Recap: Where are we, where are we going?

Just a quick recap post to gather my thoughts about where I am in the process and where I am going.

After almost a year, I'm almost finally finished with Stage 1.  Stage 1 was to Google for Chinese factory listings, make screenshots, save photos, print images, identify all the pins and start building the master list.  I have about 15 more images to post, which I hope to finish in the next couple of days.  There are probably more images to find, but I'll have to do some more heavier duty searching than I've been doing, maybe try to use the Internet Web Archive to find older images that have been removed because they are out of date, etc.

Then I'll move on to Stage 2.  Stage 2 will be almost the same as Stage 1, except it will be for the images that were collected by Dizpins prior to ceasing operations.  The link to those images is in the link list on the right.  I think this will go much quicker, because many of the pins will be duplicates.  But the images contain a  bunch of older counterfeits from the Cast Lanyard series and older rack pins, so it's definitely worth going through all of those pins.  I hope to finish all of those within a couple of weeks, hopefully before the 1 year anniversary of this blog.

Stage 3, will be cleanup of the blog.  It took awhile to wrap my head around how I wanted to organize and phrasing of the pin listings.  I need to go back and make sure the way I referred to each of the Hidden Mickey series is uniform, check for spelling errors, verify the Pinpics numbers are accurate, etc.  At that point the "duplicate" listings will be removed from the Master list, and each pin will only be listed once, but I think I might leave a reference to how many times it appears in a counterfeit image. And I'll see what I can do about getting pictures, or Pinpics links.  Also, at that time I will make the lists of Hidden Mickey and Vinylmation pins only.  I might also make other pages like those, where I can list specific series that have been counterfeited like certain rack pin series, or WDW Gold Card series, etc.  Hopefully, those will make it easier for people to find the specific pins they have a question about.

Stage 4.  Time to go public.  I keep writing as if I have regular followers, but in truth I've only shared this blog with one other person.   How useful this blog will turn out to be, I have no idea, but at least *I* have a better understanding of how many pins have been compromised, the types of pins, how many (or actually few) manufacturers are involved in this.

Stage 5:  Continue to look for new images.