This guide will help you create submissions for the website. As of reading this paragraph, this guide is in a preliminary stage, and improvements are being made to it.
1. Where do I submit an improvement on the site?
Stuff on the site (like motherboards, cards, chips, etc.) is maintained by a small team of curators, thus the editor is not open to the public. If you want to submit a new item or an improvement to an existing item, you have two possibilities:
- Discord submission on our server, under the #submissions-feedback channel
- email submission
2. How should the submission look like?
The overall idea is to include as much information as you have for the given entry like images, manuals and/or BIOS dumps. But there are of course some criteria to follow:
2a. Title (required)
This is the first thing we see when we go through entries, so having a clean title is important. Having the item name (e.g: PCChips M396F) as the title will be alright. Page links for existing items should be placed in the description (they will help us process entries faster).
2b. Photos (required)
We only accept photos that either belong to the submitter (they must own the items they’re submitting), or from people that have given the submitter permissions to use the photos. Random eBay or other auction site photos are not accepted.
Photos must be provided with a source, either the submitter’s name (or nick), or of the person granting the use of the photo. Ones without a source will not be taken into consideration. Some additional criteria to follow:
- License: we use CC BY-SA 4.0 for all the submitted photos, the submitter must agree to that license.
- Size: photos should not exceed 12MB (they can be bigger, but we will compress them in order to fit the size constraints. JPGs are generally preferred, as they allow a much higher image quality on the same size footprint vs PNGs
- Quality: we expect photos to generally be of good quality, at least of the acceptable type (see below), images that look worse than that will not be taken into consideration. We prioritize photos of the highest quality standard, for which we’ve provided a basic tier list down below.
A: best – all the text markings are clearly legible, markings on SMD resistors and other small components are also legible, no shadows or white light spots on the PCB
B: good – most of the markings on the PCB and the important chips are legible (such as chipset, LAN, audio or clock chips, etc.), minimal shadows or white light spots
C: acceptable – markings are barely legible but visible, image shaking/blur, shadows and/or white light spots present
2c. Files (BIOS dumps, manuals, datasheets)
These help us a lot to identify who is the manufacturer of the item and various features it has, so if you have the possibility to provide such files, it will be appreciated
3. What items qualify for the website
We have a few cut-off dates depending on the item category, but generally we prefer adding items with poor quality or lacking documentation. Usually, things made after the 2010s are pretty well documented online (with a few exceptions), but we have a few pre-defined cut-off lists as a guideline:
3a. Motherboards
- up to all LGA 1366/1156 motherboards, for the Intel side,
- up to all AM3 (non plus, pre-FX era) motherboards, for the AMD side
3b. Video cards (under expansion cards, the most common item)
- up to GeForce GTX 500 series (Fermi)
- up to Radeon HD 6xxx series (TeraScale 2)
If you have any more questions, you can always ask us on our Discord.