Frequently asked questions - scale modeling database

Scalemates functionality

What do you provide?

Kit database: find 550.000 products and fact sheets. A fact sheet contains all important info in combination with related products, links to reviews, links to built models,...
Stash management: Add your kits/detail-sets/decals to your personal stash or collection. Setup a wishlist or mark items for trade.
Scale modeling search engine: find 68.000 gallery articles on 1500+ different websites.
Scale modeling social network: connect with your peers within the context of plastic modeling.

I'm not into social networking/forums, can I still use this site?

Absolutely, if you use the social networking part is completely up to you. You can use the search engine, stash management and product database without ever posting a comment.

How much does it cost?

Using Scalemates and all our rich features are 100% free

Searching

What are my options when searching?

A short video tutorial Youtube Video explains how it works.

You have following options when typing a search string in the search field:

Tornado - Finds all results that contain the word "Tornado".
Tornado Tigermeet - Finds all results that contain both words.
Tornado Seat* - Finds all results containing "Tornado" AND words starting with "seat" (eg. seats, seatbelts...)
Tornado 1:72 - Finds all results that contain the word "Tornado" and filtered to scale 1:72.
Tornado 1:72 Revell - Finds all results containing "Tornado" and filtered to scale 1:72 and company Revell.
"Panavia Tornado IDS" - Finds all results that contain the exact phrase "Panavia Tornado IDS".

What sections can be searched?

Selecting from the dropdown list in front of the searchbox allows changing the scope to:

Large searchbox with dropdown located to the left hand side.

All Sections
Kits: Our huge kitdatabase with 550.000 kits, detailsets, decals, figurines...
Market-Place: Search all products which are for sale/trade.
Reviews: Search all products with links to inbox reviews
Articles: 68.000 feature articles of finished models on 1500+ sites
Paint: Colors and paints.
Books: A massive database for scale modeling reference books (currently 29.000).
Walkarounds: walkarounds found on the WWW.
Projects: Scale modeling projects started by our members.
Mates: Our members list
Brands: Scale modeling manufacturers, small & big
Sites: Online magazines, forums, clubs, blogs...
Shops: Online or offline scale modeling shops across the globe.

How can I filter results?

When you search we will generate smart filters on the right hand side of the results. This allows you to narrow down your results.

Usage

What are the little icons next to topics?

These icons indicate the usage of a particular topic. Topics can have multiple usages. (eg. A helicopter could be used by Military and Police. A car for racing and civilian use.

: Civilian
: Racing
: Police
: Emergency Services
: Military

Profile

What are the little icons next to a user their profile?

Activity indicators

: Account verified + activity in the last 6 months
: Account verified + no activity in the last 6 months
RIP: This mate unfortunately passed away
: Account not yet verified + activity in the last 6 months
: Account not yet verified + no activity in the last 6 months

Contributor levels

: Visitor
: Contributor
: Trusted Contributor
: Star Contributor
: Administrator

Stash management

What is a "stash"

Your "stash" is your collection of models, scalemates allows you to keep track of your stash and have a niceoverview of your collection.

How do I add items to my stash?

A short video tutorial Youtube Video explains how it works.

Search for the desired item
Click on the green button on the right of the item's thumbnail picture.
Click on "Add to Stash"
Done

1. Click Green button | 2. Click Add to ..

How do I add items to my wishlist?

Search for the desired item
Click on the green button on the right of the item's thumbnail picture.
Click on "Add to Wishlist"
Done

What do I do if a product is missing?

If a product is missing you can add a new product yourself. You can find the "Add new product" link under "actions" on the right hand side. Alternatively you can visitthe Contributor page.

Can I export my stash you Excel/PDF?

Project management

What is a "project"

allows you to keep track of your scale modeling projects. A project consists of 1 or more kits,aftermarket sets and decals. Projects have a status: it can be on your workbench, already completed, still in anidea or even on hold. During the construction fase you can add photoalbums. When finished you can link yourpublished gallery articles to the project.

How to create a project?

You can only create a project from a kit which is already on your stash/wishlist/completed. When this is the case, you click the green arrow (1a). Next you click the "Stash" submenu (1b). Now you see a list of 1 (or more kits)

Click the 2 arrows for more options, available next to an item (Step 2)

Here you have the option to add it to a project (Step 3)...

Social networking

Newsfeed

What is the difference between a message posted with visibility: All/Mates only/Private

All: Messages can be read by all registered and non registered users.
Private: Messages can only be read by the sender and the recipient.

Can the visibility be changed after posting?

Yes, visibility can be changed after posting by clicking on "Change Privacy". Caution: it is only possible within the first 5mins after your post. You can only decrease visibility.

