On April 3rd I reached 400 feedback on Bricklink.  (100% positive, thank you very much! Smile )  The "My Bricklink" page that I use when logged in shows my feedback score right above the date that I joined.  Even though I look at the page where this information is displayed all the time, I hardly ever pay attention to it.

When my feedback reached 400, I noticed it (something visually different about the two zeros I guess), and I happened to also look at my "Member since" date.  I joined on April 1, 2001.  There must be some kind of April Fool's joke to be made there somewhere, but I was more intrigued that I had just completed my 8th year on Bricklink.  You could say that I've averaged 50 feedback a year, or about 1 per week, but truthfully there are many more from the recent years than there are from the early years.

Do you remember the early years?  Were you a part of them?  Back in the Day, Bricklink started out as Brickbay.  Back in 2001 I was living in Oklahoma, and I had just joined the LEGO Users Group of Central Oklahoma (LUGCO).  Todd Trotter was the person who first told me about Brickbay.  After hearing about Brickbay at our LUG meeting, I went home and checked it out.  Brickbay was a fairly new site at the time, but to an online-LEGO-buying newbie like me, it seemed like there were plenty of stores with plenty of parts for sale.  I had used lego.com and ebay for buying LEGOs online, and now I had another option—an option where you could buy whatever quantity of whatever pieces you wanted.

Do you ever think what your LEGO hobby would be like if it wasn't for Bricklink?  I believe that if Brickbay had never started, we would have many more individual LEGO-part-selling sites like there used to be years ago (Guild of Bricksmiths, Baylit, Auctionbrick, etc.).  I also believe that LEGO projects requiring large amounts of a certain part would mean scouring ebay for weeks or months on end, hoping that some seller would happen to list what you needed.  Bricklink gives us a centralized resource for worldwide LEGO buying and selling that is unmatched.  Ebay and lego.com's Pick-A-Brick give you a lot to choose from, but the enormous variety of parts and colors that LEGO has produced is only matched by the large variety of shops and parts on Bricklink.

I don't see the Bricklink site fizzling out anytime soon, and I hope it never does.  I look forward to my next 8 years on Bricklink and my next 400 feedback.