namesuppressed's forum posts 44

Any chance of adding a revert-to-previous-version when editing an item? Basically something to undo vandalism edits?

Today someone has edited the Squire Strat SE listing to not just change the name, but also the brand, and even replaced the picture. A Squire Strat SE is not a Washburn Dime 3 Dime Slime, ffs:

https://equipboard.com/items/squire-strat-se-black

I could revert the text easily, but hunting down the previous gear image and editing it.... urgh. That's going to take me a lot more time and effort than writing this post.

It looks like vandalism, but I'm hoping it's just an attempt by the user to fix a completely-incorrect item listing on an artist's page. It's not the way to do it though. The item URL doesn't get updated (as you can see above). And it affects all the other artists who had that gear item listed on their page too. Suddenly their Equipboards are incorrect, with an incredibly ugly slime green guitar they never used....

Probably obvious to anyone looking at the forum tonight, but it seems Equipboard could be improved by rate-limiting how quickly accounts (especially new accounts) can create new forum topics & post gear photos. There's 7 pages / 150 forum threads all with the topic of phone numbers for "lonely ladies" right now, to borrow a Nick Batt / Sonic Talk euphemism. They're filling up the Gear Photo links too. Considering how quickly they're being posted, more than 1 per minute, I think someone has targeted a bot at Equipboard. Couldn't see a way to flag a post or an account either.

Accounts involved so far:

banti_bauala roadddd0000 mithunkoishak dimple_sumit

Not sure if it would have helped here, but maybe take a look at AbuseIPDB? I've found it quite useful for attacks like this. If the AbuseIPDB score is anything above Zero, I flag / ban it from my sites. Though I'm sure my sites aren't getting anything like the attacks you must see on a site as popular as Equipboard.

I definitely think the individual plugins should be merged with the master iZotope RX. AFAIK you can't buy those plugins individually - you have to buy an RX bundle. Which plugins you get depends on the bundle level you buy. I'd have a different opinion if iZotope sold them unbundled (ala Waves).

The consolidation has had the weird consequence of RX no longer scoring for any category, though. RX should be near the top of Noise Removal Plugins (I think most people would agree it's the industry standard for that purpose). But because RX also does audio restoration, dialog enhancement, creative spectral editing etc etc, the whole bundle is now categorized as just "Audio Editor Plugins". So if you look at the charts for Noise Removal Plugins, you don't even find RX listed (except for an RX V1 listing near the end that still needs to be merged).

Just to complicate things, iZotope RX 8 isn't actually the "latest" version. They're getting out of one-time licenses & moving to Subscription, and the subscription version with updates is called RX Pro For Music. Though you can only get that by subscribing to iZotope Music Production Suite Pro.

Ooh, I'm belatedly coming to this thread after looking at my Equipboard and thinking "Huh? I don't own Guitar Rig version 6! Did I add the wrong one?". That, and my VintageWarmer v2 seemed out of place, because it was meant to rank below my v1...

I see I'm in the minority though! And I agree it's much easier to add gear if you don't have to worry about version or specific differences. I have spent more time than I should have trying to identify a specific version of Pianoteq used by a producer. And I've been "that guy" who marked someone's Tube Screamer sighting as "Needs Improvement" because it wasn't the exact specific Tube Screamer model and I thought guitarists and Equipboard were especially picky about that stuff. I'm glad Equipboard has taught me how to be that specific, but I agree that detail might not be helpful to everyone (or better added in comments to an artist gear sighting).

There's some software where I have two versions installed because old versions had different features removed from later ones (in my case Ozone 4 & Ozone 7, also PSP VintageWarmer v1 and v2), but I'm happy to write about the differences and how I use them in a consolidated review / gear comment. Or perhaps I should put that detail on my own blog & not fuss with that much detail here :)

So I'm generally on board, but I think in that case, you shouldn't include the version number in the product name. I don't have Guitar Rig 6, but it's fine to say I have Guitar Rig. I don't have Izotope Neutron 3, but it's fine to say I have Neutron.

