| Redisplay Messages: Compact | Brief | All | Full Show Messages: All | Without Replies| Author: | Admin_Russell  | | Posted: | Jul 4, 2019 12:25 | | Subject: | Re: 10205 : Parts to be removed from Inventory | | Viewed: | 36 times | | Topic: | Inventories | |
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BrickLink
ID CardAdmin_Russell
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Location:  USA, California |
| Member Since |
Contact |
Type |
Status |
| May 9, 2017 |
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Admin |
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| BrickLink Administrator |
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| In Inventories, 62Bricks writes:
| | The foolish policy to which I refer is the one that uses the "official parts
count" as the primary guide for what goes in the regular section when there is
no part list.
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Regular Items - Parts required to build the main model and any secondary models
plus any other parts on the official parts list. In the absence of an official
parts list, the official parts count, the instructions, and/or images on the
packaging are used to determine as closely as possible the contents of this section.
Where does it say anything about the official parts count being the primary guide?
It is listed first because it is the easiest and most useful thing to check.
There are cases where the instructions have the final say, e.g. in a situation
where the instructions call for a greater number of parts than the official parts
count.
| | That policy does not serve sellers who want to part out sets, because
there is no consistent way Lego has counted parts in the past, and part counts
are not included on all sets now.
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LEGO part counts are exceptionally reliable. There are a few cases where things
don't line up, but for 99.9% of the cases they are spot on. We know that
some sets don't have them, but that is nothing new. Sets produced for the
European market in the 1970's never had them.
| | That policy is not spelled out anywhere in the help pages. It is listed among
the possible sources in the absence of a part list, but it is not explained that
it is considered more important than the instructions.
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It is spelled out as much as it needs to be. Any further details about how part
lists were counted slightly differently over the years or limitations of their
usefulness are matters of discussion among collectors. Please read these as examples:
https://www.bricklink.com/message.asp?ID=1027168
https://www.bricklink.com/aboutMe.asp?u=viejos&pageID=16500
We're not going to put that level of detail in the Help Pages. Our Inv Admins
have access to this kind of information to help them make informed decisions,
but it's too much for the general BrickLink public.
| | This case illustrates the foolishness of this policy. The criterion for including
these leftover parts in the regular section - and thereby including them in any
part-out and in requiring them to be present to sell the set as "complete" -
is a number printed on the package. If this set had been released just in Europe
with no part count on the box, those parts would be extras, could be excluded
from a part-out, and would not be required in a "complete" set.
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Maybe, but probably not. We have other ways to determine what parts should be
considered regular, and one of them is related sets.
| | If you want to base the inventories on the consistent contents of the box, that
makes sense from a part-out viewpoint. But this policy does not guarantee that
will happen. It is determining what goes "inside" the box based on what's
printed on the outside of the box, and not what is actually included.
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The parts count is just one tool out of many that we use. It is not used to remove
actual contents from a set, or to add things that were never there. BrickLink's
standard is a sealed set, and that's where we start from when building an
inventory.
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| Author: | Admin_Russell | | Posted: | Jul 4, 2019 03:00 | | Subject: | Re: 10205 : Parts to be removed from Inventory | | Viewed: | 78 times | | Topic: | Inventories | |
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BrickLink
ID CardAdmin_Russell
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| Location: USA, California |
| Member Since |
Contact |
Type |
Status |
| May 9, 2017 |
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Admin |
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| BrickLink Administrator |
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| In Inventories, 62Bricks writes:
| | | | If there is nothing that can be done to stop this misguided inventory policy,
it would at least be useful to have it explained in the help pages. I hear a
lot of lip service being paid to consistency, but these policies are still opaque
and arcane to anyone trying to understand them from what is written, and as such
their application appears very inconsistent.
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As this set demonstrates, the designation of "extra" items is essentially meaningless,
since the policy now is to document the contents of the box and not the parts
needed to build the models. The simplest thing to do to avoid confusion and the
appearance of inconsistency is to eliminate the extra parts designation entirely.
Of course that might mean apparent conflicts with what you are calling "official"
part counts, but you can't have it both ways. It appears that items are just
being moved from extra to regular or vice versa simply to make the BL inventory
count match the number that sometimes appears on some boxes in some parts of
the world.
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| | That is a foolish policy because history has shown us that Lego has changed how
they count parts in the past. If they do it again in the future, we will be faced
with a dilemma.
The previous method of designating extra parts was unique to BL and would still
work no matter what Lego did. That method has been abandoned, and it was a shortsighted
mistake.
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These policies are grounded in a thorough and correct understanding of LEGO history
in addition to the practical considerations of running a site that sells parts.
When you examine the change log of this inventory, you will see that as far as
extra parts goes, it has remained exactly the same as it was on the day it was
approved in July 2005. That was 14 years ago. Meaning that the extras policy
the admins are defending today is the same one used to create this inventory
all those years ago.
There was no “previous method”. There were some people who (after Dan passed
away) tried to change the way things were done, and for a short while it may
have seemed like there was some sort of new policy. But there was simply no easy
way to change everything the site had done up until that point to accommodate
a new way of defining extra pieces, so this idea of a new extras policy was confined
to a small subset of parts and an even smaller subset of sets that happened to
get inventoried at that time.
BrickLink has always preferred to document the contents of the box vs the parts
necessary to build the set. This is because BrickLink was from the a beginning
a site primarily designed to sell parts, and the inventory system was designed
primarily to part out sets. Sellers parting out sets don’t necessarily care whether
or not parts are used in the instructions. They want a list of parts that they
can upload efficiently to their store inventory and sell.
Initially there was no Extras section, and everything was placed in the regular
section. There is reams of evidence in the change logs to prove this. The Extras
section was designed to handle parts with variable presence so that sellers could
either exclude them categorically or treat them with special care during the
partout process. Parts that invariably came in a set were deemed regular parts.
Those that may or may not have been included were called extras.
Fast forward to several years ago when I was grappling with the task of more
firmly defining the rules for inventories (mainly so that conversations like
this wouldn’t have to take place). The site needed a standard to align itself
with, and it needed to be one that both sellers and collectors could live with.
A very small adjustment consisting of some rubber band holders and a few stacking
pins was all that was necessary to align the traditional partout-focused policy
with the historical practices of the LEGO Group.
So that’s where we are today, and it doesn’t seem shortsighted at all, at least
to me. I actually tried to envision what an instructions-based policy would look
like and where it would lead us. But we’ve got so many sets where there are no
instructions or the instructions only use a certain percentage of the pieces.
And when something is listed in a published parts list, it’s really not in the
site’s best interests to encourage sellers to leave those parts out of what is
considered a “complete” set. It’s just asking for problems.
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