Platform Autopsy: Lego Message Boards
The Lego Message Boards were an official platform of discussion forums dedicated to the Lego toy brand that were active from 2001 to 2017. The Boards were used to talk about Lego sets, show off original creations, discuss the stories for various Lego toylines, and share fanfiction and roleplay around the stories of those lines. The boards were officially hosted and maintained by The Lego Group, and were accessible in most places of the world with open internet. The Boards themselves, while hosted by Lego, were ultimately run at the discretion of Lego’s appointed moderation team, headed by a user/employee called WhiteAlligator online. According to WhiteAlligator in 2016, the mod team had the final say on almost all issues on the boards (History). The Boards were generally organized according to various Lego subthemes and other pertinent topics. For instance, users could post and read under topics such as Lego News, Lego Ninjago, Lego DC Universe Superheroes, Bionicle, etc. Lego would make new topics dedicated to new sets and themes that came out, but generally left old ones open. These topics served as a space where fans of the subthemes could congregate. It was essentially Lego taking the initiative to provide a space for it’s own fanbase, so that they could have oversight into how it was cultivated. This meant that the Boards were strictly maintained as a child-friendly space.
The Boards went live in 2001 after a period of beta testing. In the earlier days, there were few organizing topics and posts, and the boards had a very simplistic design with a red and white color scheme, according to the Lego Message Boards Wiki, one of the only surviving sources on the Boards. The earliest form of the Boards included a ranking system for users. Over the following years, the Boards would evolve, shifting to a more refined layout with a blue and white color scheme. Various large updates occurred, some to the format of the website, and some to the nature of user accounts. One such event was called “The Great Migration,” where users had to either update or lose their accounts. Many prominent users lost their accounts. Other similar events on the Boards were often likened to this one (History). In spite of these changes, the Boards were considered to be a pretty continuous entity through this time, and 2001 to 2012 could be looked at as the first and longest phase of their existence. This period was largely marked by the rank system of the time, the organization and look of the boards as a whole, the lack of post “liking,” and the avatar system, which allowed users to depict their accounts with selected Lego minifigure heads as icons.
In 2012, The Lego Message Boards underwent a large update, undergoing a complete design change. New ranks for users were introduced in lieu of the old ones, personal profile pages were introduced, the post ranking system was adjusted to focus more on quality than quantity of engagement, a “like” system was introduced, and the avatar system was updated to allow users to create a whole minifigure to be their icon, alongside various other quality-of-life changes. The Boards existed largely in this form from 2012 to 2017, when they were shuttered (The 2012).
Across all of their forms and iterations, the Lego Message Boards were consistent in their objective as a space to cultivate Lego’s online fan community in a child-friendly environment. As such, they were not meant to generate revenue directly, but to advertise for and promote discussion of the various lines of building block toys Lego produced. Within Lego terminology, these lines are typically called themes or subthemes. Some of them are licensed from other companies, like Lego Star Wars, and others are original IP’s created by Lego with their own stories and media, like Ninjago or Bionicle. Each of these subthemes has their own dedicated fanbase, and the Lego Message Boards were a localized hub for all of them, at least in intent. Users could post pictures of their creations, participate in story-based moderated roleplay with others, share their own individual stories, and ask questions about recent developments.
To accomplish their goal of attracting and hosting Lego fans to in turn promote sales of sets, the Lego Message Boards had some unique draws. To begin with, they were one of the only spaces dedicated to online discussion of the toyline that was truly moderated to remain child-friendly, meaning parents were more likely to be willing to let their children have accounts. In addition to this, there were some Lego themes that had small enough fanbases that otherwise really didn’t have anywhere else dedicated to converse; such as Lego Alien Conquest or Ultra Agents. By hosting discussion for those small themes alongside their more popular brands, Lego allowed interest in them to be maintained and expanded. The Boards also cultivated an interesting social dynamic, with users creating various friendships, and some achieving “local” celebrity status through their post ranking. People were motivated to use the boards to interact with their online friends and popular users that they looked up to.
One of the most unique draws of the Lego Message Boards was that they were at the time essentially the only place where Lego employees were allowed to interact with fans online– and Lego had some very popular employees. Among the most notable examples was Greg Farshtey, author of the vast majority of the books and story serials surrounding the very popular Bionicle toyline (a line of buildable action figures representing biomechanical elemental warriors fighting to save their universe from an ancient evil, of which the author of this paper was and is a huge fan). The Lego Message Boards hosted a massive ongoing thread called “Ask Greg” where Mr. Farshtey was allowed and encouraged to interact with fans and answer questions regarding Bionicle, even long after the theme had been cancelled with the story largely unfinished (About). Many fans flocked to the Message Boards to ask him questions about the story. He consistently answered many of them, and occasionally revealed new plot details to people there that would have otherwise never been revealed. By giving Bionicle fans a massive incentive to stick around on the Boards long after the toyline had been ended, Lego increased the chances that they would interact with other media on the boards and buy other Lego products.