Just saw the gear scores, and I have to say I freakin' love it! I also like how it's making the gear categories more prominent, which is making it easy to do some cleanup. I just removed some EQ and compressors plugins that were mistakenly in the Amp Simulator category, so I guess ranking scores will be changing again next week!

But that brings up a question, are some gear pages locked? I can't find the Edit Gear Details link on Amplitube 4 anywhere, and it seems like it should really be in the Amp Simulator category. The Edit Gear Details link seems to usually be next to the Description now, but Amplitube 4 doesn't have a description for some reason. Some other items have it near the top (with the "Want to help? Edit gear details" wording), but that isn't showing up for Amplitube 4 either. Maybe it's a weird corner case with the new layout templates?

Sometime last year, there was a bug impacting the star rating display when you were viewing your own Equipboard...

Yep, I remember that bug! But this one is (I think) unrelated. It's showing the original score I gave the item correctly on my Equipboard, though that's the same score as the aggregated score so I guess I wouldn't know the difference! The bug is that I can't change my score for the item now that I've rated it.

You should be able to change your star rating by following the steps you outlined. You are saying you went to the item page, clicked on the aggregated stars, which takes you to the "Write a review" page right? From there, you should be able to change star rating (whether or not you write a review). That is bugging out for you?

Yep, that's the one that's buggy for me. Exact steps:

• Clicking on link from my Equipboard to https://equipboard.com/items/aas-ultra-analog-va-3

• Clicking on the aggregated stars rating icon to get to review page

• 3 stars currently highlighted on Write A Review page - clicking on 4th star makes stars all go blank

• Clicking on any stars makes them briefly "blink" to acknowledge a change, but still all stars empty

• Checking my personal Equipboard page again (and hitting refresh) shows no change to my rating.

Using Microsoft Edge 90.0.818.36 (Win 10) here, I guess I should have tested other browsers too just in case....

EDIT: Just tested on Firefox 87.0 (Windows 10), same behavior there too.

Not sure if this is a bug or just a dumb question - I'm trying to change the rating I gave on an item, but don't seem to be able to. I know to click through to the item page & click on the aggregated star rating, and it shows the star rating I previously gave correctly. But if I try to click on a different star to change my rating, none of the stars are highlighted (as if i've just rated zero stars), and repeated clicks don't cause any stars to light up.

Possibly related - I never actually wrote a review, so there's no title or body text associated with my original gear rating. I was hoping to rate some items until I have more time to write a full review.

Just a heads-up - looks like a site called WhatGear has been scraping Equipboard and creating a copycat site. I'm seeing some of my Equipboard gear submissions duplicated over there, product images and artist photos are identical to the ones on Equipboard. Ironically, they're trying to claim their website is "DMCA Protected".

You might want to consider leaving a few Trap Streets in some Equipboard listings to catch them out & prove they're scraping data from you.

Quick story: Many years ago I wrote the online tech glossary for a popular website. We had a bunch of competitors scraping us constantly, we were able to catch them out because I hid references to friends & girlfriends in my definitions. Our incredibly smart boss - instead of issuing a takedown notice, he sent them a licensing agreement for our content instead. Those hidden references created an extra annual revenue stream for the company & a bunch of backlinks from direct competitors.

Oh hell yeah, how did I miss this addition?!

I mean, I kinda like supporting the developers directly, but I like this too. If I ever start writing VST plugins I know who to add into my marketing mix :)

And if Equipboard payments are up and running, I'd still be up for an option to buy an ad-free annual plan so I don't feel guilty running my AdBlock here (sorry...)

Adding a +1 for this idea of a vandalism/spam queue. I found a user submitting essay spam today (equipboard.com/sonampte) and I'd love to flag the account to go into a moderation queue. Maybe restrict the spam flag option to users with a certain Gear IQ threshold if we're worried about false reports clogging the queue?

