CoolMiniOrNot - The Internet's largest gallery of Painted Miniatures and Miniature Painting art

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FAQ

What are the advantages of an account if I'm just browsing?
- How do I register? Is it free?
- How do I change my avatar or signature?
How do I post images to the gallery?
How do I post an eBay auction? Is it free?
- What are credits? How do I use them?
What are Premium accounts? What do they do?
How are the rankings on the Top 50 Artist list calculated?
What do I do if I see a picture that is inappropriate or stolen?
How do I contact an artist on the site?
How do I find a specific picture?
What is Vote Tracking?
Who owns the copyright on an image?
What are themes and how do I use them?
I've lost my password. Help?
How do I add content to my own site or other sites?

What are the advantages of an account if I'm just browsing?

You can browse and vote on CoolMiniOrNot anonymously, but your experience will be greatly improved if you sign up. Why not, it's free!

Member only features:

Vote tracking
The site will remember the minis you've voted on and will not show them to you again unless you specifically request them. With thousands of images in our database, this prevents tiresome repetition.
Comments/Forums
Leave your comments on a mini or in the forums, make your thoughts and opinions known to everyone!
Private Messages
Send and receive private messages without giving out your email address unless you choose to. Want to ask a specific painter a private question? This is the way to do it.

How do I register? Is it free?

Just click the signup link on the top of every page, or here. Accounts are free, although you can opt to purchase additional features.

How do I change my avatar or signature?

Login, click on "My Account" link on the top right hand corner of each page, and you will then be able to do edit your personal information from there. You will need to post at least once on the forums as a spam contro measure in order to edit your signature.

How do I post images to the gallery?

Make sure you are logged in, then click "My Pictures" on the menu that appears on the top right corner of every page.

What are Premium accounts? What do they do?

If you came here by clicking on a star icon

, the person with the star is a financial supporter of CoolMiniOrNot! If you enjoy CoolMiniOrNot, why not subscribe?

For only $1 a month, you can help support this site!

You will also have access to your own personal Favourites list where you can store links of all your favourite CoolMiniOrNot images for future reference, a very useful tool for navigating CoolMiniOrNot's huge collection! Check out a sample Favourites list here.

Turn off all external advertising, expose scores given by registered voters and many new features added regularly, and keep up to 1000 PMs!

The process is completely automated by PayPal. To subscribe, simply go here.

What kind of picture is accepted here?

Any picture of any painted or converted miniature is accepted. You must own the rights to the picture to post it.

What is the Image URL?

Your Image URL is the location on the internet where your picture is stored. This is only really relevant if you already have a website. We recommend that you upload your picture here so that it loads quickly, as free hosts are notoriously slow.

In addition, most free webhosts (eg. Geocities, Angelfire) do not allow images stored on their servers to be used on other sites and block it.

What image file types are supported?

JPEG, GIF, PNG and TIF images are supported. We do however recommend the JPEG format because it makes smaller files while having more colour information.

What is the maximum file size of each image?

1024kb (1 meg) is the maximum file size. Please make sure your images are smaller than this or they will automatically be rejected. There is no maximum width, but images will be resized to fit visitor's screens, which they can then magnify. We've found about 500 to 800 pixels wide is good for a single 28mm figure.

How do I post an eBay auction? Is it free?

Post or edit your image as normal, and simply add the eBay item number assigned to your auction by eBay. We only accept auctions of painted miniatures, and not Buy It Now items without an auction format. We do not accept unpainted original sculpts or mass produced items. Posting auctions is free, but for a small fee we will feature it prominently on our front page and on the pages of the site.

What are credits? How do I use them?

You can purchase credits from "My Pictures" area when you are logged in. These are used to create additional exposure for your eBay auctions. Spending 1 credit will feature your auction in the right side bar of the site, as well as giving them enlarged thumbnails on the front page of the site when your auction is about to end.

How are the rankings on the Top 50 Artist list calculated?

1. From each artist, we take the Top 5 pictures (with more than 50 votes each)

2. We average the top 5, giving the artist an average score.

3. We then rank all the artists on the site against each other using this score, producing the rankings.

You may have realised that this means that there is no advantage to removing lower scoring pictures from the site, since only your top 5 pictures are used to calculate your rank.

How do I change a picture I've already submitted? I've got a better one now.

The short answer is, you can't, not without our intervention. The reason is there's no way for our server to tell if the image replacing the old one is a picture of the same mini, this has to be judged by the human eye.

If it's really important to you to update a picture, you should upload it as a new image, then contact us with the new image ID and old image ID. After we check it, we'll update the image to the new one.

What do I do if I see a picture that is inappropriate or stolen?

If you notice a photo that you know to be posted without permission of the copyright owner or should not be on here for some other reason, please contact us

How do I contact an artist on the site?

You can click the "Send me a message" link underneath any picture you see to send a message to the person. They will be able to view your message next time they log into this site. Under no circumstances will we give out the e-mail address or contact information of anyone listed on this site.

How do I find a specific picture?

That depends. If you know the id number of the picture, you can jump straight to it by typing this in your browser's Address bar:
https://www.coolminiornot.com/XXX, where XXX is the id number of the picture.

