Computer/Electronics Maintenance Portal

[djukon]

Seeing that many great solutions, tips and tricks for repairing and performing long term preventative maintenance on computers/electronics, come out of EAB and other retro/classic/bleeding-edge communities, I was left with a question.

Is there a wiki or special purpose portal that tries to aggregate this information? A portal that is platform/brand agnostic and anyone can contribute.

Doing a quick search online, I only found RepairWorld, which requires an $8.33 a month subscription. Do you know of any others, preferably free and open? If not, should I and anyone else interested make an effort to create one?

Recent Context Use Case (which led here)

In the Floppy Disks: Testing, Recovering, Reusing and Recycling thread, prowler brought up that detecting mould on floppy's magnetic surface was very difficult due to spores being dark. I came up with the idea of checking the floppy's magnetic opening against a light source, since it was translucent. Then demolition came along with the idea of using a simple flat screwdriver head to rotate the magnetic disc manually. The knee jerk reaction I had was, lets see if this is already documented; and that leads us here.

There are many other cases I have seen come up, particularly in these forums, over the years, that sit spread out over several thread posts, not accessible in digested format for the world to easily learn from and quickly apply. Something which wikis are good for documenting, after the brainstorming and discussion is done in forums like this one.

Any additional thoughts?

[Loedown]

I took an interest in your last post about floppies. As a community I think it's an excellent idea but where would you host this and server space isn't free?

[djukon]

Originally Posted by Loedown

As a community I think it's an excellent idea but where would you host this and server space isn't free?

There are some free solutions that can be used as a testing ground or for bootstrapping.

Creating a Stack Exchange Q&A site is an option. The Q&A site as defined by SE is not a Wiki, Blog, Forum or Digg/Reddit, it sits in the middle, combining aspects of all.

There are already somewhat related examples of existing Q&A sites: Electrical Engineering, Super User, Home Improvement and Motor Vehicle Maintenance & Repair. Area51 is where new Stack Exchange sites take off, if they have enough traction, or where they come if they windle down. Sites that didn't make it, related to this idea: Digital Preservation and Electronic Gadgets. Sites related to this idea, currently being discussed: Retrocomputing and Repurpose Hacking.

Then there are some free wiki hosting services out there, in which Wikia is the most known.

The downside to these alternatives is that I find none which are moveable. I.e., you cannot just export the data from the site, hosting it independently. There are business models and other alternatives I could discuss further, if there is any interest in diving there.