Hi Andinomm - I wouldn't stress, that's definitely not vandalism & you've improved the listing!

I was going to suggest you could add a comment on the page about the original missing source, but I see you've done that already too. That's useful for others looking at the listing. If you're sure it's an MPC 2000 XL in that video, you could maybe add that as a new gear item to TYDOLLA$IGN with the same source video (bonus points!). Then if you feel like it, go for a hunt for other videos where he might have used a regular MPC 2000 instead?

Kudos on the attention to detail, you've put more thought into this than many others would have.

Oh man, that guy! What does “stop leaking” even mean?

I spent way too much time (well, 3 minutes) trying to figure out what that meant and give the benefit of the doubt - I wondered if it was a jaded developer who thought this was a warez site leaking downloads (obviously not), or thought that I'd listed an unannounced product ahead of embargo (nope). I eventually settled on "some people just want to watch the world burn" :)

I let the mods know about him last night and Michael cleaned it up.

Thanks for that! Luckily I only saw it on one item, I would've hated to see dozens of my submissions disappear and have to do them again. For the moment I like keeping my Gear IQ stuck at (Neve) 1073...

Is there a chance that we might get an "Undo edit" or "Revert" button when editing an item? I've just been fixing some vandalism edits, and it would be faster & easier if I could just revert the change back to the previous edit, instead of having to re-research the correct product name & product description. (I realize there would be a lot of programming work required to make that happen though!)

Also, might want to flag user sbs_bang for vandalism, eg on Lounge Lizard Session: https://equipboard.com/items/aas-lounge-lizard-session

incidentally, alethea's microphone in your submissions looks like a beyerdynamic, probably a hypercard model.

Ahh! See, if I'd added it I would have put SM58, I wasn't looking closely enough at that grill. But from one angle I saw the mic was engraved with the radio station ID, so I left it out if it's not really her chosen mic.

But I agree that the best solution is to hunt down all the artist's gear and fill out the page when you can!

While we're talking about Equipboard page layouts - any chance of changing the automated order of an artist's gear, if they don't have any listed in a category?

As an example, on the Imogen Heap page, there's no gear shown above the fold, because there are no pianos listed for her (since she's mostly MIDI / Synth anyway). So the initial impression is, eww, spam page with zero content - even though there's a dozen things listed in her Studio Equipment and VST Plugin categories:

https://equipboard.com/pros/imogen-heap

Similarly with an artist I just added, Alethea Leventhal - because I've only found a synth and a drum machine so far, listing zero microphones and zero pianos at the top of the page makes it feel empty, especially on desktop:

https://equipboard.com/pros/alethea-leventhal

Not a big deal, but one of those little things I thought might be worth mentioning.

Absolutely! You click on the stars from the gear "cards" on your own page. Perhaps we should make that more obvious, with a "read review" or "edit review" link...

I think I might be in an A/B test group! ;) I've already got a "Read Review" link there if I actually wrote a text review for an item. Clicking on the stars on my own page doesn't do anything for me in many cases though - I suspect those might be items that I gave a star rating but skipped writing the text review. It makes it look like there's no way for me to edit those ratings/reviews. (I've figured out that if I click through to the item I can edit my review by clicking on the stars on that page, though.)

I liked the method where I could directly rate items from that screen by hovering my mouse and just clicking on the appropriate star rating (and the graphic would highlight my rating as I hovered my mouse over it), but it's not a big deal for me if that's changed.

... and you could see what gear built up to Trent Reznor. Maybe that's also a bad example ...

Perfect example as far as I'm concerned, because I've just gone through that exact process. I belatedly realized how influential Gary Numan was on Reznor after finally listening to The Pleasure Principle for the first time this year. (Also discovered that the riff I loved in Basement Jaxx's "Where's Your Head At" was just a Gary Numan sample, so that was embarrassing.) Equipboard was part of that process for me & led me to spending more time with my Arturia Mini V softsynth.

