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International List of Scale Model Related Web Sites

The ultimate web resource for Scale, R/C, and Railroad modelers.

Site Description & History edit

The International List of Scale Model Related Web Sites (or ScaleModel.NET in short), was established on 3/6/1996. The goal of this site is to keep and maintain an international based list of all the web sites which are truly related to Scale Models. To minimize the maintenance efforts while keeping the list complete and grow, the concept of Sharesite is introduced. Which means that the contents of this site are intended to be freely shared with modelers from around the world. Anyone who has or know any web site that has anything to do with scale models are welcome to Add their site to the list, on-line and free. In return, the registrant receives an image file of a golden badge as shown at left, which can be displayed in their site to indicate it is a valuable member of the list, and link back to here. This concept is quite successful, as the list now contains over 7800 sites, and nearly half of the sites have posted the badge in their homepage. As a result, this site currently receives more than 15000 page views per day from around the world.

The sites included in the list are categorized according to their contents or major interest, the list now contains 40 categories covering almost every aspects of scale, R/C, and railroad models. However, as the list grow, it is found that there are many sites can fall into several categories, and some special interest groups (SIG) are difficult to be categorized appropriately. To avoid misleading and to let the visitors quickly find what they are really looking for, a comprehensive search program for the database of the list is developed and launched in 1997. This program allows users to search keywords or phrase in any combination of the fields of the database. In addition, it allows recursive keyword search to narrow down the search result. A "key resource" feature and a "popularity" property were added to the program later in 1998 to let the user to locate the most useful and/or popular sites quickly.

Among the many places of this site, the Model Gallery featured scale models of many classical things such as the HMS Victory, Stephenson's Rocket locomotive, Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle, Wright Flyer, etc., and is the most frequent visited page other than the main page. The Modeler's Bookstore (in association with Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble (2001), and Abebooks.com (2003)) was initiated in late 1998, the Magazine stand (with Magazines.com, Amazon.com (2003), and Kalmbach Publishing (2003)) was established later. The main purpose of these stores is to provide a starting point for serious modelers to find good modeling reference books and magazines (with good bargains, too). At the end of 2006, these stores have been integrated with a Hobby Tool store, a Model Kit store, a R/C model store, a Model Railroad store, and a CD/Video store, all powered by Amazon.com, to provide an one stop shopping plaza for modelers. The Modeling News Headlines section was launched in late 1999, which is a free service for the members of the list to announce their new product, web site updates, upcoming events, special discounts, model shows and contests information.

At the beginning of 1999, to celebrate the third anniversary, the site obtained itself an easy to remember domain name, that's right, ScaleModel.NET! Hopefully, you will tell your modeling fellows this name and bring them here, and this site will lead you folks dig deep into the amazing world of scale modeling.

Contact edit

Whois information is public, but in response to some people wanting to keep their contact information private, many domain name Registrars offer a "privacy" or "proxy" service to mask the domain name owner. This domain is most likely using a proxy service.

Related Domains edit

3dpapermodel.com.tw 87thScale.info ALoisirs.com ArcaneLoisirs.com AutoPasion18.com CardModelers.org Fineartmodels.com ipmsusa.org

IWantedThat.com Nmra.org Pb-messingmodelbouw.com ph-modellbau.de Project118.com Rondo-ModelIsMo.com ShipModeling.ca

AboutUs Featured WikiPage edit

Featured on 19 September 2007

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Featured Text -- The page for ScaleModel.net offers great information on their website for scale model enthusiasts. Beyond being a (pardon the pun) model WikiPage (complete with some great photos of scale models), the history and site description for ScaleModel.net make this a very interesting website. Kept and maintained as an international list of websites related to scale models, ScaleModel.net provides an approach to maintaining their list that is much in line with some of TheWikiWay philosophies, allowing modelers from around the world to add their website to the list, online and free. The contents of the ScaleModel.net website are then intended to be freely shared by everyone. The success of this approach has allowed for the ScaleModel.net resource to contain over 7,800 sites listed, with an impressive 15,000 page views per day.