About Flaredbase

One entry per toy, with its brand, its category, its materials, its measurements, and what members made of it. Around that, three things that are yours:

• Your drawer: what you own, and what you have retired.
• Your wishlist: the same list, for the things you don't own yet. Buying something you wished for keeps the same entry, with its notes and its history, because that is part of the story.
• Your reviews: written from your drawer, of a toy you own or had. One per toy, a rating out of five, and optional scales that fit the kind of toy, such as rumbly to buzzy, quiet to loud and gentle to strong. A review can be public, or a private note to yourself.
• Picks: lists of toys chosen for a purpose, each with a note on why. See all picks.

It is written for people who are already in the community: reviewers, collectors, anyone with a drawer and opinions about what is in it. It is not an introduction to the subject, and it is not a shop.

Members. Anyone signed in can add a toy that isn't here, on one form. Give it a link to the maker's or a shop's page and we read the name, the brand and the picture off it; you correct what it got wrong and fill in the rest. Or skip the link and type the lot in by hand.

A new entry goes live at once, because a catalogue that waits on one person's approval stays empty, and anyone can suggest an edit to it. Checking entries, correcting them and merging the duplicates happens afterwards, by hand, one at a time.

Specs are the point of the whole thing. Length, insertable length, diameter, weight, materials and which part of the toy each one is, motor, power, noise, waterproof rating, whether it has a flared base. A value nobody has filled in yet is listed as not known yet, in plain sight, rather than being quietly left off the page. A gap in the data is information: it says what still needs finding out, and it is worth more than a confident number somebody guessed.

You can suggest a correction to an entry that already exists, which doesn't count as a new submission. Who submitted or corrected an entry is never shown on the site.

The picture on an entry is the preview image the shop publishes for its own product page. We keep our own small copy and serve it from here, credited to the shop, so that looking at a page never makes your browser ask a shop for anything.

We count anonymously, per day, which searches, pages and errors occur. Never who. There are no analytics and no tracking of any kind: nothing on a page comes from anyone else's server. Your drawer is public by default, with a box to keep a toy private each time you add one. Every review asks, each time, whether to post it publicly or keep it as a private note. Your username is the only public thing about you. An account needs an email address too, which nobody else ever sees and which is used only for mail about the account; one kept just for this site is fine. Deleting your account is one step in settings that takes your account, your drawer and your reviews with it. The privacy page is the long version, and it is the one to read before typing a list of what you own into a website.

• Nothing for sale here, and nobody can pay to be placed on a page.
• No affiliate links yet. They are planned for after launch, as a way to show where a toy can be bought. Each one will be marked where it appears, and they will never touch what ranks where, what sorts first, or which reviews you see. That rule was written down before there was any money to argue with it.
• No explicit imagery. A photo of a toy, in a hand or beside a ruler, is what the site is for. A photo of someone using one is not. Member photos show straight away, anyone can report one, and we take down what breaks the rules.
• No feed, no followers, no likes, no notifications of any kind. A public review sits on the toy's page and on its author's profile, and while it is one of the newest, on the home page. That is the whole of it.

A catalogue is only worth reading once it is full, and the only thing that fills one is people putting things in it. Three things help most:

• Add a toy that isn't here. Something in your own drawer is the easiest start.
• Correct a spec that's wrong, or fill in one nobody knows yet. Most of what lands in the catalogue starts life as shop copy, and shop copy is wrong constantly. Someone holding the thing is the only real source.
• Write a review of something you actually own. Blunt is fine, useful is better, and nobody needs another paragraph of marketing.

Flaredbase is a private side project, operated from the Netherlands. It is not a company: there is no legal entity, and nothing is sold. It is run in someone's spare time, and it is identified here by its name alone. No personal name appears on it, which is a deliberate choice on a site about toys.

Mail is read and answered by hand, so an answer takes days rather than minutes. The legal page has the rest: where the site runs and who else is involved. The terms of use are the rules for using it, and the takedown page is how to get something removed.