While the Lego Message Boards were popular, they were not without competition. There were lots of other message boards hosted by other parties that were often dedicated to the specific Lego subthemes they were fans of. These boards also had their own communities, and while they occasionally shared users with the main Lego Boards, they weren’t always as strictly moderated or child friendly, which had a draw of its own for some. Noteworthy examples of pretty successful alternative message boards for Lego fans included BZPower and the TTV Message Boards, both of which are still up and running, if with a diminished userbase in more recent years.
Ultimately, the biggest outside competitor to the Lego Message Boards was not other traditional message boards at all, but the rise of social media. Message boards in general became less popular with the influx and development of other massive platforms with their own mobile apps like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and then Reddit and Discord functionally cornered what was left of the market for that type of discussion-oriented space to grow. Lego announced the Lego Message Boards would close and be deleted in 2017. At the time, it seemed that Lego was attempting to direct the functionality and userbase of the platform to a new mobile app called Lego Life, but that has also since been rendered defunct and never seemed to garner much recognition (LEGO). Lego also introduced the Lego Ambassador Network around this time, which folded in many of the other unofficial message boards under Lego’s umbrella by offering them privileges and networking opportunities in exchange for following guidelines set by Lego to make sure their platforms reflected well on the brand. In fact, when the Lego Message Boards shut down, the aforementioned “Ask Greg” thread was allowed to move to be hosted on the TTV Message Boards (and the existing thread was archived at greg.thegreatarchives.com), where it continued for some years until Greg Farshtey eventually was let go from his job at Lego. It seems likely that around 2017, Lego concluded that it would be best to follow the trend of streamlined mobile apps in hopes of reaching a larger audience, and instead of spending resources on maintaining a message board, found that outsourcing that role to fan communities and starting a mobile app could be mutually beneficial. Interestingly, the original layout and style of the Lego Message Boards was copied and maintained by the site that would become known as The Brick Boards in an attempt to spark an exodus, but that website seems to have a fairly low userbase, with 819 accounts total and four users online in the last 24 hours at the time of writing this.
The ultimate fall of online message boards to social media mobile apps, Reddit, and Discord– the wider trend behind the fall of the Lego Message Boards– is worth examining in broad terms as well. It is no secret that social media apps as a means of communication caught like wildfire, especially with Generations Z and Alpha, and older generations have generally followed the trend as well, out of necessity and convenience if nothing else. Aside from many of these platforms acting to facilitate digital communication with people in real-world social circles, they also have a distinct advantage over web-browser-based communication sites: they are less clunky. Apps are optimized to be easily accessible from a vertical phone screen, almost always maintain login information, and are in general able to be presented as more streamlined than websites are. When young people grow up having access to these amazingly convenient platforms with global reach (that also often prioritize visual and audible stimulation over long text and in-depth conversation) it is unsurprising that message boards would fall out of favor. Message boards require one to open a browser and navigate to the site, often require a log-in every time, have limited userbases, are primarily text-based, and as traditional websites, are by default almost always optimized for desktop screens instead of phones. The Lego Message Boards were particularly frustrating to navigate from an iphone screen; it required lots of zooming and pinching, and one wrong tap could send the user all the way to the top or bottom of a thread.
Reddit and Discord have had the greatest success at preserving the legacy of message boards (Lego and otherwise) in the eyes of the general public. They allow the hyper-specialization of subjects and topics that message boards have, are well-optimized for mobile devices for the most part, maintain the largely text-based structure while easily allowing photos and videos as well, and allow for individual subspaces to have their own moderation and culture while having a unified feeling across each app. They also have significantly wider reach than message boards typically did. However, this is not without draw-back, as every individual subspace on Reddit or Discord is still subject to the whims, ethos, and preferred design languages of those that control the larger platforms; a homogenizing effect that somewhat limits the cultural development that can happen in individual subspaces. And while traditional message boards also still exist, they will likely never be able to carve out the foothold that they used to have, because Discord and Reddit are so ubiquitous.
The Lego Message Boards are indeed defunct, but their fragmented spirit lives on in a great many Lego-based subreddits, discord servers, surviving fan message boards, a few disparate digital archives, the no-longer-updated Lego Message Boards Wiki, and The Brick Boards, but there will likely never again be such a ubiquitous and carefully moderated hub for online Lego fans to congregate. The original Boards were completely deleted, and an actual physical Lego set consisting of brick-built letters called Message Board has since come out, rendering search engine results for the term “Lego Message Boards” almost completely useless. Furthermore, it seems that many of the archived pages on The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine are also corrupted. Thus, it is likely that the Lego Message Boards will largely be forgotten in the eyes of the internet at large.
Works Cited
About - Official Greg Discussion Archive. (2016). Thegreatarchives.com. About - Official Greg Discussion Archive
Home | The Brick Boards. (2018). Boards.net. https://thebrick.boards.net/
LEGO. (2019, October 28). LEGO Life. LEGO.com; The LEGO Group. LEGO Life - About Us - LEGO.com
History of the LEGO Message Boards. LEGO Message Boards Wiki; Fandom, Inc. https://legomessageboards.fandom.com/wiki/History_of_the_LEGO_Message_Boards
The 2012 Update. LEGO Message Boards Wiki; Fandom, Inc. https://legomessageboards.fandom.com/wiki/The_2012_Update
