Guidance and reviews of all sorts of shit, electronic and otherwise. Low editorial standards.
There is a hell of a lot of shit for sale these days. When you want to get something of some sort - assuming we're talking generic shit from aliexpress level stuff, where you accept goods weith only pictures, and if you're lucky, terse specs in broken english.
However, this is often the only way to get said items without buying industrial quantities. After I've populated it a bit, to provide a style guide, I'll open it to PRs and you can add your own. Be sure to identify yourself by pseudonym or real name as you please, clearly, and declare any contracts, deals, employment or other involvement with that industry; in the case of someone with ties to the industry, you must include the name of the company the city is is headquartered in. We encourage people to use their real names, but understand why many might not be comfortable with this.
We reserve the right to combine two submitted guides for similar products or elide obviously biased verbiage during our editing process. Say a glow in the dark pigment manufacuter read our guide and was aghast that we had not mentioned it's products in that market. They are encouranged to submit a pull request covering said products provided that they disclose the name and city of their company, and give us either their real name or a pseudonym it might be:
- He could add a section listing his companies offerings, add columns to the charts and provide information we are missing (with blank spots for his competitors). Any description of them must not read like an ad copy, but is free to point out advantages, particularly if hard data is used to back them up. We love details most people don't care about. You want to give us the peak emission wavelenth or identify the dopant atom or ion in the chart? Wonderful!
- He might add his companies products to the lists and give them rave reviews without adding hard data or technical details
- Having far more information available to him than we do, he writes a long document about his companies offerings, with data, charts, and so on and submits it as a new file
Our response to these would pronbably be:
- Merge PR and make sure to mark clearly content contributed by a the biased party using the name or pseudonym given.
- Merge PR, but remove unsupported puffery and bullshit (marked with a
...), but retain mention of the products. - Replicate the data points that correspond to things cited in the PR, and create a subdirectory for that document, linked to from the main document. A disclaimer will be addded to the top of that document making clear that while we belive it contains valuable data, it was received from an inherrently biased source, and as such should be taken with a grain of salt.
Any object reviewed here will not be any of these things:
- Electronic components - I already have a repo for this.
- Fully assembled devices which are not common tools. This is not the place for the Screwdriver of the Month club. If you've tried a dozen brands of butane torch, and found that there are major differences in effectiveness or that some have serious non-obvious defects, Great! (and yes, some brands of butane torch are considerably better than others, and the price doesn't make much difference).
- Anything not used for creating something else.
- Reviews that were writtn by assholes
- Anything that objectionable to any group (nothing offensive to a race, ethnicity, religion, or other protected or unoproducted group.
- Exception: You may freely make generalization about idiots (unless it is due to a medical condition), and/or imply that a manufacturer or department at a manufacturer is staffed by incompetents. This is discouraged though, as most people are incompetent idiots; this is information we could assume anyway) Casual suggestions that one would have to be insane or stupid to use a product are permitted, but do consider rephrasing in a less harsh way.
- No specific name of any individual shall be mentioned, except the name of someone submitting information or the contact point for a company. Nothing lik
- Anything that objectionable to any group (nothing offensive to a race, ethnicity, religion, or other protected or unoproducted group.
- Nothing political. The most political thing you are permitted to do is state the nation in which a company is based
- Nothing sexual, nothing violent, nothing illegal. I don't care how badly various pimps of machine-gun wielding, drug selling prostitutes need reviews (and I'm sure they do, if they exist, they don't go here. (I council against hiring any services involving one or more of those, particularly armed ones who are concurrently engaging in multiple felonies). Despite the fact that they routinely show up in aliexpress, no, no review of the ever present vibrator in all search results.
- Reviews that are flagrantly biased towards one companies product.
The type of things that ARE acceptable are more like these:
- A comparison of different sorts of neon or other special pigments.
- Comparisons of brands or paints, resins, or epoxies. Or of various paper marking implements (pens, pencils, mechanical pencils, gasoline powered pens, and so on)
- Comparisons of organizational and storage containers (if one has a ton of electronic components, pigments, adhesives, and all manner of other small objects, storage for said objects is a necessity.
- There must be a large number of very similar products that are not identical available for sale, particularly if differentiating between them is challenging.
Cheapskate makers. If the majority of your credit card is aliexpress or ebay payments (you're too cheap to buy from reputable western outfits), and you're buying stuff to make other stuff, especially if you compulsively buy stuff you don't have already in case you ever do, you're our target audience :-) Not casting shade here. That totally describes my spending.
But sometimes you try a shitload of similar items and identical looking items are sometimes crap and sometimes great, and you want to write up your findings to help others get the good stuff and not the garbage.