Not sure how you'd setup the musicology feature though, because from NIN & Einstürzende Neubauten (and even Sisters Of Mercy via the Korg A3) you can get to... U2's Achtung Baby album. But pointing from NIN to U2 circa Joshua Tree / Rattle & Hum would be ludicrous.

By including the start of your review on each card, is that too "busy" looking? Do you prefer a cleaner look?

While I generally prefer more minimal designs, the reviews are one of the main reasons I hang around here. It's fairly rare for someone to have reviewed equipment anyway. If I see a review preview, I'll often click through to read it - and on my own gear page, it reminds me that "yeah I really should write a review of that soon". It would be annoying if I had to click through each item just to see if someone had reviewed it or not.

One of my favorite things is the ability to re-order items on my page, so I hope that stays, at least on desktop. I've agonized over my gear order, so while I haven't got around writing reviews of everything I have drag&drop-ordered all my plugins from Favorite to Least Favorite.

Will the new pages show our own personal ratings of our gear? At the moment the ratings it shows are the Equipboard averages, not the star rating I've personally given something. I can understand showing the Equipboard rating if someone hasn't reviewed an item though (maybe as a less bright / saturated version of the star graphics, to give the hint it's the default and not the personal rating?) I actually logged on to the forums today to ask about how to get my personal gear ratings to show!

Just have to say, on this bit:

And finally... you're not limited to a source link/URL! You can now directly upload an image as proof from your device.

This is huge! Thanks so much for this. I've got a bunch of old music magazines with interviews that I wanted to use as sources, but they haven't been republished online yet so I couldn't quote them. I've already seen & approved some submissions with scans from the liner notes of CDs, this is going to help a lot!

Before I reply to anything else - I just found the new gear editing options, and the ability to change gear photos & even add brands! That's fantastic, thank you.

It also ties in with your point about photos. Honestly, seeing dozens of Tube Screamers doesn't work for me because they all look alike... but I see that if people can upload a photo of their own specific guitar, or even a photo of them with their guitar, that will make a lot of people happy. Being able to upload photos of your own pedalboard & tag the items in it would be useful too. (I mostly work in the box, so photo uploading won't apply much to me, every screenshot of a VSTi looks identical.)

...we opted to do away with that because we honestly never felt it was that useful...

I get the feeling I'm one of the only people who used it, so I understand! However, when it was around, it nudged me to increase my gear IQ. I shouldn't admit this, but when I saw others with a higher Gear IQ on gear that I own, it would sometimes prompt me to find another studio tour video or Sound On Sounda article that I could examine to easily rack up some more meaningless internet points ;)

If I can add a UI request... on mobile, is there any chance of adding a search box in the front page itself? Perhaps above the fold or roughly where the Gear Recommender button is? I know there's search in the hamburger menu, but I keep forgetting to look there. Usually I'm starting with a specific gear item now, rather than a specific artist. (Basically I think of Equipboard as the Wikipedia of music gear - like Vintage Synth Explorer or EveryMac, but for all music gear.)

That sounds good to me as well. Bonus points if you can keep the current option to drag & reorder your items within those categories / collections. (I currently sort my VST plugins by how much I use them, even though I haven't gotten around to actually rating them all.)

I like solusash's idea too - having live & studio rigs wouldn't apply to me personally but I see how that's useful. Would that mean you could list the same item in two categories, if you also use something on the road & in the studio?

This might be overcomplicating things, but I like how that possibly leads to showing how you use the gear, not just what you own. Perhaps I could show what my preferred vocal effects chain is, or a plug-in effects chain to recreate a particular sound. (I doubt I'd actually go to the effort of creating that on Equipboard, and if I did I might save it for my own website instead, but I've definitely read articles in Sound On Sound & Future Music etc to learn specific effects chains used on records.)

