How Our Readers Made Wirecutter Better in July 2020

It’s been a tough summer. Thanks for all the time you spent on our site in July, and for all your comments, tweets, and messages. We hope you’re hanging in there.

Coverage you inspired

The Best Gear to Take to a Drive-In Movie Theater: Back in May, we got a Facebook message from a reader named Ian: “Can I make suggestions for reviews via messenger? If so, portable FM radios. Drive ins are so hot right now!” As we looked into Ian’s question, we realized that a roundup of the best gear to bring to the drive-in might be useful to a lot of people right now, as a safe way to do something fun while practicing social distancing. So we did research and testing—including driving 75 miles to catch Jurassic Park and Jaws in a double feature—to share advice on radios, comfy seating, coolers, and even a portable, disposal urinal for bathroom breaks.

How to Get the Most Out of 1Password: Everyone should be using a password manager to keep their online data safe. That said, the process of setting up a password manager for the first time can range from inconvenient to excruciating. We’ve received lots of messages from readers sharing questions and frustrations—so many messages, in fact, that Wirecutter editor and infosec expert Thorin Klosowski wrote about how to use our current top pick, 1Password. We can’t promise it’ll be easy, but we do think the result is worth the effort.

Things we’re looking into thanks to you

Issues with the Skullcandy Sesh Evo: Two commenters on our review of wireless earbuds, Kenneth Boyd and sbw, let us know that fast charging ruined our new budget pick. We temporarily removed the recommendation while we investigated the issue. Skullcandy has since assured us that the problem was due to a faulty batch and that all affected earbuds have been pulled from the market. We’ll keep watch on the situation going forward—let us know if you run into any problems. We’re grateful to our readers for flagging this issue for us right away.

Good questions

What if I don’t have (or want to spend) hundreds of dollars on an office chair or a standing desk? With so many people pivoting to working from home, and with the current recession having an impact everywhere, we’ve received a lot of questions about how to set up a home office on a budget. We added a section to our review of office chairs addressing this concern. We think the sub-$100 AmazonBasics Mid-Back Mesh Office Chair is probably your best bet if you’re looking for an inexpensive office chair that offers height adjustability, although we do have reservations about its comfort and longevity. Consider checking out what’s in stock at any nearby office-liquidation outlets, too—you may be able to pick up a high-quality secondhand office chair for a bargain price.

And if you’re looking for a cheap alternative to our pricey standing desk recommendations, consider an ironing board. Because ironing boards tend to be height-adjustable, you can sit or stand while working at one, and you can then fold it up and put it away whenever you need the space back. A bookcase or shelving unit might also be able to serve as a standing desk in a pinch. Staff writer Melanie Pinola recently put together a full roundup of cheap alternatives to pricey home office gear—if you have additional suggestions, share them in the comments.

Where did the comments go? Since Wirecutter moved to the New York Times website back at the end of May, some readers have been unable to access our comments sections. Disqus, Wirecutter’s commenting platform, uses third-party cookies to track and sell user data—something the nytimes.com domain has been designed not to allow. In the short term, turning off “do not track” in a browser’s privacy and security settings might let affected individuals see the comments again, although we can’t say we recommend that from a privacy and security perspective. For others, an unsupported browser could be a complicating factor; also, if you have an nytimes.com account and you’ve set a CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) preference, that will block your access to Wirecutter comments, too. We’re working on a long-term solution that won’t pressure readers to compromise their privacy, but it will take us a while.

Excellent contributions

Shout-out to Sandra F.! On our review of laundry baskets and hampers, Sandra let us know that using hampers designed like our pick for sorting have been a source of frustration in the past. Sandra shared a preferred hamper and detailed pros, cons, tips, and caveats. Here’s an excerpt from Sandra’s excellent comment:

I've had various hampers and hamper solutions over the years. As a person who sorts my laundry, I disagree with your top pick for that purpose. I've had a *very* similar 3-section hamper in the past. Sturdiness was never the issue for me; inconvenience was. It was surprisingly annoying and difficult to remove the bags from the hamper, to the point where we just stopped ever removing them. Also, canvas gets really funky in these situations.

My setup of choice is:
3x of this hamper from Target (click), lined up side-by-side.

Pros:
* It's space efficient.
* The bags come out and go back in easily.
* If you don't care to fiddle with the back in and out, the hamper itself weighs very little and you can just pick it up by the handles to move, without moving all three hampers.
* The durability has been very good on the bags and the structured containers for at least a year. I've seen no issues.
* If the mesh bags fail, it's easy to buy replacement analogs.
* If the container fails in any way other than the frame, I can recover it with new fabric or most likely repair the original fabric.

Shout-out to fieldwolf! For sharing more kid-approved board game recommendations on our guide to board games we love for kids:

We’ve played almost all of those, and this is indeed a great list!!! There are four other games that our kids (10,7, 5) play most:

• Ghost fighting treasure hunters. Cooperative game with really good components (green ghost figures!), a perfect theme (stealing treasures from a spooky manor full of ghosts) and challenging enough for a family - ghosts win quite often
• Sleeping queens. It’s fun, it’s quick, the rules are simple, the game is light, and our 5 year old wins more often than I do
• Tokaido. I was surprised, but Tokaido turned out to be a great family game. It’s a beautifully designed game - or, as the designer insists, an experience - of a journey along an old road in Japan. It’s really zen, and not a lot of action, but it’s the game that kids reach out for most frequently. Also, it’s a great gateway from coop to competitive games: the competition is somewhat indirect and secondary to the experience. The 5 year old is an observer in this one.
• Catan Junior. Most of the “junior” games are, well, bad (hello, Ticket to Ride junior!). Catan Junior is a great exception. It really carefully adapted the mechanics and the spirit of the original game to make it simpler and more accessible without making it purely luck-driven or plain dumb.

Honorable mentions have to go to Azul and to Patchwork. Both fantastic games for 2 players, and Azul is maybe the most gorgeous tactile game we have.

And a final shout-out to Krishna Patel, for a delightful meta comment about Wirecutter comments on our post about the anatomy of a Wirecutter guide: