Summary of Stoves/Technologies

[nixsee]

As a newcomer who has now spent a few days reading through threads trying to find my bearings without bothering people with dozens of basic and dumb questions, something that would have been (and still would be) very useful is to have some sort of somewhat comprehensive introduction/primer/table of contents/glossary for the forum.

Just focusing on peterberg and his tremendous contributions alone, it would be great to see a description for each major technology/innovation. His batchrocket.eu site is fantastic, but far more detailed than what I'm talking about here. Simply just a summary that says when it was made, who made it, what was learned, major benefits and drawbacks, potential applications, etc... 

2011 - innovation on xyz. Link here. 
201x - batch box - L tube stove with a large box to be loaded in advance. Can be used open or closed. Link to thread here
Dsr - modification of batchbox to have no riser and is suitable for a cooktop, though not officially recommended due to inconsistency issues. Link. 
Dsr2 - hybrid of the two. Link 
Dsr2/vortex hybrid - 
P channel 
Etc... 

And perhaps under each technology there could be links to threads where people have built them. 

Same deal for Vortex, Aprovecho stove, institutional stove, J tubes, walker stoves etc... 

Not sure if tags can be applied to threads, but that would be a partial solution. But I think a curated, very brief primer would be tremendously helpful to help give people their bearings before setting off to learn from the threads. As it is, I have been wandering somewhat aimlessly, just opening up any thread that seems relevant and poring through it, often finding it not to be what I am looking for or even sometimes finding it to ultimately be a "failure", like the DSR1 stove (which might not even be the case given things that were learned in Dsr2 with exit ports etc...). 

I could be naive, but I don't think it would be a huge task if each of the major contributors (peterberg, donkey, vortex, Matthew walker, etc... - you know who they/you are) wrote up a summary of their contributions and learnings and linked to the threads. An index/table of contents of end user implementations would be harder to put together, but it's something that could be crowdsourced over time and aided by some sort of mandatory classification upon thread creation. 

Is this something that might be amenable and possible? I'm happy to discuss it to refine what would actually be useful and possible! 

Thanks for all the great info shared here. 

[belgiangulch]

Hi Nixsee;
That is a good idea although I doubt you could get it arranged. Don't let me stop you trying though.
You might try checking out the RMH forum at Permies.
Lots of info available and you will get response's to your questions much sooner than here.
The guys here are serious builders and once they get their build finished, they tend to move on.
Newby's like yourself(as you know) are left to wonder around looking for easy to understand information.
Over at Permies you will find plenty of newbys. As well as accomplished builder's. Peter Berg frequents Permies and will happily answer your questions.
Donkeys is a great site with a huge amount of information but is not the easiest place to learn the basics.

[nixsee]

Thanks for the reply. I've been to permies as well, but this is a far better resource.

I don't have the time or capability to implement anything here, but I just hope that the powers that be will consider it - what I propose seems to be a very minimal effort for each relevant person (an hour or two, at most, to just write some bullets about their technological progress and link to relevant posts).

Broad dissemination is the key to any knowledge creation. It's almost pointless without it. None of this is to say that this forum is a secluded, condescending ivory tower - it's clear that people are very helpful. I would just love to see a simple thing implemented to make best use of the tremendous efforts of the contributors.

Without something like this, not only does it limit the potential for new people to learn, but also for them to contribute. Moreover, when the existing contributors are no longer doing so (for endless valid reasons) this will turn into yet another internet ghost town, with a mountain of great info just collecting dust - an ultimately futile effort.