Boards more crap than before?

daveirl

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The Sweeper

We're going to need a van and a stick with nails in by the looks of it.

mike65

Ah Dave, another sceptic. Be gone with you (us)

Mike.

Sparky

The world evolves, Humans evolve, technology evolves and so will boards
I remember boards motto was creating an irish online community and it has happened, we should think of ourselfs as boardies and lets face it boardsies will evolve.

Tom, John and all the other admins at the end of the day have done a wonderfull job and im sure they see it as an achievement and i do hope they are proud of it, hell i would be.

Do you still drive an old battered up car, or still have a 1960's tv, so lets face it, move with the times or get left behind.

WizZard

Sparky-s wrote:

The world evolves, Humans evolve, technology evolves

And by simple logic I conclude that boards is actually human. We are all posting ideas into someone's head in an eerie "Being John Malkovitch" situation...

Alternatively, boards is the world

Stark

Last night's thing with the jazz music was cool. I've never seen an OpenGL environment look that good before!

Beruthiel

@rchives wrote:

I presume whatever offender moved this back to Feedback is going to be banned immediately?

why are you asking me?
I certainly did not move this thread and if I had, it would not have been to the TCN :rolleyes:

damien

mike65 wrote:

What a load of cock! Magpie can be annoying I've banned him at least once but I dread the day when he is considered to be the wrong sort of person to be allowed on boards.ie in the first instance...

Hear hear!

Cake Fiend

DeVore wrote:

You may not know it but there was a baby boom in the irish population in the 70's which has followed me throughout my life

.... are you telling us you were a "free love" baby?

DeVore

I was conceived at roughly the same time as Woodstock was happening.

DeV.

DeVore

Beruthiel wrote:

I see you like to think small

Nothing about me is small, baby.... fnarrrrrr.


DeV.
(dick joke in honour of Bill Hicks )

DeVore

amp wrote:

I moved it from TCN to Feedback. If it's moved back I will edit all posts to conform with TCN standards. Unless of course TCN is now the designated place for Admins and Smods to post their opinions on boards.ie's future. If so I missed the memo on that one.

As far as the actual contents of this thread I couldn't care less. It's nothing to do with TCN and should never have been posted there in the first place. However I have no opinion on magpie, his/her banning or the future of boards.ie. I'm just moderating.

Yeah, Amp is right about The Cuckoo's Nest. Its not a dumping ground for anything we can't find a home for. Its for silliness and surreality. He's dead right in what he says about it. Its for serious silliness not silly seriousness.

DeV.

DeVore

daveirl wrote:

This post has been deleted.

Things don't always go the way I want them to. I think you have to agree that things have grown and changed around here. Perhaps I'm a dreamer, perhaps you are right and I'll never achieve my goals.

I'd rather that then a sit back and throw stones attitude.

DeV.

Nevyn

Gah my eyes the quintupile postings.

As much as boards.ie has organically evolved I guess it was nice to know that Someone had an eye to the horizon, someone who had an idea what an internet iceburgs is.

So in the Admins we trust.

It is comforting to know that the admins are still arround and looking to steer the site in certain directions as as long as none of us take boards.ie for granted and is unsinkible.

Life is change, what doesn't change dies and undergoes the biggest change of all.

CuLT

DeVore wrote:

Things don't always go the way I want them to. I think you have to agree that things have grown and changed around here. Perhaps I'm a dreamer, perhaps you are right and I'll never achieve my goals.

I'd rather that then a sit back and throw stones attitude.

DeV.

Jesus, DeV banned from Feedback for extreme multiple posting :v:

And I think you could have very easily gotten away with "you may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one".

I think too often people view you as some sort of prolific businessman gone mad, hence the disappointment when certain deliveries aren't made. I find I have a much easier ride thinking of you as an eccentric religious leader who occasionally smokes a bit too much of the old Ceremonial Pipe and spills the beans on current ideas.
You seem to be on more of a crusade than a business model, which is fine; people don't seem to grasp that we're all guests in the crusaders camp, some of whom decided that it would be at least an interesting journey and enlisted.

Sorry if my own impression horrifies you

steveland?

daveirl wrote:

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Well let's break down that "2005 and beyond..." post and see what was done...

I'd like to think I'm a bit objective... I haven't been here a long time so I don't know what it was like in "the glory days"... I don't hang around with the admins so I'm not gonna kiss their asses...

DeVore wrote:

1. We are broadly happy with how Boards works. The changes will be to ensure it continues to work this way in the future.

As far as I can tell boards.ie is running fairly much the same way as it was when I first joined in March of 2004. The main thing I can see that's changed is that the backup time is much, much less than before (15 minutes or so as opposed to nearly an hour)

DeVore wrote:

2. We cannot withstand the growth we had last year again this year. If our level of growth even just repeated itself this year we'd have the busiest site in the country. Twice as busy as Ryanair.com. We havent a chance of surviving that as we are, we can hear the creaks already and by 2006 we'll collapse under our own weight.