Can I edit the text of my wallposts?

Yes, you can edit the text of your post by clicking on the "pencil" icon in front of your text. This can be done up to 15mins after your post.

Can I edit the text of my comments?

Yes, you can edit the text of your comments by clicking on the "pencil" icon in front of your text. This can be done up to 15mins after your post.

What are the different filters in the newsfeed for?

All filters take into account the privacy settings
The filters can be divided in "what type" of posts you see combined with "which topic".

All:This shows ALL posts from the WHOLE community in chronological order
Popular: This shows posts from the WHOLE community in chronological order but limited to important topics. (No Add to stash/Wishlist posts, no favourite topics, no activities, ...) or topics with comments
Models: This shows posts from the WHOLE community in chronological order but limited to albums, articles and projects.
Questions: This shows posts from the WHOLE community in chronological order but limited to posts marked as questions.
Trading: This shows posts from the WHOLE community in chronological order but limited to swap & sell interactions.
PM (Private messages): This shows all your incoming and outgoing private messages.

Topics filter

All:All topics
My topics: Only shows these posts which are related to your favourite topics

Filters are your friend to cope with the huge amount of data available on this website.

How do I keep up with the huge amount of info?

Using the filters is important to keep track of what is happening. The "Your news" filter shows ALL posts from YOUR community and what appears there is controlled by yourself.For this it is important that you become mates with the persons you know and/or follow persons. This is how YOU control which info is visible in "Your news".

Suggestion 1: Do connect with other mates (follow or become mates), otherwise "Your news" will be empty.
Suggestion 2: Do not follow or become mates with everyone in the community, if that is the case "Your news"will be the same as "All news".

How can I keep informed about what is new on ?

For this you can visit the wall of user , it contains news, feedback related to scalemates.comIf you are really interested you can follow user , this will make the posts visible on the newsfeed (Your news).

How do I add emojis?

Emojis can be inserted using the keyboard on your device, we alternatively support a small subset by typing these shortcuts:

👍 (y)
👎 (n)
😎 8)
😳 :#
🤔 :s
😮 :o
😠 :O
😉 ;)
🙁 :(
😭 ;(
😄 :D
😛 :p
🙂 :)
👀 ::eyes::
❤️️ ::heart::

How do I add a link to another website

Connections - Mates & Following

Can you see more when you follow a person/company?

No, following a person does not give you any additional permissions. You thus see the same as an anonymous or registered user.

Can I stop following a person/company

Yes, at any time you can stop following a person/company.

Is it offensive to stop following a person/company

No not at all. You could temporarily follow a person because he is working on your favourite model. When he is finished you can perfectly stop following him.

I accidentally stopped following a person/company, can I undo this?

Yes you can by following him again. You can follow/unfollow a person as many times as you want.

What happens when I follow someone?

Immediately after following someone his "public" messages become visible in your personalised newsfeed.An automated public message is posted on your wall. (this can be deleted if desired)

What happens when I Unfollow someone?

Immediately after unfollowing someone his "public" messages will no longer be visible in your personalised newsfeed.No message is posted on your/his wall.

What happens when I request to become a mate

When you request to become a mate a private message is sent to that person. He will be able to accept orreject.

Until he accepts or in case of rejection nothing changes

As soon as he accepts you will see all his messages marked as "public" and "mates only". Your personalised newsfeed will now also contain all his messages marked as "public" and "mates only". You will be able to postmessages on his wallAn automated public message is posted on his wall to tell that you are now mates.

What happens when I remove someone from my mates list?

Immediately after removing someone from your mates list you will no longer be mates and all the extra permissions you/he had are gone.No message is posted on your/his wall.

Does it make sense to follow someone who is also a mate?

No, when someone is your mate you automatically follow him.

What is the difference between following and mates.

Becoming each others mate is a mutual connection. When you are each others mates you can see messages.Following someone does not require agreement from the followed person. This is fine because following someone does not give you any additional rights but merely shows the public messages in your newsfeed.

Privacy

Do we have a privacy policy?

Yes, absolutely! At scalemates.com, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us. Our privacy policy page outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by scalemates.com and how it is used.

Can my account be deleted?

Yes, it can! On your profile preferences you can start the Account removal wizard. Your account will be erasedcompletely (note, no roll back possible as all data is deleted and made anonymous.

Contributing

Can I become a contributor?

Yes please! Join our enthousiastic team of contributors and help improving our reference database by adding/correcting/completing the data. If a product is missing, just add it. If you see wrong data, just correct it...Try it, it is easy!

How do I become a contributor?

As soon as you are registered you can start contributing. You will have access to a dedicated page.

