I was thinking the very same. Wading through 160 postings and searching for the "golden nuggets" hidden inside is no fun at all.
Having a summary of the discussion either at the top of the thread or on a wiki page would make it much easier to find the user-favoured devices.
I was also thinking about creating one topic like this per year, because new hardware appears on the horizon, and old hardware disappears.
Options we have
- Create new topic, making post#1 the place where to find the essence of the topic, i.e. post#1 is continuously updated by a) the author of that posting or b) by everyone taking part in that discussion (we can make a posting "wiki" so everyone can contribute to it). List favoured devices in a table, or
- We can create "polls" in forum postings (see e.g. [OpenWrt/LEDE merge] Which forum software do users want for the future?). Not sure though if those can be dynamically expanded (in December there will be more devices to vote for than in January -> devices need to be added to the poll during the year).
- Create wiki page where user-favoured devices are listed in a table.
- Create wiki page with a poll included. Polls are somewhat possible IIRC, but I would have to dig deeper into this again to judge if polls are really feasible in the wiki.
.... a rating system like on amazon comes to my mind, with stars and comments and such...
To make this summary or essence of the "favourite device" topic useful, we need to agree on what information is needed.
Example for a listing in post#1 of a new "favourite device" topic:
| Model | is my favourite because... | Price |
|---|---|---|
| DIR-505 | small formfactor, directly pluggable into wall outlet, no cables; sufficient flash/ram (8/64) for my usecase | 999,-€ |
| TL-MR3020 | small formfactor, low power consumption | 888,-$ |
| $yourmodel | $your_reason_for_favouring_this_device | 777,-¥ |
Is that all we need? Anything to add?
Sidenote: Anything more than the above in a table would probably make it more a candidate for the wiki, since in the forum we are quite width restricted.
Any other proposals on how to condense the information of a long topic into a nice list?