Mouser BOMs with better parts quality?

Big Monk said:
First, an anecdote. Then, a little "Devil's Advocate" for the opinions of @tablebeast:

Anecdote: There does seem to be a trend over the last 5 years or so of new members to ANY forum "comin' in hot". I can only speak for myself but when I started in DIY around 2008 or so, modifying Valve Junior's, I had missed both the initial DIY pedal era AND the VJr era by about 5 years and 2 years, respectively.

One thing we didn't seem to do back then was come into a known forum and start telling people what's what. In those days, no one told you shit. Despite the community, as we seem to know it now, having gained a reputation for being inclusive and free with knowledge, I think you can point to the creation of freestompboxes.org as a sort of turning point in the more outgoing, more free exchange of information.

Up to that point, if you came in like a whirlwind telling people they were wrong or telling them what they needed to do correctly, you were iced out. It was already difficult getting answers to things if you didn't know what you were looking at/working on, but give any of those old guard guys shit? You were persona non grata.

So what you'll find here is that we are in a totally different era and it's a testament to this community, but also DIY communities as a whole in 2025, that there IS a huge success rate in the absence of DIFM (Do It For Me) BOM's, of detailed build docs, etc. It's kind of like a big team in that sense, as the success of the community hinges on the summation of individual successes.

What we do do (yes, I said doo doo) though, especially when a new person comes in like an asteroid hellbent on destroying the Earth, is joke and clown on that person.

There is good reason for that as well: For instance, I am 40 years old. I grew up in that magical era just slightly before broadband internet. We still did quite a bit of talking to real people back then on a regular basis and one thing young boys did especially was mercilessly bust each other's balls.

Humor, in either it's gallows or male to male ball busting variety, is an extremely effective tool for regulating people's behavior within a friend group. A guy starts getting out of line? You bust his balls and joke about his behavior until he sees the ridiculousness of it.

That's what you saw here and what you'll see all over this forum when we see someone who needs to be checked in a friendly way.

Devil's Advocate: We can all remember those darker times in DIY where, even in light of the intense excitement we felt at the overall proposition, we felt buried alive by:

1.) What we didn't know
2.) What we needed
3.) Where to get what we needed

I think I handled that proposition a little differently in 2008 than many people do in a similar situation in 2025. Honestly, it makes sense that people expect everything to be already done for them, especially in an era where there is so much information that almost nothing, save for the last kernels of understanding about how the universe works, seem to be unsolved, not understood, without a YouTube tutorial, etc.

TLDR?

This is a great community and infinitely more helpful than it was back in the day.

We are going to bust your chops when you bust ours because we think you are being ridiculous.

As someone pointed out earlier, the very immense pool of parts, constant turnover and obsolescence and user preference makes BOMs not as universal a thing as you might think.
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The internet age has allowed some people to have an immediate hierachary-free audience with no shameful repercussions for faux pas behavior. But that's only a reflection on those who aren't self aware such that they can self-govern. What tableguy did isn't a reflection on society as a whole, or this forum, or anything other than his own struggle with self actualization. He made himself look like an ass. The proper response is ridicule and/or shunning. But to try to give credence to anything coming from his perspective, which we know is skewed, would be a mistake. Just let him be a buttmunch and play by himself.
 
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falco_femoralis said:
This forum is easily the best one I've been on for any of my hobbies - seems like whatever is going on here is working quite well. Don't let this champion of the cause put a bad taste in your mouth
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I would say DIYSB has more 'technical' guys, but guys like RG have been around for so long they're more answer the question and get on with it.

Here seems to have a few less of these types (this is not a criticism; there are shitloads of people who have forgotten more than I'll ever know), but people are much more willing to have a solid chat about things outside of purely tech info.

Either way, it's a great community in both of these places - so much nicer than the UG forums where I started that mostly had Zvex threatening 14 year olds with lawsuits for building fuzzes that were vaguely similar to FFs 😅
 
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