About KBDMania English
What this site is, where the material comes from, and how we handle other people's words.
KBDMania (키보드매니아, "keyboard mania") is a Korean keyboard community that has been online since 2002. Its archive holds roughly 220,000 posts across about twenty boards: a free board, a Q&A board, a photo board, reviews, tips, news, a marketplace with 75,000 listings, and smaller boards for keycaps, mice, and an English board that opened in 2009. The Korean site is still active at kbdmania.net.
Most of that history is invisible to anyone who doesn't read Korean. Yet a lot of what the global hobby now takes for granted was worked out, argued over, and photographed here first: the 356 series group buys of 2008, the KMAC project of 2011, the LZ housings of 2012, and a body of modding knowledge about Topre and Cherry switches that predates most English-language guides.
What this edition is
KBDMania English publishes original articles in English about the Korean keyboard scene. It is not a translation of the Korean boards, and it is not a machine-translated mirror of the archive. Each article is researched from the archive and written for a reader who has never visited the Korean site.
The first series, Korean Custom Keyboard History, goes back to the primary sources: the group-buy announcements, the delivery threads, the arguments about price, and the photos. Where a Korean post is quoted, the quotation is short, credited to the member who wrote it, and linked to the original.
How we treat members' posts
The archive is written by thousands of people over twenty-plus years. Their posts are theirs. In this edition we:
- summarise and paraphrase rather than translate wholesale,
- keep direct quotations brief and always credited,
- link every claim about a post back to that post, so you can check it (or run it through a translator yourself),
- use only photos that members posted publicly on KBDMania, with the post linked.
If you wrote something quoted here and want it changed or removed, use the contact form and we will do it.
Who writes this
The English edition is produced by the KBDMania editorial team, which is to say the person who runs the site, with AI tools assisting in drafting and in reading two decades of Korean posts. Every date, price, and quotation in an article is checked against the source post before publishing. Mistakes are still possible; corrections are welcome.
Why "since 2002"
KBDMania opened in 2002. The earliest surviving archived posts date from April 2003, when the site moved to the board software that the archive was later exported from, which is why you'll see 2003 dates on the oldest reviews. The site has been continuously online since.