100,000 Guides and Other 2023 Community Milestones

2023 is coming to an end and we wanted to share some Community-focused highlights that showcase how much our fixers have contributed to helping the world fix their stuff. 

Our community is the lifeblood of iFixit. We want to teach the world how to fix every thing—but there are a lot of things, and this is a big world. Without repair enthusiasts from every corner of the globe writing guides, answering questions, translating pages, and sharing all kinds of repair know-how, we’d be so much further from our goal.

Our most recent milestones were celebrating 20 years of iFixit and reaching 100,000 guides! 

But we have plenty more reasons to celebrate.

The global iFixit Community consists of millions of fixers, and this year that number grew by almost 200,000! This means that repair is starting to take root in many more households, which is great for the planet and for your wallet. The more you fix, the less you spend on buying something new that is designed to break. 

This year, iFixit visitors marked 23,603 guides as completed! That means nearly 24k people came to the site with the intent of fixing their things and saved nearly 24k devices from the landfill. But we know this number is only a tiny portion of people who use guides—it only counts fixers who have an account on iFixit and hit the blue button at the end of a guide. That number doesn’t account for any lurkers who are using a guide to fix a thing (you know who you are). 

We also had a solid turnout of fixers asking questions on the Answers Forum. In total, this year, we had more than 22,000 questions asked about how to fix something. This means that folks are curious about troubleshooting their stuff. Asking about how to fix something is the first step to repairing something. And we are proud to host a wonderful and welcoming Forum that allows for just that. 

But sometimes when something’s broken, you’re not sure what questions to ask—you just know that it’s not quite working right.

That’s why this summer we launched 228 new troubleshooting pages written by repair professionals to help you iron out some of the simple checks and repairs that could get you up and running. Here are some of our favorites: TV Has Sound But No Picture, Refrigerator Compressor Running But Not Cooling, iPhone Battery Draining Fast, and Nintendo Switch Blue Screen of Death. These troubleshooting pages have accounted for 148,000 people visiting the site from Google, many for the first time.

Expect to see more troubleshooting pages like this in 2024!

Aside from the English language, the Spanish language has by far been the fastest-growing language Community this year. To pay tribute to that, we organized (on the fringes of the Mobile Social Congress) a meet-and-greet with some of our members in Barcelona. 

We’ve also added Korean to our list of supported languages! And in keeping with our efforts to reach more people, we started our first translation collaboration with the University of Rome in the winter term. This is a partnership that we’re very excited about! 

Our very own Midori Doi is currently living in Japan and is actively promoting the repair revolution in various presentations, workshops, and events together with government agencies and schools. 

To help with our growing Community we onboarded 7 new mods! Having more mods means that the site can be monitored for lost fixers, kept out of the clutches of spammers, and in general, made more helpful all around. Thank you, mods, for all that you do!

We also launched six contests this year to encourage people to fix. We had something for everyone. For folks who like answering questions, we had the Repair-A-Thon. For anyone with a super cool profile, we had the Show-and-Tell, and just this past Halloween, we saw fixers tap into their creative side by participating in the Repair-O-Lantern contest. Our Translation contest helped open up the repair world to many other languages—and helped us plant some trees in the process. 

Sidenote: Our longest-running contest of the year, Repair Hero of the Year, will be closing on December 31, 2023, so make sure you log your repairs and enter to win!

Some contests will be re-run and some new ones will pop up every year, so be on the lookout on the Contests page. 

Thank you, truly, from the bottom of our screwdrivers, for everything you do to keep stuff working as long as possible and keep this motley crew of repair-minded people fixing everything we can. We appreciate you more than we can say.

Here’s to 2024. ?