Armorama
Armorama.com is a hobbyist website dedicated to scale modeling. Founded by Jim Starkweather on December 16 2001, it currently has over 27,000 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 150,000 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.