What can a contributor do?

Add missing products, add brands, correct timelines, complete product data, add reviews and many more

Will you validate my actions?

Changes are made directly to the system. We will however verify your changes and provide feedback if necessary.

Search engine (inner workings)

For users

Why is my favourite website not included in the search engine?

This site recently started and more websites will be added to the search engine.

Main reason:

Currently if a website is missing, it most likely means that we didn't found the time to include it. If youhave a proposition please contact us, we are happy to add additional websites.

Other reasons can be:

The website owner raised some objections and didn't want the articles to be returned in our search engine.
The type of website doesn't allow to do automated indexing.
The way the content is structured is inconsistent
The type of website is not allowed. (Photobucket, Picasa,...)

Why are not all pages of a website included in the search engine?

Not all pages of a website will be added to the search engine. We limit ourselves to gallery articles of acompleted model.

Following type of pages are likely to be removed from the search results because of the type of the content

About Us/Privacy Statements/Homepage/Whatsnew page/...
Collections (Ex. My 20 Phantom models. 50 years of ... Air Force Special)
Individual images
Walkarounds
Editorials from the webmaster
General opinions
Tips and Tricks
BBQ/Party/Reunion/Get together articles
In progress articles without a finished result
Artwork
Pure photo albums
Forum pages
Discussions
Non scale modeling related content
...

Does this mean they are not good? Absolutely not, they can be well written content and scale modeling related.They just don't fit into our search engine which is "scale model" related (note: scale model vs. scalemodeling)

Example: scale-rotors.com
All articles in the official gallery are indexed, all other articles in the forum or other sections of thesite are ignored (which does not mean they are not good).

I have plenty of my models on Photobucket, Picasa, ...other photo galleries. How can I add them into thesearch engine.

We currently do not intend to add Photobucket, Picasa,... and similar websites to our search engine. Please makea nice article and send it to one of the online magazines.

For webmasters

What must I do once my website is indexed?

Nothing! When your website is indexed and is meeting the requirements for automated indexing you do not need todo anything. Our crawler will pick up new articles automatically.

What must I when I want to index my website?

Get in touch with us, we will have a look at your site.

Some articles can not be found in the search engine while they are from a known site and fromthe

There could have been a technical issue were the indexing failed or no valuable data (title, scale, company,author, thumbnail) could be extracted automatically.

Can the contents of an article be responsible for exclusion of that particular article?

Yes, follow articles are likely to be removed from the search results because of the quality of the visiblecontent

Incomplete articles (Example: due to missing pictures)
Bad picture quality (especially older articles can be affected)
Too small pictures (especially older articles can be affected)
Very slow loading of the article

If an article is missing, does it mean it is not good?

No, not at all. Some articles from quality websites could be missing because of technical problems duringindexing

Timeouts
HTML errors
Temporary network problems
Inconsistencies
Bugs in our code
...

Is every website allowed?

No, not every website is considered as a quality website which can be added to our search results. Followingfactors are considered as blocking.

Very slow loading of the articles (Green zone: 0-4 secs; Orange zone: 4-6 secs;Red zone:7-15secs; Blackzone:>15secs)
Bad advertising to content ratio
Popup windows
Full page advertisings
Websites not meeting the Google Webmaster Guidelines
Websites with illegal content
Websites delibirately infringing copyrights
Bad Karma websites with a bad reputation within the scale modeling community
...

This is not an exhaustive list, if a website is blocked/unblocked remains the decission of the webmaster. We willrecheck the quality guidelines on a regular basis.

Are there technical requirements that need to be met before being added to the search engine?

Yes, we need to be able to extract the "Title", "Scale", "Builder" and "company" in an automated way.

This information must thus be present and identifiable on the page (Visible or within the meta tags: Title and ordescription tag

As this is done in an automated way the following can cause us problems extracting this in an automated way.

HTML errors
HTML inconsistencies (No title tags)
Use of frames/iframes
Flash sites
No text content (If the title of the model is embedded in the image)
Inconsistencies
No use of the semantic web (meta tags, use of h1, h2,...)

What is the effect when not all technical requirements are met?

Websites with too many articles not meeting the technical requirements can and will not be indexedautomatically.

However they could still be indexed manually by any registered member. Websites with too many articles notmeeting the blocking requirements can be refused to be indexed manually as well.

Note: We are working on a system where you can add URL's of specific dedicated articles and manually provide infolike title/scale/company/...

Will our search engine automatically index new content from a website?

Yes, if a website meets the requirements for automated indexing our search engine will add new articlesautomatically.

Frequently asked questions - scale modeling database | stash manager (2024)