Brickshelf gone?

I was at DC for a fun event (I will make a blog entry later on this) Saturday and came back to my hotel room Saturday night and got an e-mail: Brickshelf down?

And it is. Going to the page brings up:

Brickshelf has discontinued operation. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Whoa. About 1,900,000 pics were on board when it was shut down. Photos from all of the AFOL community are now gone...the only archive of the hobby that even had a hint of completion is gone.

Am I upset? A little.

However, I do believe that Kevin (the owner of Brickshelf) had the right to shut it down. The amount of resources that the site needs is not cheap, and donations may or may not be enough. The ads in the site only work when clicked on in quantity. If he can't afford it, then the site should be shut down.

I can see why people would be upset with the lack of notification, but most of us should have backups, right? I do...somewhere:-). I also have a Flickr account. The only thing I am upset with is that there is no central point to see MOCs anymore.

I don't understand why some are so upset and posted rather mean remarks concerning both Brickshelf and Kevin. Whether anyone likes it or not, the site was a donation/ad run site. I gave $20 in 2003. That's it. And my donation was not a contract to keep the site running for any amount of time. I gave the money to help Brickshelf succeed. I understand that the site is a labor of love for the community - and if there's not enough love, then it can disappear. And it's tough for us, but if we didn't provide enough support, then we kinda set this up ourselves.

There's still a lot that isn't known about this shutdown. For me, I will give Kevin the benefit of the doubt. Until more info comes out, we should not jump to conclusions. Kevin should be credited for creating the only centralized resource of images for the community, and he should be thanked for running it for so long. He didn't have to do this.

And we all should be looking for ways to make sure this doesn't happen again.

I'm thinking about this myself.