gdgt

Was thinking the same thing... seconded!

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

+1 Great Idea

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!

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. :)

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.

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.

A couple ideas:

1) Perhaps just a "report" button would be enough to allow the community to police uploads?

2) Allow any number of manuals to be uploaded with Digg-style voting on each, so good ones float to the top. The opens up the possibility for user-created manuals that may actually be more helpful than the official manuals.

3) If policing uploads is too risky for now, perhaps just allowing users to submit URL's to the actual manual, and you just link to it. You have some power to police these automatically by verifying the domain of the submitted URL to the domain of the "Company Site" you have on company pages. It's not perfect, but would still be useful.