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What do we classify as not repair related? PT. 2

Alright, I need to bring What do we classify as "not repair related"? up again. I’ve been told that must of my content on this site is not repair related. Jeff Suovanen (@jeffsu) sent me a kind email the other day about my guides .

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I agree that these following guides aren’t related to repair & should be deleted

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+Enab...

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+inst...

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+play...

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Create+a+Sh...

This guide is duplicate and can be archived/deleted

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+clon...

However these guides (reasons provided) are related to repair & resurrecting a broken device in some ways

This one is a no brainer, it’s an iMac stand replacement guide

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+...

This one pertains to repair because it gives you information on if your iPhone’s battery needs replacing or not

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+test...

This one also pertains to repair in the same way above but for Macs. This is my “prized possession” as it is the guide I most frequently reference.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+Test...

This one pertains to repair in the same way above but for iPads

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+test...

This guide is questionable. It’s not about repair but rather a technique to keep aging Macs out of the trash. It’s my attempt at saving the earth & spreading DosDude1’s incredible patch tool

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+inst...

These following SMC & PRAM/NVRAM guides pertain to repair because they can resurrect a dead Mac in some cases

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+rese...

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+rese...

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+rese...

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+rese...

My other question is that if iFixit is a strictly repair related site why do we have this Software category? Isn’t that not repair related? Why are my guides not repair related & somehow that category is classified as repair related? I'm a bit baffled on that one.

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I would say as long as there is a piece of real hardware (Ex: Laptop, USB drive, printer etc.) involved then it's not an issue. Pure software isn't always the best to cover and will usually lead to this response. There needs to be hardware explicitly shown in the guide for it to qualify as a repair related guide.

That said I do think a good software guide that makes sense should be allowed but that's very rare. It should be decided by the community and admin when it makes sense to make an exception.

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Hi Aaron!

This is a complicated question. The best way to approach this is to consider whether the guide directly contributes in the repair of a device. An example of this would be a software guide that goes in hand with a hard drive replacement (directly related) versus a software guide that determines if the hard drive is dying or not (not directly related).

General how-to guides are great, and you wrote some really nice ones; however, they are better appreciated elsewhere.

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For software guides, we’ve carved out some clear exceptions for things you’d need to do in the course of a repair. For example:

Basically, you shouldn’t have to leave iFixit to find instructions to finish your repair.

There are definitely some gray areas, and our top contributors generally get more leeway when it comes to new content.

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2 Comments:

@jeffsu - I might add hardware diagnostics & OS install/recovery (strictly at the higher levels needed to get the device back to the baseline).

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@danj Absolutely! :)

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@jeffsu @arthurshi in light of recent “events” should I make my windows category https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Windows private?

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@captainsnowball Thanks for asking! You can't actually make a category page private; it would have to be deleted. I think it's fine to leave it alone for now. There is definitely some Windows content that shouldn't have slipped through, and we'll likely do a purge at some point.

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@jeffsu anything specific? I think I own most of the windows guides.

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@captainsnowball I think your guides are good for now. I suggest to leave things as is for the time being :-)

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Aaron Cooke will be eternally grateful.