Armorama.com is a
hobbyist website dedicated to
scale modeling. Founded by Jim Starkweather
on
December 16
2001, it currently has over
17,000 users. The main focus of the website is to provide an
interactive community for scale model hobbyists to meet and
exchange ideas, stories, and news of their work. Users come
together as a community to share tips, tricks, reviews of kits or
other products and also their completed models. There are also
online competitions based on themes that users can participate in.
Participants are awarded 'medals' that can be displayed on their
profile. Occasionally winners may be awarded prizes such as unbuilt
model kits.
Since 2006, the site has broken into several sites
under a network umbrella similar to many electronic gaming sites
like the
IGN gaming network. The
site is now part of the
KitMaker Network of scale modeling sites
which also include ModelGeek.com, AeroScale, Historicus Forma, and
Model Shipwrights. The sites share a photo gallery which boasts
over 100,000 photos. There is also a shared event calendar.
Site
users are encouraged to submit articles, reviews, and news items to
keep the site informative and interesting. The site is built on a
dynamic PHP/database driven platform originally based on
PostNuke, a fork of
the popular
PHPNuke
CMS system. The sites are
managed by a staff of over 25 users who work on the them in
volunteer
capacity.
External links
Armorama.com KitMaker Network