Equipboard Improvement Ideas

I would love to maybe see a "Studio Tours" section for artists with maybe a player for a YT or Vimeo (or whatever) video of their studio...

would it be possible to get a notification when someone I'm following posts a review?

I get a notification for every picture they post, why not gear reviews too?

would it be possible to get a notification when someone I'm following posts a review?

I get a notification for every picture they post, why not gear reviews too?

Good idea, I'll make it so.

would it be possible to get a notification when someone I'm following posts a review?

I get a notification for every picture they post, why not gear reviews too?

Good idea, I'll make it so.

Thank you!

I'm hopeful this improves the number of comments and upvotes reviews get in their first 24 hours... therefore making people feel more rewarded for taking the time to write a thoughtful one, therefore writing more in the future, etc etc.

There needs to be a way to report a duplicate Artist, not only duplicate gear.

Just a simple design mod - give the forum more prominence by placing it towards the top of the column instead of off the screen at the bottom. It puzzles me that I have to scroll down to find it; it's so easy to miss where it is. It kind of makes it feel like a secondary feature to the website whereas I feel the community aspect is equally as strong as all the gear specific features, perhaps even more so.

Just a simple design mod - give the forum more prominence by placing it towards the top of the column instead of off the screen at the bottom.

yeah, I had to add it to my browser favorites bar when I became obsessed with answering questions and bantering here.... it would be busier if it were more forward.... some questions aren't simple enough to be answered by all these expanded features that are being added

I also suggest equipboard brew its own beer... equipbeer, a boutique lager with a proprietary blend of unobtainium hops and leadless solder...

I also suggest equipboard brew its own beer... equipbeer, a boutique lager with a proprietary blend of unobtainium hops and leadless solder...

Hell yeah - Board-wiser, Beer of geeks!

I also suggest equipboard brew its own beer... equipbeer, a boutique lager with a proprietary blend of unobtainium hops and leadless solder...

The Equipbeer(dot)com url is currently available dirt-cheap on GoDaddy and similar.

Austin is overflowing with breweries to partner with.

Just sayin'...

I'm a marketing genius.

Hell yeah - Board-wiser, Beer of geeks!

I like Board-wiser; a class A adult beverage, all discrete ingredients with a minerally (iron, copper, tungsten) transformer balanced finished and smooth top end!

Boardwiser - Beer of Geeks

"Smells like guitar polish. Tastes like guitar polish."

On a separate subject, what about adding manufacturing dates to items? basicly just introduction year, and production status (e.g. "Boss DS-1, 1978-Present").

Hosting gear manuals might be useful (I don't like the way the sites that specialize in that want your contact details, or add their own watermarks to the files), but is there a copyright issue with hosting them?

My main request for improvement would be to do something about the crazy number of duplicates. Every time I start looking at the gear for a manufacturer I'm interested in, there are loads of duplicates. The form for reporting duplicates isn't great either. It would be helpful if it showed a preview of the item after you enter the URL, so you can see you've got the right URLs, and not entered them the wrong way around (i.e. requested to keep the bad one and delete the good one). Using multiple browser tabs to check the URLs is awkward on a phone.

I think a better "are you sure this isn't a duplicate? Stop entering duplicates, you clowns" check when submitting new gear would help too. Try to prevent dupes in the first place, so there aren't so many to report and merge later.

Finally, I'm not sure what the process is for "Needs Improvement" items when the item is incorrect. It doesn't seem possible for the submitter to change a bad item after it's been reviewed. So what's the point of reviewing it as needing improvement? Should it just be marked "completely incorrect"? And what happens to incorrect items, do mods delete them?

I want to help improve the quality of the data, but it sometimes seems pointless to review things if mistakes can't be corrected.

Edit: for example, I reviewed this to point out the gear was completely wrong (same manufacturer, totally different unit) and now it's a submission for the Analog Four that says "Machinedrum, no Analog Four here". Edit2: oh maybe only the original submitter can change the item? I've just realised that the user who updated the description on that item isn't the original submitter.

what about adding manufacturing dates to items? basicly just introduction year, and production status (e.g. "Boss DS-1, 1978-Present").

I think Reverb does this for some items. We use their API to update prices and such, so we could look into grabbing that data if they have it and displaying it on Equipboard.

Hosting gear manuals might be useful (I don't like the way the sites that specialize in that want your contact details, or add their own watermarks to the files), but is there a copyright issue with hosting them?

Not opposed to this. Just as with a certain gearIQ users can submit a video to an item, we could do a similar thing with uploading the PDF manual. Will have to look into if there's a copyright issue.

My main request for improvement would be to do something about the crazy number of duplicates.

We hear you and this effort is underway, starting with software.

The form for reporting duplicates isn't great either.

What if it worked more like the normal site search, as opposed to asking for URLs? Would that be an improvement?

I think a better "are you sure this isn't a duplicate? Stop entering duplicates, you clowns" check when submitting new gear would help too. Try to prevent dupes in the first place, so there aren't so many to report and merge later.

