The year is coming to an end and it's time to sum up some results.
Our year began with a difficult move to new servers, as the old ones could no longer cope physically. Of course, because we have more than 1 million images for sets, it's not easy to store and save them. We have successfully completed the move and we even have some space for interesting future updates on the site.
Thanks to the new servers, we have additional capacities, some of which were aimed at creating a search for images of sets. So far, it's working with our telegram bot - you send him a picture, and it searches for similar among the million available ones. Well, if the bot fails, professionals are involved, so everything will be found. And we've been searching the collection a lot. I mean a lot! From more than 1.5k searches only a small faction weren't successful. That's been a peculiar experience.
The company's pages have been updated, statistics, games, and other amenities have been added, both for users and archivists. Things are constantly changing and being fixed on the site - many collectors offer small but extremely useful features that are added fairly quickly. With such a large amount of information on the site, it is very important to be able to filter and sort it correctly, finding errors and omissions. Therefore, a lot of things have been added for the convenience of archivists. It may not be accessible to ordinary visitors, but in the end, all this affects the correctness and completeness of the information, which means that in the end it is important for everyone.
A lot of interesting things on the site are in beta and are being actively tested (you can offer your ideas and participation here), but we managed to release Releases before the holidays. A Release is a couple of sets from one particular company combined due to a similar release window. Sometimes it's easier to see a list of the latest releases from different companies than to scroll through the pages of new sets. In addition, it turned out that more than 700 releases from different companies are released per month - who would have thought until we started developing this feature! Therefore, viewing the sets by release simplifies the review of new products - it is worth skipping a couple of weeks and it will be difficult to scroll up all sets. Releases can be viewed on the company's pages and in a separate section.
Releases are part of a significant future update of the catalog, as with such volumes of new and old information, more flexible approaches are needed. YouTube also showed a list of the last uploaded videos, if anyone remembers :) But for such major changes, we will also need to learn how to work with information more precisely, so that it improves the use of the catalog and does not confuse.
This year, we added a new image description layer and sorted more than 12k sets from GW, which is almost 100 thousand photos. Now we can easily find sets that lack a photo of the package, for example. This means that it will be easier for everyone to add the missing information!
Over 91k sets have been added this year and the total number of sets has exceeded 318k. Collectors have manually added more than 5k sets and made more than 91k corrections to information in existing sets. This is, by the way, one improvement in information every 5 minutes, if we count the whole year. This is a lot, significantly more than in previous years. Unthinkable numbers for our community, who would have thought of such a thing 10 years ago.
With time we'll reach the bottom of the barrel of old sets we can add. So we'll focus on the new sets and improving the quality of information we collect and store, as well as adding more complicated categories of miniatures. For instance, minis from previous centuries, flat miniatures and other rarities. We have tons of entertaining information ahead of us!
It's been an active year! We managed to do so much, and it seems that we didn't manage to do even more :) Congratulations to all the collectors and members of our community. May next year be even richer in discoveries and pleasant events! There is a lot of information, updates and useful tools ahead of us, so see you in the new year!
P.S. Join the congratulations in the comments, let's congratulate each other!
I's an official news from representatives of company Miniset