If you don't know the id number, then things get a little tricky. You could try a Search from either the main or the Browse page, or by the submitter's name on the Browse page.

What is Vote Tracking?

If you are logged in, CoolMiniOrNot will remember which pictures you have voted on and the score you gave them. This was a much requested feature and has two main advantages.

First, the random image on the main page will be one you have not voted on, unless you specifically jump to it. This is very useful since there are tens of thousands of images in the database but you don't want to keep seeing the same ones.

Second, you can review the scores you have given a picture. This score is displayed in red on both the main and Browse pages.

There are also minor advantages, like a small report on the top left of the main page telling you how many pictures out of the total database you've voted on.

If you'd rather not have your votes tracked, all you have to do is stay logged out. We can't really think of any sinister reason not to use Vote Tracking but the choice is yours.

Who owns the copyright on an image?

This is a tough question. The following does not constitute legal advice. If in doubt, consult your attorney/lawyer.

As a rule of thumb in most countries, unless she's sold the rights, the person who took the photograph owns the copyright of the image.

This should not be confused with trademark or passing off issues, where a distinctive design is "copied" and used to advertise something else.

eg. It's fine for you to take a picture of a GW miniature (you'll own the copyright to the picture), but it is not ok for you to use the picture on a website claiming you sculpted it (you'll still own the copyright, but will probably get hit by a trademark/passing off action which will restrict your use of it).

The painter of the figure generally does not get any rights in the picture unless, of course, he took the picture. However, we endeavour to make sure all work is properly creditted and will act if someone is passing off another person's work as their own.

What are themes and how do I use them?

Themes allow you to control the way CoolMiniOrNot appears. In order to use themes you must have an account.

The Main area and Forums have two different theme management systems.

To access themes in the Main area, just look at the bottom right of any page and change the themes from there.

To access themes from the Forums, select User Control Panel from the Forums page.

I've lost my password. Help?

Hit this link to recover your password.

Dynamically add thumbnails of the images here to my site?

You can add thumbnails to your site now like this:

code:
<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" src="https://www.coolminiornot.com/partnerbar.php"></script>

By default, this will pull the last 5 images uploaded to CoolMiniOrNot so that it can be displayed on your page in vertical format.
You can also play set which images are displayed, much like the Browse page. For example

code:
<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" src="https://www.coolminiornot.com/partnerbar.php?submitter=Chern+Ann&orderby=Descending"></script>

Will pull the top 5 images from Chern Ann and order them in Descending order. You can easily substitute your own name in to show your top five scoring minis. You can chain tags after partnerbar.php by using ? for the first tag and & for the subsequent ones.

Valid tags are:

Tag	Value
submitter	(name of submitter)
orderby	Ascending (sort scores bottom up)
	Descending (top down)
	Week (top 3 miniatures submitted within last 7 days)
	AuctionPrice (auction price if any)
	AuctionEnd (auction end if any)
	AuctionBids (auction bids if any)
	AuctionPlaced (auction start date if any)
limit	(1 to 10, default 5)
whatcat	(name of category, eg Fantasy, SF, Historical or Misc)
whatmanufacturer	(name of manufacturer)
format	Horizontal (changes output to a horizontal table, not too pretty but there if you want to use it)
logo	top (shifts CoolMiniOrNot logo to the top)
auctionactive	activeonly (only active auctions)
	closedonly(only closed auctions)
	allauctions (all auctions)

The partnerbar is very flexible, and tags can be mixed and matched.

code:
<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" src="https://www.coolminiornot.com/partnerbar.php?orderby=Week&limit=3"></script>

The top 3 minis this week

code:
<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" src="https://www.coolminiornot.com/partnerbar.php?submitter=haley&orderby=AuctionPrice&limit=10&auctionactive=allauctions"></script>

The top 10 auction prices from user haley, sorted by price.

Dynamically add comments on my own site

Just cut and paste this into your website. Just substituting the "XXXXX" with the id of your image.

code:
<script type="text/javascript" language="Javascript" src="https://www.coolminiornot.com/comments.php?id=XXXXX"></script>

There are three additional tags you can specify:

bgcolor1
bgcolor2
fontcolor

These are background colours for the cell's tables and the fontcolor of the text. For example,

code:
<script type="text/javascript" language="Javascript" src="https://www.coolminiornot.com/comments.php?id=6247&fontcolor=white&bgcolor1=#000000&bgcolor2=#111111"></script>

would produce white text on black and grey backgrounds for entry 6247. Note that if you use cascading stylesheets, your color selections for this script may be changed.

Display my CoolMiniOrNot rank?

You can add this rank dynamically to your website or forum signature like this, replace Username with your actual login name.
<IMG SRC="http://www.coolminiornot.com/rank.php?name=Username">
You can dynamically update scores of your selected images on your own website
<IMG SRC="http://www.coolminiornot.com/score.php?id=XXX"> where XXX is the image id.
You can also optionally define the foreground(fg) and background(bg) color in hexadecimal like this. Color options will also work with your rank.
<IMG SRC="http://www.coolminiornot.com/score.php?id=XXX&fg=ffffff&bg=000000">

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