prints recorded against a row.
A model that has been printed by somebody other than the person who designed it is a different claim from a model that has been posted. This page describes how the register would tell those apart. Nothing has been recorded, and the mechanism has never been used.
Stage, in one line
Described, built as far as the data shape, never once exercised. Zero prints are recorded because zero models are registered. No photograph has been collected, no submitter has been asked for one, and nothing below has survived contact with a real print.
Why the register gathers this itself
Of the model repositories examined on 2026-08-25, the ones that publish evidence of printing publish it as a count attached to their own site, and the federated servers publish no such field at all — no make, no print count, no third-party print anywhere in the vocabulary they share. Evidence that a design works is the most useful thing a register of functional prints could carry, and it is the one thing no source hands over.
So it is collected first-party, under terms this register sets, or it is absent and the row says so.
The four states a row can be in
- No evidence. The model is registered and nobody has shown a print of it. This is the default and it is written on the row rather than left blank.
- Printed by the maker. A photograph from the person who designed it. Worth something, and worth less than the next state, which is why the two are never merged.
- Printed by somebody else. A photograph from a printer who did not design it, with the printer, the material and the settings they used, submitted with their attribution and under their permission to show it.
- Cannot carry evidence. A row ingested from a federated source, permanently. The source publishes no print data, so a federated row can never reach the states above. That is a property of where the row came from, not a gap waiting to be filled, and hiding it would make every row look equally evidenced when they are not.
What a recorded print has to contain
- A photograph of the printed part, from the person who printed it.
- Their attribution, as they want it shown, and their permission to show the photograph.
- The printer, the material, and the settings that mattered.
- Whether the part did the job it was designed to do, in their words.
- The date. A print from three years ago and a print from last week are different evidence.
A photograph is not machine-readable, and one photograph is not a test. The register can honestly say a print exists and who reported it; it cannot say a design is sound, and it never will on this evidence alone.
What would make this fail
The mechanism rests on printers being willing to send a photograph for nothing, to a register with no audience, for a model they found somewhere else. That has not been tested even once. If submissions arrive and no evidence ever follows them, the register carries rows that are no better evidenced than a repository listing, and its reason to exist goes with it.
Recording that here, before it has been tried, is cheaper than discovering it in a page that already claims otherwise.