Search Engine for Parts & Tools

I agree with you on this, Mayer. If iFixit made their tools easier to find I may buy from them but because it's not exactly point and click I end up going back to places like Newegg and Amazon for parts if I need them. And sometimes RadioShack like I did for the AL2216W monitor. However, with RadioShack closing their doors as time goes on I will not have this anymore. I'm just going to migrate to Mouser Electronics and Amazon for parts like that.

In the AL2216W they removed my 60/40 solder at first. As long as you're not dumb then lead solder is fine. Plus it seems better then the RoHS solder used today, too. The only reason for it is California and the EU. RoHS may be just as good at first, but when it fails sooner then 60/40 the effect is negated. At this point I leave both the 60/40 and RoHS in now to avoid this problem. Has it improved? Probably, but I want to find some on sale first before I try due to the extra cost. 60/40 is actually cheaper.

When you removed my 60/40 at first it seemed you were imposing RoHS on people and that was the part that got me. You just can't buy it in California and are stuck with RoHS. Doesn't mean the rest of us can't have a easy time getting it.

(Yes, I'm waiting for the one here to close to get another multmeter and stockpile on cheap parts.)

I also think they caught onto the fact this system sucks. In the past I have used Amazon links in many cases because you need to dig through 50 pages to find stuff and for guides I make for free the difficult to find stuff isn't something I want to readily do. I'll do it when time permits but in the fist stages I'll use Amazon links and I usually leave them as a second option too. Their response in the past was to replace the links with iFixit ones. While I did find it annoying, I understand their financial incentive to but it seems to ignore the critical point that the system sucks. It was the wrong approach to the matter. It's like when HP sped the fans in the defective 2007 DV laptops. It just delayed the death of the machines instead of killing them earlier. Solutions like them deleting non iFixit tools don't exactly fix the problem, but mask it for a bit longer. This is what I think iFixit was doing with the link swaps. It wasn't so bad if it was the same item anyway and if it was they did the dirty work for me.

I did this with the NES game cleaning guide(which I'm tempted to at least depublish) for good reason. 25.00 for a 3.8 Gamebit to open a 5.00 NES cart is dumb unless you clean them professionally. Professionals aren't using that method to clean these games, iFixit. When the goal was to make it practical they added their links anyway and didn't even leave the Amazon ones in to make matters worse. At this point I don't check because they use affiliate links now so it's far less likely to happen at this point. I replaced them all the time and they did the same thing over and over again too. My solution was to hide them in the part nobody really needs until it was safe to avoid the problem.

Of course the admin edits like to hide the affiliate link work they do, too. In the case of the NES cart guide there was no way a bot did it since anyone with a brain could tell I snuck it in such a way human intervention was required and I never found the edit in the history. It wasn't in the standard parts list so server side scripts were out of the question to avoid the same problem. It was beyond servers being able to do it in the NES cart guide. I wouldn't be shocked if admin edits must allow them to hide stuff like that.

These days it seems like they run a server side script on their end to take my non Amazon affiliate links and redirect them to their affiliate link. This script does the redirect without altering my links I put in when it isn't a note from what I see(well, it might but I never see it in the edit history). It only happens like this if I create a part page and I magically see the affiliate information. Still better then deleting my tools habitually.

If the iFixit system wasn't as horrid as it is to get a tool list from it before putting the guide together I would try and do it. But as I said the material is free and I do it in my spare time. I'm not going to spend 2 hours on the iFixit store to find what I need for free material I do on my spare time. It isn't worth the effort. I'd rather link to a store with common sense with the organization of the product.

I can understand and respect the server side affiliate link redirection on Amazon links as iFixit has every right to. I prefer this approach far more because I have some actual security they won't mess with the Amazon links as much, if at all anymore. Beats having to hide links and deal with habitually deleted tools.

They also have every right to replace my non iFixit tools but if I want to make it something of a budget project like the NES cart guide I can't use an iFixit link easily. While I can understand replacing my 5.00 Amazon Gamebit for your 25.00 driver inside it makes me a bit mad because it destroys the concept of a cheap approach to it that works well enough and isn't impractical. If the iFixit tool was the same as the one from Amazon I won't get annoyed but in the sense of a guide I want to minimize the reader's cost where possible it's annoying.

Want proof iFixit has a bad search system? Here's the SSHD from Newgg and Amazon as proof. Found it on one search.