Dave Ambrose

That's an interesting point. The market itself has shifted. Now days, most modelers start when they're adults; something that hasn't registered on the hobby as a whole. There might be a market for the parts that wasn't there before. Model King is able to do short runs of modified kits. It's worthwhile for the bigger manufacturers because they remove all the financial risk of doing so. I don't have any insight into their dealings so it might not be quite that simple.

We'd just as soon you directly upload the images anyway. That way they stay with the posting regardless of what happens with your photo hosting. We lost the images from Harry's builds because of PhotoBucket's change in policy and would like to avoid this in the future.

I'm still working on this. I can't get rid of them, but they're causing us problems. Darn things are a sledgehammer solution to a problem needing a jeweler's hammer. I do apologize. Using the words s e l e c t followed by f r o m triggers one of the rules. There are other rules that people have triggered.

I'm sorry we don't interest you any more. We don't generally delete profiles, as it deletes the posts. If you don't want to be here, just step away.

This is very sad indeed. We got to see that B-17 when they visited Ramona California. My son came away with a new appreciation for how those who fought in WWII. I hope they continue to fly those planes.

I wonder if we couldn't turn the funding model around. What if someone like Atlantis says, we could do some set of interesting kits. They need X to make a run. People sign up, pay for them, and they either get to enough to run, or some time limit runs out. Kind of like GoFundMe without the 3% skim. They can injection mold them in the US. These are limited run kits. Keeping with the low-cost theme, packaging would be a plastic bag containing parts and instructions. Deluxe kits get a white cardboard box. I could see this working for all kinds of hobby stuff. I'll go back to my server room now. Please turn out the light.

I liked these kits. If I remember correctly, there were lots of left-overs. That was always a good thing for 11 year old self. I'd totally buy some reissues. But, truth be told, there probably isn't a big market for them.

I changed the settings to be much less prolific. Hopefully, this will fix the problem without killing our support revenue. I do apologize, and thanks for being patient. If you turned on your ad blocker in disgust, please white list us again.

I agree with you completely. I'll be working on turning those off tonight.

The current settings are too aggressive. I’ll turn them down as soon as I get back to San Diego.

I do apologize. Our ad income isn't what it used to be, so we're trying to optimize without being too obnoxious about it.

We adjusted our ad settings a few days ago. It's definitely too much. I'll get that turned down to something less obnoxious as soon as I can.

That is amazing and too cool for words.

Yes, things have changed. Rather a lot. Now, most new modelers begin building as adults. They're also building different kinds of models. My daughter and I were at the SoCal Gundam contest. They had 283 paid admissions last year, and they keep outgrowing their venue. I was almost the oldest person in the room. They have women builders too. The old guard, IPMS and established model car clubs, have been very slow to catch on. It took a lot of convincing to open a specific category for Gundams at our local IPMS show. They showed up with a lot of high-quality models. Our judges were very impressed, and I haven't heard anything more about how someone thinks they don't belong in a plastic model contest. Entries at our local contest have stabilized; almost entirely due to an increasing number of Gundam entries. If we could open our eyes to some of the other modelers out there, plus alleviate the sexism and chauvinism, we'd probably start growing. My usual hobby shop has reduced the shelf space for armor and aircraft. They've drastically increased the shelf space for Gundams, and modestly increased shelf space for science fiction and real spacecraft. Model cars are stable, but they need to run a serious clearance sale, That said, when we do a model car display at a car show, the kids just love the cars we build. So do the adults. I find it heartwarming to see grandpa tell his grandchildren about the models he built as a kid. The problem is that their parents won't encourage their participation. That's probably our biggest problem. Model building will continue. It's just way too much fun not to. But there will be different subjects. In a lot of ways, younger people are doing the same thing we did. We built stuff we thought was cool when we were kids. So do they; just different things.

I'll be working on this in a couple of weeks. There is a filter in our web server that is supposed to filter out malicious requests. Welcome to the post modern Internet. It doesn't work nearly as well as we'd like with this forum software, but I can't just disable them without getting the main MCM site attacked. We've been there, done that, and no thank you very much. I have some learning to do before I get this ironed out. You've all been incredibly patient so far, and I truly appreciate that. Please bear with me. It's us, not you.

If it's not too much trouble, try a different browser. I haven't decoded that security rule, so I don't have a complete understanding of what it does. But, it does seem to be linked to the browser you're using. I recommend Chrome just because it's the most common, but Firefox should work fine too.

You're tripping up on a different "security" rule. These things are driving me insane(r), but I can't pull them out just yet. What browser are you using?

Very nice. I'm glad at least a few people remember and appreciate him. He was our gateway into NASCAR. We lived in Salinas at the time, and one of our friends went to high school with him. There was some exciting racing that sometimes crossed the line into terrifying.

The two keywords are s e l e c t and f r o m (without spaces). Have both of them and get your very own 404 error.

I like that idea. 'Tis done.

The Sci-fi model segment is growing. It might be the only one, but we'll see. The demographics for new modelers has shifted, and it's taking way to long for the hobby to respond to that.

That's a new one on me. Do you have any javascript blockers, like NoScript installed?

Well well well, I now understand what's going on with this problem. It's a stinker, but I may be able to figure out how to fix it. For the techies out there, sometimes comments look vaguely like a SQL injection attack. When that happens, you get the 404 error.

Since people are curious, we do get revenue from people seeing the ads. You don't need to click on them, but if you find something interesting, we'd be delighted if you did click on it. We get paid extra for that. Scrolling down to the bottom of the page helps because we only get paid if you actually see the ad. We're lucky that we have enough readers to make this scheme work. Not many web sites can fund themselves solely with advertising.

Thanks!