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Discuss: gdgt discussions

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If you came to talk about gdgt itself, this is definitely the right place.

Lay it down here with the rest of the gdgt community.

gdgt discussions

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Topic: User Manuals in product pages.

20 replies / Originally posted by kleinc / Latest reply from Zmower / Topic is open

By kleinc

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Since I'll have all of my gadgets here, why not create a section for user manuals in the product page?
What do you think?

Posted 7 months ago

By calaban9

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Was thinking the same thing... seconded!

And perhaps a link to driver/firmware downloads where applicable.

Posted 7 months ago

By Drew

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I think that's what we all need. A central place on the interwebs that links to drivers etc, and isn't full of spyware :-P

Posted 7 months ago

By Run

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+1 Great Idea

Posted 7 months ago

By ryan

gdgt admin

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Sooner or later, we will definitely do this in one form or another, no doubt about it. This falls under the list of things that I want every bit as much as you guys!

Posted 7 months ago

By michbex

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+1, i like the idea

Posted 7 months ago

By mccrum

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Manuals and drivers would be awesome, I would love one stop for all the stuff I lose in my home somewhere or on hard drives of yore.

The only question would be if they're going to be hardcore about the copyrights of such things.

Posted 7 months ago

By Zmower

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Most companies have their manuals posted as pdfs on their own websites, so I doubt they would be too picky about having them here. If they're going to complain about lost traffic on their sites, there could at least be a link here that leads to the company's webpage that includes the manuals.

Posted 7 months ago

By mccrum

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Good point. When I get home I'll see if I can find my pdf manuals and start posting them to the discussion boards of various gadgets I've got. The lawyers can sort it out later. :)

Posted 7 months ago

By michael4tech

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great suggestion! manuals are a great way to find answers to technical questions too detailed to manage in the gdgt database.

Drivers may be too much to manage, maybe a deep link to specific drivers maintained by the product vendor?

Posted 7 months ago

By Eoco

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That's an awesome idea. If we couldn't get the drivers hosted on the site (might be a problem keeping all of them updated), we could at least link to the manufacturer's site, possibly even the relevant product's support page where the drivers are most likely to be found.

Posted 7 months ago

By glennlunder

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I totally second this one, manuals and firmware downloads would make an awesome addition to an already pretty great site :)

Posted 7 months ago

By ArcUk

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Great idea, definitely would make this site even more useful! - Not that it needs to be! :)

Posted 7 months ago

By ronnsprocket

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Agreed. This site would go from novel to useful instantly.

Posted 7 months ago

By humedini

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Doing this would make gdgt.com the place to go on the web for everything gadget related. User Guides and Drivers would be fantastic.

Posted 7 months ago

By Shan

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We should upload the manuals to GDGT and not link back to the manufacturers. Simply because if they decided to remove the page or incase of a smaller company - go bust - then the manual is lost to the entire community. Uploading it here safeguards it for the future.

Posted 7 months ago

By l0stprophet

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Fantastic idea, save me keeping the bloody things... +1 for moderated manuals, drivers and firmware (official only of course, we don't want the site to become a repository for somewhere like XDA, imagine the amount of ROMS!)

Posted 7 months ago

By gsd

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And say if there were driver incompatibility issues, say, with different OSs, and people could discuss and even vote maybe on what drivers work and didn't work in which cases. This would be amazing.

Posted 7 months ago

By ryan

gdgt admin

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So if we make the manuals open to public upload, how do we make sure people don't abuse it by uploading junk, porn, random documents they just want to have hosted, etc.? One thought was to make it an editable section (with images) and just not allow file uploads at all, but I'm not sure if that'd be significantly better.

Posted 7 months ago

By PistolPiet

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The only way I see preventing that is having a "pending" stage for manuals much like for the gadgets themselves. Or, similarly, "submit" manuals to mods/admins and only they can update/post them.

Those two suggestions are pretty much the same, and are probably not the most effective/fast/convenient methods, but... I don't really see it working any other way.

Posted 7 months ago

By Zmower

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If I were getting my manuals from any site other than the manufacturer's I would want some way of knowing they were the official manuals that originally shipped with the item (and not something that someone made at home and made look official, or, you know, porn). The only way around that is to have all uploads from the community checked by an admin before going live (as per PistolPiet's suggestion), but that's very time/resource consuming. It seems like it's hard enough for you guys to keep up with new gadgets being added right now.

I would be happy with a spot on each gadget page set aside for links to the pages on the manufacturers' websites, but then you have to deal with the chance of the page being moved or deleted, as others have stated. Give a little, take a little. At least the url addition would be an easy and reasonable quick fix for now, and would buy some time for someone to come up with a better solution in the future.

Posted 7 months ago

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