In my case, I often need to edit the source URL after I've typed in the description - in particular if I'm trying to get exactly the right timestamp for a YouTube video where the artist mentions the gear. So it's not 100% a linear process for me.

And if I'm submitting a few items at once (with a few Equipboard tabs open in my browser), then it helps to see all the item / source / notes all at once, so I keep track of what I'm doing and don't accidentally enter the wrong notes into the wrong item in the wrong browser tab. But that's an occasional edge case.

Another vote for the desktop submission form here - but I'm also doing all my submissions from desktop / laptop, never from mobile. I occasionally browse Equipboard from mobile, though.

Thought I'd start a thread about the redesign, now that I'm seeing it more often & it's starting to get in my way at times.

Something I'm really missing in the new design is the list of people who own an item that used to be at the end of each page. I used that as a way to discover other people's Equipboards & check out who else is using something before I buy or downloadf it. (For example, today I'm looking into Kazrog True Iron, so I've found it on Equipboard... I can see one other person has saved it, but I can't see who now, so I can't click on their Equipboard to see if their music style / gear tastes are similar to mine, or what they might have rated it without actually writing a review for it.)

My other concern is that there's a ton of non-information above the fold. The links for "reviews" and # saved are really tiny on desktop now. If I scroll down, each individual section - artists, reviews, details - completely fills a single screen of my 27" desktop monitor, even if they're completely empty with no content. I'm sure you folks know way more about SEO than I do, but something about this redesign feels more 'content farm' for me than the previous design did.

If I had a way to re-enable the old design on my account, I'd love that - but I realize there must be a reason you're moving to a new design.

I still love Equipboard though!

Maybe this could (eventually) be solved by the "Categorize Your Gear" link on your own Equipboard? If you click on that, you can show which categories show up & how items are grouped. Categories that aren't selected get grouped higher up in their hierarchy or dumped into Other Gear.

At the moment, there's no single "Drum Machines" category that you can check, but it seems reasonable that people might want that to show their drum machines as one separate group. I wouldn't mind being able to separate out my "VST Effects" from my "VST Instrument Plugins", for instance.

I don't envy the Equipboard developers trying to tweak the "Categorize Your Gear" GUI to enable that, though...

Argh, sorry folks, I added the wrong item here: https://equipboard.com/pros/yoad-nevo/sequential-circuits-prophet-5-rev2

(I've already posted the correct item as well - I got confused by the Rev2's.)

Another one for the delete list:

https://equipboard.com/pros/charlie-puth/m-audio-oxygen-61-61-key-usb-midi-controller

Someone has already submitted the correct Oxygen 61 MkIV to Charlie Puth's page, so this slightly incorrect entry is now redundant... and irritating the OCD in me whenever I get email notifications about it ;)

Just noticed your post about the FL Studio 20 submission, so I've submitted it as a duplicate to be merged with the main Image Line FL Studio 20 listing.

(For others reading this thread, there's a link here for submitting items that should be merged together that I find super useful.)

Yep, it's not a logical way to replicate it, just a way I was able to get it to happen repeatedly here. (In my case, I may have clicked refresh because I was testing behavior between AdBlock Plus on and AdBlock off... not that I would ever browse Equipboard with AdBlock ;) )

It might be a problem with items that don't have categories, or where the category has been deleted from the system. Try this one:

• Click edit for the Adobe Photoshop CC item (yeah I know, just an item with an old category)
• Select an initial category eg VST Plugins
• Select a second category eg DAW
• For some insane reason, now refresh the page
• Notice now that VST Plugins is selected (even though that isn't the category it is saved as), but the 2nd category is not selected - and if you try clicking on the 2nd category, there are no items to choose from. (This was in Firefox 69 on macOS 10.13 here.)

I know it's a ludicrous test case, but you might at least be able to see the behavior I've encountered where the secondary categories sometimes don't get populated. I've encountered this during normal editing too, I just haven't been able to find a "normal" reproducible test case for you!