New servers with new hardware were installed and boards is quicker than it was under the same amount of pressure last year or so.

DeVore wrote:

3. We dont want to change the basics, we need to find money from somewhere but we will not charge for the services we provide (and have provided historically). IE: we refute the Pay-To-Talk model (ala somethingawful) as being anathema to Boards history and culture. (that said dont be surprised if the Legal Highs forum is created as a subscriber only forum to protect us legally, thats a special case though).

Boards still doesn't charge to post, it's a completely free service that people seem to feel the need to moan about... I can understand where daveirl, as a subscriber, is coming from but I don't think the people who pay nothing (including myself tbh) should go moaning about how "crap" boards is... especially when it's certain people that contribute nothing but "crap" to it...

When the Sex and Sexuality forum was created there was a huge influx of subscribers. As soon as this happened the admins must have been tempted to make much more forums subscriber only... they didn't... nearly everything else remained completely free...

DeVore wrote:

4. The admins are not able to keep up with the demands on our time, we've literally reached the limits of what 5 guys can do in our spare time. This is leading to longer and longer response times to Mod requests and user support. Also its leading to requests being handled on the basis of "I have time to do A right now but not time to do B so while B is a higher priority, I'll do A now to get it out of the way". Hence the odd order of things getting sorted as Muck pointed out (at least I *think* it was Muck!)

The admins created the CMods around the time of this original post. They then created SMods who have taken a lot of the slack. If you've ever felt that someone's posting just spam and reported it, either in feedback or in the moderators forum, it's been taken care of almost straight away if the evidence points towards them being a spamming muppet

DeVore wrote:

5. We need to decide what we want Boards to be in the future or it will drift aimlessly. Thats going to bug a few people because any direction we take, some people will object to it. Thats life unfortunately


So, in the next 6-8 weeks some fairly serious changes will occur and I'll keep you abreast of them here. Hopefully it will make Boards *more* like the place we all love but it needs careful handling and some trust on all sides that change will be for the better.

I know this post says lots but tells you very little but honestly I want to be able to adopt any ideas the Mods come up with and theres little point requesting their input if I've already announced a plan now is there!

I think you'll find the new admin changes to be good and our cash generation plans are all non-invasive and voluntary. We are still just as opposed to popups, mail address selling and commercial sponsorship as ever and I *can* tell you now that you wont see any of that sort of nonsense. "The Broadband Forum , brought to you by Eircom" isnt an option

DeV.

Fair enough there hasn't been a lot of noticable change but the way certain things work in the background (SMods being able to perform site-bans, etc.) has helped cull a lot of the spam on boards...

We still don't have anything like "The Broadband Forum, brought to you by Eircom"... You can still go onto the Broadband Forum and complain about an ISP that you don't feel satisfied about... in fact there's a petition of sorts against IBB and a survey on how (un)happy you are with your ISP.


My point is that a fairly large proportion of the promises DeVore made in that post that you quoted have been implemented sitewide...

You don't have to pay to post here, you don't have to contribute anything constructive... There's a forum for nearly anything you'd want and, if there isn't, you can pop over to the Forums forum and request one...

Fair enough there's a couple of decisions I don't agree with throughout the site, there's a few promises that never came to fruition, but boards still provides you with a place to air your opinions, vent your anger, learn something new, get suggestions on all sorts of stuff, a lot of other crap that a lot of fee-charging websites don't even provide you with

Stark

I have to agree. The changes have been evolutionary rather than revolutionary, but the fact is that sensible changes were made, and as a result boards.ie is ticking along smoothly rather than collapsing under its own weight. And it's still free, and for that price we have even more services this year.

Devon

DeVore wrote:

So we're going from A to B and, this is the cool part, you can come too! Its like a big hippy Mystery Machine van! Everyone pile in we're going to B if thats any use to you!!

Just so as you and Cloud know in advance, I've rigged the van to explode if it goes under 80kmph in Ireland, or 50mph if we go abroad.

I demand immediate admin rights to boards.ie and a Ferrari.

I've always wanted a Ferrari.

Wertz

mike65 wrote:

What a load of cock! Magpie can be annoying I've banned him at least once but I dread the day when he is considered to be the wrong sort of person to be allowed on boards.ie in the first instance...



35 going on 75 by the sounds of it. At 40 I trust I can still find in me the spirt of a 20 year old, the day I think as old as I am its over! :eek: (a smilie for the youngsters)

Boards ie the place to unwind and chat, argue, impart useful/useless information for the partial amusement of oneself and others.



Mike.

