Today was mostly about the hobby shop directory — making what is already there actually true, and actually useful on a phone.
Phone numbers now work like phone numbers
Every phone number on the site is a link you tap to call. That sounds small until you are stood in a car park trying to work out whether the shop is open.
The site is worldwide, so the country code is handled for you. Pick the country your shop is in, type just the digits, and it lays itself out — type `2125550123` and you get `1 (212) 555-0123`. The number saved behind it is the international form, so a listing in Australia or Germany dials correctly from anywhere.
A detail that mattered more than it sounds: Italy keeps the leading zero in its numbers. A blanket "strip the zero" rule would have broken every Italian landline in the directory. Places where the right answer was not certain — Argentina and Brazil mobiles in particular — were left exactly as the shop wrote them rather than guessed at.
While in there: emails are now `mailto:` links, addresses have a Directions button, and the country list went from 28 countries to 226. A shop in Finland or Czechia simply could not be listed before.
Shop listings got filled in — from real sources only
Opening hours went from 1 shop to 119. Postcodes from 5 to 193. Emails from 0 to 72.
All of it came from two places: the shop's own website, and HERE's places data. Nothing was written by an AI guessing what a shop's hours probably are. Every enriched listing records where its data came from and the date it was checked.
The map got the bigger fix. 57 pins were in the wrong place — one shop was pinned 189 km from its actual address. Those are corrected, and 33 shops that had no pin at all are now on the map.
Just as important is what was *rejected*. Looking up a shop by name returns candidates, and taking the wrong one puts a stranger's phone number on a real business's page. Every candidate had to clear both a name check and a distance check before anything was copied — 110 of 262 were thrown out, including a "Skull Moto Shop" several miles away and a craft shop in Turkey that happened to share a couple of words. Where nothing could be confirmed, the field was left empty. An empty field is honest; a plausible-looking wrong one is not.
Unclaimed shops now say so, clearly
Every shop nobody has claimed carries a banner saying exactly that: this listing was written by the crew, not the shop, so the hours and phone are unconfirmed — ring ahead before you drive out.
It also tells the owner what claiming gets them, which is the whole page: a verified badge, their own storefront with a product catalog and checkout, orders paid straight into their own Stripe or PayPal. We never touch the money and never take a cut. Free, no subscription. If you know a shop on here, tell them it exists — most have no idea.
Nothing waits for approval any more
Shops, run spots and models used to sit in a queue until a moderator approved them. That is gone. Add something and it is live immediately; if something is wrong, anyone can report it and it gets looked at. Faster for you, and honestly it was a queue that only ever slowed good submissions down.
Parts and the "Will it fit?" tool
The parts catalog went from 433 to 1,988, and every one of the 431 models in the catalog now has at least one part that names it — it was 171 this morning.
The same rule applies here: a part only claims to fit several models where that sharing is documented — a Tamiya chassis code, ARRMA's MEGA platform, the Traxxas TRX 3.3 engine that genuinely is the same engine across four trucks. Everything else names one model only. No part number was invented.
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If you spot something wrong on a shop page — wrong hours, moved, closed — please report it. That is now the main way this stays accurate, and it works.
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