Equipboard updates and changes

Hey everyone! Just wanted to do a quick post and let you all know what we've been up to at Equipboard HQ. We've been making some backend/infrastructure changes to make the site faster, more reliable, and more secure, as well as some improvements to the overall site experience.

• The entire site is now served over HTTPS. You should notice a little lock 🔒 icon in the browser URL bar. The 'S' in HTTPS stands for 'Secure,' which means all communications between your browser and Equipboard are encrypted.
• We've been working on making the site faster, so hopefully it feels a little snappier as you're browsing around on both desktop and mobile.
• By popular demand, we added Metal as a genre. You can now apply that genre to artists (new and existing) as needed.
• You can now save items from the mobile site (I posted separately about this here).
• Also by popular demand, we added a 'had' list in addition to the existing have & want.
• We've been happily squashing lots of little bugs and annoyances around the site.

There are a lot of things coming up as well:

• You guys asked for a search feature for the forum, which @michael and I think is a great idea so we'll get going on it.
• Some categories need to be fixed to make more sense, for instance Synths right now has a parent category of Electronic Keyboards which doesn't make much sense.
• We're going to add a tutorial in or around the FAQ on how to save items to your Equipboard. We get asked that a lot from new users, so my guess is the process needs to be a little clearer!
• When adding a new item to the site, we want to add the ability to just put in a URL from a store like Musician's Friend and the item gets auto-added with all the right photos, description, etc. We can eventually expand that to support all the major music retailers.
• We want to enable submitting gear to pros from the mobile site.
• On Role pages, you should be able to filter by genre. So for instance, if you're looking at guitarists, you should be able to filter by guitarists who play blues or metal or whatever you want.

Okay, sorry maybe that wasn't such a quick post after all 😁 Hopefully this helps give a sense for what's to come, and of course if you have any ideas or strongly support (or oppose) anything I laid out above, don't hesitate to reply and let us know.

Equipboard wouldn't be anything without you guys, so we continue to appreciate you and please keep the good ideas coming.

and my gear IQ will be set to infinity, space time continuum be damned?

Sure we could do it but things are gonna get weird for humanity for a while there.