Frequently Asked Questions

Here you can find some answers on the frequently asked questions.

Scalemates functionality

What do you provide?

Scale modeling search engine: find 39.000 gallery articles on 100+ different websites.
Kit database: find 78.000 products and fact sheets. A fact sheet contains all important info as related products, links to reviews, links to built models,...
Scale modeling social network: connect with your peers within the context of plastic modeling.
Stash management: Add your kits/detail-sets/decals to your personal stash or collection. Setup a wishlist or mark items for trade.

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 and product database without ever posting a comment.

Searching

What are my options when searching?

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 -Tigermeet - Finds all results that contain the word “Tornado” but NOT the word “Tigermeet”.
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”.

Is there an advanced search?

Yes, our advanced search contains more advanced search options, including;

Section: Limits the search to a specific section of the site only: eg. gallery, products, projects or profiles.
Period: Limits the search those topics within a specific time period. (*: this is very new feature, not all topics are already attached to a timeframe)
Usage: Limits the search those topics used in: Military, Competition, Law enforcement, Emergency services or by Civilians.
Company: Limits the search those topics from a specific company

How do I access the advanced search options?

The advanced search options are available on the search page. You can click on the search button on top of every page to get to the search page.

Social Networking

News feed

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

All: Messages posted with visibility set to "all" can be read by all registered and non registered users.
Mates only: Messages posted with visibility set to "mates only" can only be read by your mates. People following you can not see these messages (unless they are your mates as well)
Private: Messages posted with visibility set to "private" can only be read by the sender and the recipient.

What are the different filters in the news feed for?

All news: This shows ALL posts from the WHOLE community in chronological order (taking into account privacy settings)
Top news: This shows posts from the WHOLE community in chronological order but limited to important topics. (No Add to stash/Wishlist posts, no favorite topics, no activities, ...) or topics with comments
Your news: This shows ALL posts from YOUR community. Your community is the people you are mates with + the ones you follow.
Private messages: This shows all your incoming and outgoing private messages.

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 scalemates?

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

How do I add smilies?

Smilies can be inserted by typing the standard codes for smilies, these are:

;)

(y)

(n)

;(

How do I add a link to another website

Easy, just copy past the URL into your post/comment. The URL will become a clickable link automatically after posting.

How do I post video's from Youtube or Vimeo?

Easy, just copy past the URL into your post/comment. The video will display automatically after posting.

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! Send your account deletion request to the administrator of this website. Your account will be erased completely (note, no roll back possible as all data is deleted and made anonymous. We do not tend to ask a lot of questions or will try to convince you to stay. So be sure before you send the request).

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 favorite model. When he is finished you can perfectly stop following him.

I accidently 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?

Immediatly after following someone his "public" messages become visible in your personalised news feed. 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 news feed. 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 or reject.

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 news feed will now also contain all his messages marked as "public" and "mates only". You will be able to post messages on his wall An 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 news feed.

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 nice overview of your collection.

How do I add items to my stash?

Search for the desired item
Click on the little green arrow at the right of the item's thumbnail picture.
Click on "Stash" in the opened menu
Click on "Add to Stash"
Done

How do I add items to my wishlist?

Search for the desired item
Click on the little green arrow at the right of the item's thumbnail picture.
Click on "Stash" in the opened menu
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.

What products are shown under related products?

The related products section shows all products which are in the same scale and attached to the same topic.

How to add a related product to a kit?

Which related products are shown is done automatically by the system, it checks for all products in the same scale and having the same topic. In case a product is missing, you add a new product. If this new product is in the same scale and from the same topic it will be shown automatically in the related products.

Search engine (inner workings)

For users

Why is my favorite 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 you have 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 a completed 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
Editiorals 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. scale modeling)

Example: scale-rotors.com
All articles in the official gallery are indexed, all other articles in the forum or other sections of the site 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 the search engine.

We currently do not intend to add Photobucket, Picasa,... and similar websites to our search engine. Please make a 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 autmated indexing you do not need to do 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 from the

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

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 visible content

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 during indexing

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. Following factors are considered as blocking.

Very slow loading of the articles (Green zone: 0-4 secs; Orange zone: 4-6 secs;Red zone:7-15secs; Black zone:>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 will recheck 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 or description 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 indexed automatically.

However they could still be indexed manually by any registered member. Websites with too many articles not meeting 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 info like 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 articles automatically.