Agreed. This one is tough, and I think it comes down to the fact that anyone can add anything on Equipboard. Some combination of a text string and a photo makes for a "product" page, and Equipboard has gotten to the size where unfortunately that level of openness is no longer viable. We need to clamp down a bit on what it takes to submit a valid item. We do our best to match gear up to unique identifiers like SKUs and UPCs, but there is lots of interesting older music gear (and software) which doesn't have those. So that led us to also consider a match with a used product on Reverb a unique identifier. Possibly revising the add item process to HAVE to include a link to Guitar Center/Sweetwater/Reverb/etc is an option. That way it becomes easier to prevent duplicates, as opposed to having to detect the difference between "Walrus Julianna Pedal" and "Walrus Audio Julianna Pedal."

What do you think?

What if it worked more like the normal site search, as opposed to asking for URLs? Would that be an improvement?

Yes, I think that would be helpful. Maybe also display the URLs of the two selected items, so you can double check which is which. In theory, there could be two items with the same name and same photo, so you need to be able to tell them apart. Entering the URLs solves that problem because the URLs are unique identifiers, but it's awkward.

We hear you and this effort is underway, starting with software.

Nice. I'd not seen that thread, thanks for the link.

This one is tough, and I think it comes down to the fact that anyone can add anything on Equipboard.

Yeah, I totally get that it's tough, and don't have any great ideas. Requiring proof of existence in the form of a Reverb or Sweetwater listing might work, of it doesn't dissuade people from submitting.

Discogs has a "confirm this isn't a duplicate" checkbox when submitting a new release with a catalogue number already in the database. Maybe something like that. If the product name is a close match for any existing items, show them to the user and make them confirm that they're not duplicating one of them. The difficulty here is shining "close match". "Korg mini kp2" and "Korg mini kp2s" are not the same item, but "Korg mini kaoss pad 2" is the same as the former. Show too many matches and it will annoy people, too few and they will still submit duplicates.

at the top it should say "submit another item to [artist] using the same source" - and this would pre-populate the artist, source, and perhaps even your notes from the previous submission so you could go in and edit them accordingly.

Yeeeeeess! This would be great.

It would also be nice to be able to see a preview of what you're entering into the details box, to check there are no typos in your markdown. Either have a "live preview" below the textbox that shows the rendered version as you type, or have a toggle to switch between text entry and rendered preview (as on GitHub comments and pull requests, if you've used that).

One more idea: I'd like to be able to search within a single artist's gear. Let's say I want to submit his Midas mixing desk to Neil Landstrumm's profile. To check if it's already there I have to check each section; is it "Studio Equipment" or "Mixers" or "Studio Recording Gear" or "Other Gear"? Do I need to click "show more" to see them all?

If there was a quick search box somewhere on the artist profile (separate from the main search at the top of the page) then I could just enter "midas" and see all his gear that matches that.

(On the subject of the different sections, sometimes the distinction between "synthesizer" and "drum machine" is very arbitrary, so displaying them separately isn't always helpful ... I get why the distinction's good, it's just ... not always good ;-) And that's before you consider that lots of drum machines on the site seem to be categorized as "electronic drum kit" so appear in the wrong section.)

(On the subject of the different sections, sometimes the distinction between "synthesizer" and "drum machine" is very arbitrary, so displaying them separately isn't always helpful ... I get why the distinction's good, it's just ... not always good ;-) And that's before you consider that lots of drum machines on the site seem to be categorized as "electronic drum kit" so appear in the wrong section.)

What distinction? Most drum machines are categorized as Studio Equipment at the moment. There is no category for drum machines, right?

The "Drum Machines" category is under "DJ Gear" (along with "Audio samplers") but that does show up as "Studio Equipment" on artist profile pages.

The distinction between a "drum machine" and an "audio sampler" is often blurry, e.g. the Elektron Machinedrum UW and Rytm are drum machines that can sample, and the Elektron Digitakt and Korg ESX-1 are samplers that make good drum machines. But either way, calling them "DJ Gear" seems a bit inaccurate. Countless hit records were made using drum machines like the TR-808 with no DJ anywhere near.

What I meant about drum machines being mis-categorized as "electronic drum kits" is that I've had to correct quite a few drum machines which were categorized as "Drums & Percussion | Electronic Drums | Drum Sets" which is the category for things like Roland VAD506 and Yamaha DTX400K. I just found these ones under "Drum Sets" too:

• https://equipboard.com/items/jomox-airbase-99
• https://equipboard.com/items/yamaha-rx21-drum-machine
• https://equipboard.com/items/simmons-sds-8
• https://equipboard.com/items/mam-adx1
• https://equipboard.com/items/roland-ddr-30
• https://equipboard.com/items/korg-beat-boy
• https://equipboard.com/items/simmons-sds-7
• https://equipboard.com/items/singular-sound-beat-buddy-drum-machine-pedal
• https://equipboard.com/items/tiptop-audio-tr-909-clone
• https://equipboard.com/items/tama-techstar-306