit.
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Perhaps the frequency could be controlled by the user.
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Great addition to the site.
Already got a first notification of a designer i follow.
And after two years you can finally follow someone that has not posted a MOC yet (even if their workbench is empty).
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Nice idea, let's see how this turns out.
btw: The title image of this post is so hilarious, which AI messed with that?-
Lol I didn’t notice until you mentioned that
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nice, was expected for a long time! thanks for giving new options for community!
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Nice feature, I tried it and I really like that it is possible to have some feedback on things that aren't quite finished.
Cool, congratulations on this new feature. It is a must.
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Love this new feature! It creates a great opportunity to communicate with the fans for people who don't use other social media pages for lego stuff
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man so much detail would have token me years(maximum sarcasm included)
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Very interesting feature!
I have tested the Workbench two days before, but it seems that there was no notification sent to my followers...
My proposal would be to add a new section on the rebrickable start page "Newest Workbench entries" in the same way as "Newest MOCS", Newest Sets",...-
The initial notification settings had a problem, but it's since been fixed.
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OMG this is the greatest invention since sliced bread. Now we can post content and engage with the community throughout the whole building process.
Time to get to work…
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One of the things that seems to have gone away from the Profile page is the section under 'Most Liked MOCs' no longer seems to show the total number of likes. as a numbers nerd I am hoping that gets brought back.
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Can you use this for building MOCs in addition to real LEGO sets? Like can you post the building process of you building another person's MOC to show what an amazing creation they made kind of like a review?
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Yes, it could be a good spot for user reviews, but if it is a paid MOC don't include so many pictures that your readers can reverse engineer the build.
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for a next feature update, could you make it so we can see the number of parts and/or minifigs in each set list? it would really help
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There is a suggestion section over on the forums where you can make suggestions like this and vote on suggestions from others.
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Just an observation, not sure if this is the default for everyone here:
When you follow a user now, according to the dropdown menu it looks like you also per default subscribe to their workbench posts. But when checking the notification settings just before making this comment, per default the setting for receiving an email for the event that "A Designer you follow adds a new Workbench Post" was configured to "No".
I've changed that now for my account, but this would also mean, that followers that followed me before addition of the workbench feature aren't notified about workbench posts unless they (A) change that setting manually or (B) unfollow and follow me again.
So how can I notify my existing followers about my workbench posts?-
Huh, good catch. While I am subscribed to all workbench posts by default, the notifications were turned off in settings. Was wondering why I hadn't seen any yet.
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Whoops. New users were picking up the defaults but existing users did not. Fixed now.
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Thanks for that! :-)
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Awesome! I really like this new feature. I think that the ability for users to run polls on workbench posts should be added.
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Indeed, polls would be a great addition.
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Not having the time to learn how to make the PDF instructions, I like this idea for posting MOCs where you just want to show others what you made and how you spend your time building
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Yes. agreed
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I love this new workbench feature and I think it would be great if there was a section on the homepage for "newest workbench posts" so that more people could see your posts and then from there browse other workbench posts.
Thanks and keep up the constant developments to this great website.
resume of the following comment: So basically my two suggestions to consider adding are being able to see views of the mocs all in one place (MOCs page for exemple) and the ability to have a comments pool that ony the moc designer can see of his mocs, to see and respond more quickly the comments.
full comment and explanations:
i have a complain about one feature that long ago existed, the ability to the moc designer see the views of each moc in the "MOCs" page, now i need to go moc by moc and track down in the page the views. And this one is a addition to the designer that should be good (although i think it exists and i am just struggling with its function), is some sort of way that i can recieve notifications of new comments in my mocs, a lot of times i didn't noticed the comments (because i didn't see the comment section moc by moc) and then i didn't answered a question of someone that was posted 2 mouths ago...
So basically my two suggestions to consider adding are being able to see views of the mocs all in one place (MOCs page for exemple) and the ability to have a comments pool that ony the moc designer can see of his mocs, to see and respond more quickly the comments.