I was thinking of making a hardware section, opinions?

[mouser]

the focus of our site is software, developing our own in house software and on recommending the best software.
i don't think hardware reviews are really in our purview.
but i was thinking it might be nice to have a little hardware section where people recommended hardware they have that they think is the best after careful comparisons?
to keep the same spirit of helping cut through all the confusion?

i have a canon inkjet i bought after years of hp and i just want to shout to the world how much i love it more than my old hps

[tenseiken]

It does seem outside the scope of the site, but I don't think it could hurt.  Maybe you could just make a subforum for hardware discussion?

[mouser]

yes, it probably is outside the scope of this site/forum, so probably having it's own section is too much - i think having too many sections is bad for a forum, it spreads everything out too much and makes it less fun.  so maybe hardware posts can fit in somewhere else - maybe its nice just having one "living room" in the main section of the forum for discussing such things.

[tenseiken]

Agreed.  I don't think anyone will have a problem with using this forum for hardware discussion.

[zridling]

I'll second that emotion. There are some support forums (and single application forums, for that matter) that have so many different categories that many are neglected. And right now there are some very good HW Review sites online, among them Tom's Hardware Guide and Reseller Ratings. However, I don't see why someone can't interject an endorsement for something that works particularly well — I've had my HP Laserjet4 for 13 years and it works like the day I bought it!

[mouser]

yep, i think having a focus is good, and i think the best thing for us is to add some links to good hardware sites on our links page, and keep our forums here focused on software.

of course if people want to make recommendations about some particular hardware thats great, but we won't make a special section of the forum for hardware, since i think on further consideration it would just spread us too thin; better to have fewer sections and more common talk.