Enumerating the Rabbit Holes (and Dramas) in our Hobby

Does Discourse offer wiki functionality?

I don’t believe so :frowning:

Speaking as someone new-ish to the hobby I think your listing incorrectly assigns equal weights to all aspects. Some things - plate material, switch type, board layout - really matter, but others - PCB vs. plate mount switches, mods, row alignment - can be decided for customers with little impact on end experience.

Integrated vendors will typically abstract this complexity so the end user never has to think about it. To use an OS metaphor: right now, keyboards are like customizing an Arch Linux distro. I’m imagining us all starting to using macOS or Windows.

Some more points:

  • I don’t think vendors will design custom boards. I think they can offer custom cases and a menu of switches (they stock both already).
  • Soldering keyboards is a commoditized skill - Razor etc. have machines do this - so it would be inexpensive to hire folks to solder boards.
  • The hobby is clearly supply-constrained at this point (board and keyset extras sell out within seconds or minutes) so passing on some of the cost to consumers won’t affect sales.

A clarifying example: say, NovelKeys offers users a keyboard-building service for R4 of the NK65, bundled with a matching kit from GMK Striker R3, so that both GBs roughly fulfill around the same time (or - gasp! - actually ship on order?!). NK also has a small team of folks soldering boards for about $15/hour.

(Feel free to swap in as appropriate: NovelKeys/NK65/Striker with Dixie/Bauer/MoDo, Project Keyboard/Sirius/Bingsu, Cannon/Sat75/Voyage, etc.)

You actually see this already with RAMA, who sells “starter kits” for their boards with switches, PBT Heavy Industry etc.

The struggle with integrating is that most folks prefer a keyset vendor - GMK - who will not be integrated in their current form. This is why vendors are creating competing keyset profiles - KAT, the NK one, etc. - so they can also control keyset manufacturing (and provide better customer experience while making higher margins).


I’ll step out of your thread now, since you’re definitely not approaching this from a business perspective and don’t want to derail any further!

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It does. I was able to make the initial posting of this thread a “wiki”, so it seems as if everyone can now edit it. :slight_smile:

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What @XTaran has done is compile a first draft of a taxonomy of the MK hobby/illness. Taxonomies are useful for finding information in unstructured data - such as forum posts. This is typically done by including taxonomy terms that describe the content of the record/document as metadata for that record. By doing this you don’t need to maintain a database in order to search and locate relevant information. Taxonomies are formally defined and controlled to ensure consistency of use.

A less rigorous form of taxonomy is the folksonomy - a more fluid list of terms built up by users tagging information with whatever terms they think applies. Where a taxonomy is controlled a folksonomy allows people to add or remove their own terms. Hashtags are an example of how a folksonomy might be defined. We could start building a folksonomy by simply adding hashtags to our posts.

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Since I recently referred to that list in some keyboard chat, I just extended the list with some more details — as did @myyrddraal.

And we had an edit conflict which was only shown to the one who saved as second — and not to the one who started editing as second.

This seems to be some part of Discourse’s Wiki functionality which still has space for improvement… :disappointed:

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The longer the more I can relate to this. Can’t tell by mind how many mechanical keyboards I own currently. Must be around 30 or so in the meanwhile. Most of them are 40% keyboards or similar though, and quite some were kits. :grin:

I though never sold one so far, although there are two I’d give away for less than I paid for. But COVID-19 made going to the post office much, much harder. So even when I got an offer, I failed to finish that deal (at least partially) because of not wanting to go to the post office.

I also recently ordered some more storage/transport boxes and keyboard transport bags/cases.

And I bought a set of second hand glass cabinets. They will replace my (not so) hi-fi rack which I nearly never use anyway. Will probably post pictures once they’re set up and filled.

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What’s stopping us from doing this? I’m game.

:heavy_plus_sign: Funky Frankenswitches database archiving community ranked favorites and build logs.

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I think it needs to be sticky, and fun and easy to update, like a wiki (to keep it current). Easy to search/filter/use, so the interface should be good. I like Airtable, but their business model makes relational databases hard. I thought about a hashtag-based folksonomy, gathering info from around the web, but lacked clarity on how to make that work.

I thought about it for a bit, but I’ve lately decided if I can’t do something well, I’m not going to half-ass it and have it fail. The baton is, by all means, up for passing to the person or people who can do it well.

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I’ll have to think on this. I totally get what you’re saying. I may not be the perfect person for this, but I never let that stop me. lol