Just a heads-up for Michael, you might want to take a look at this post in the other thread, I was able to reproduce the issue with not being able to select a sub-category. I don't think it's the exact same case but might be related.

No problem, should be updated now. Sorry for the runaround on this!

Ahh! I think you've found a website bug - I've had the same problem before as well.

(To the Equipboard web devs: I can make the bug happen if I reload the edit page, when it reloads it pre-populates the first category as I set it before reloading, but then the other categories have no options to choose from.)

You can work around the bug if you go back to that first category (eg "Amplifiers & Effects") and change it back to "Select Category". Give it a moment to reset itself, then choose "Amplifiers & Effects" again, and it should hopefully start working.

I'm totally happy to help edit it if you get stuck! But I figured you'd rather be able to do it yourself anytime too.

When you click on the item (say the PRS cab), and click on the Edit link on the item page (near the top, next to the rating), you'll get an edit page where you can edit the item categories. Notice that there's up to 5 sub-categories, so it's not just "Amplifiers", it might be something like "Amplifiers & Effects - Amplifiers - Guitar Amplifiers - Guitar Amplifier Cabinets".

After changing the categories, at the bottom of the page there's a big orange "Submit Revisions" button that you have to press...

... but before you press the button, there's a text box just above the button that says "Answer the question: WHAT am I changing, and HOW am I making this more correct and accurate?" You need to fill out that text box too, otherwise nothing gets changed. It's there so you can explain to others why you changed it and why you think you're correct.

I've updated the PRS cab for you, but left the Mojotone for you to try yourself - and if I got the PRS cab category wrong, you're welcome to change it too!

Here's a weird one - someone has created a duplicate of the Celldweller artist page as Celldweller II and added a ton of equipment to it... but it's all written in the first person (eg "I use this amp"), and while the gear seems accurate, some of the sources are super dodgy (eg adding manufacturer pages as sources that don't mention the artist).

Any thoughts on how you'd deal with this? It's clearly a new user who doesn't understand how Equipboard works... but I suppose there's a slim chance it's actually Celldweller trying to create & edit a new artist page that he controls personally. The new duplicate page has twice as much equipment listed as the original!

I mean, if it's actually Klayton / Celldweller, I'm going to feel super embarrassed calling him out for bad sourcing here...

I didn't do this one, but the OCD in me feels I have to mention it :) This "Chris Lord Alge plugin" is a duplicate of CLA Vocals... and the one artist reference on the item is already on the CLA Vocals page anyway, so it should be safe to delete it as an item.

I didn't have any pics in mind - maybe I'll regret this, but I trust your judgement Jim! ;)

Honestly my own interest wasn't photos, more in adding website / social links for bands. I've been discovering new bands from some of the gear video submissions here on Equipboard, so having band links is useful. But no worries if editing bands needs mod privileges! I just thought it might have been a bug in the site.

Nope, no blue "Edit Group Details" link, that would fix everything! I've only got that link on individual artist pages.

As for a list of bands without photos, shortest answer is "a lot"... probably easier to set it up so we can edit & help you out! But here's a few that probably should have photos:

https://equipboard.com/band/soundgarden

https://equipboard.com/band/led-zeppelin

https://equipboard.com/band/the-beatles

https://equipboard.com/band/u2

https://equipboard.com/band/rammstein

https://equipboard.com/band/sex-pistols

https://equipboard.com/band/joy-division

https://equipboard.com/band/foo-fighters

I think I can give an example - try "The Cure". It doesn't come up as a band on its own in the search, so I'll link directly to the page:

https://equipboard.com/band/the-cure

I can't see a way to edit the band photo from that page, and it currently just shows a blank/default. But I also can't see how to edit other details for the band, like adding Twitter / Soundcloud etc. (Unless maybe I don't have enough Gear IQ to qualify to edit band listings?)

Another one for the mods to look at: nishka68

Cheers!