The voice of reason....whatever Magpie's seemingly outdated and possibly sexist attitude, they have a solid point judging by just the front page in AH this w/e, alone.
He/she is worth a hundred of the txt kiddies, be they male or female and banning him/her for posting something along those lines is both ironic and downright sad. (I know the ban is not strictly for that, but it has it's roots in that).


On the whole "influx of idiots" point...I think it has a lot to do with the prevalence of computers in homes, schools and workplaces and the increasing amount of people using them...back when boards started, a PC in the home was a lot rarer and PCs in the workspace were used solely for work (well a lot more than what they are today)...now that any idiot can have a net connection we're faced with any idiot being able to post on forums...
That sounds very elitist and I don't want to come across that way but that's currently how I see it (and not just on boards.ie).
Since there is no real vetting procedure to keep them from posting, other than banning after the fact, we're probably stuck with it...maybe we should adopt an aptitude test on the registration form? :v:


Another signature on the "Free Magpie" petition, for all the good it'll do...

daveirl

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daveirl

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damien

Half the mods were muppets and txt kiddies when they started and it wasn't through bans that they changed their style and became respected, it was through influence and being shown the right way to get along on boards.ie.

Nowadays it is warn, let the established posters berate the kiddies and provoke the kiddies to lash out, then ban the kiddies. It seems a lot of the mods get off by having a fight and then banning the poster besides having a quite word. How many mods send a friendly PM to someone who is about to do something stupid enough to get banned and tell them in a genuine manner how things work and why they need to modify their behaviour? I can see dozens of replies saying mods don't have time to do all that. There are 40,000 members here, appoint more mods, divide and conquer the work.

It was easier in the past to guide and influence as there were a lot less people but all we need now is to bring back the same attitude. Instead we have mods influenced by an owner who talks about not wanting certain types of people on his site and we have an established snitch patrol to grass on people with large signatures.

flogen

So boards.ie is maturing; just like its main userbase (and owners).
So DeV, considering that this site has moved from a Quake forum to a place where in the latest new forums created we have Teaching/Lecturing, Atheism/Agnosticism, Dental Issues, Archeaology, Darts and Poker Tournaments (which are all pretty far from hip and happenin', leet etc.) do you think that boards.ie will continue to evolve with its main posters, or do you think it will hit a balance (like I think it's hitting now).
I mean, I wouldn't be shocked if some of the original or early forums of boards.ie no longer interest you where in 1998 they did; but I'm sure they still exist. Do you see boards.ie being a place for everyone or a place for the baby boom generation?
When you and the other admins give up on the place for whatever reason (be it boredom, higher responsibilities elsewhere or death), what do you see happening?
I think boards.ie is only beginning to hit this point, but basically the change we see now compared to 5 years ago is not part of an ongoing evolution, just a side effect of a wider audience and a new generation of users.
The danger that does exist is an alienation by the older audience of newbies; I know I see posters every day who act the way I would have 5 years ago and I cringe, I almost hold it against them; but I don't have the right to; just because they like jokes etc. that I've grown out of.
It's important in my opinion that boards.ie doesn't become a place for one generation; it's important that people claiming to be the victim of bullying from long-term members don't get justification.
It's either going to go one way or another; either the users grow older, start talking about older things and (as seems to happen) begin to fall out of touch with new young pursuits; eventually the forums die. Or the users of today are replaced by another generation who go through the same cycle in another 10 or 20 years after.
There's a place for everyone here at this point; you'd have to be a soulless freak to not find a forum of interest on the site; and the same applies to the personalities of the site. I may eventually stop posting in Games and become a resident of Politics (and a bitter one at that); it doesn't mean that the site as a whole has changed with me.

damien

Stark wrote:

The changes have been evolutionary rather than revolutionary, but the fact is that sensible changes were made, and as a result boards.ie is ticking along smoothly rather than collapsing under its own weight.

The changes were needed or the place would cease to exist. It wasn't evoluntionary, the same way buying a bigger pants when you gain weight is not evolutionary. The massive changes to prevent future server crapouts, the new way of generating money to make this place even better never happened despite all the pontificating. All these new services we saw happened because the humble guy who is all action and little talk (Cloud) kept doing what he always does, the tech guys in the background (Regi and ecksor) keep getting duct tape and their MacGyver knives out, while the guy who admits to being the mouthpiece wants to man the barricades to stop the people who are quite possibly making more from boards.ie members than boards.ie The 2nd last time there were massive outages there were 100s of suggestions on how to make money and give boards.ie a nice treasure chest and all were knocked down with the now quite common standard that the boards.ie brain trust had a much better idea which would be revealed soon.

And it's still free, and for that price we have even more services this year.

Do you honestly think it would be this large and successful if it asked for people to pay? In reality boards.ie should be paying and rewarding its members for what they have contributed. Boards.ie is a shell and a container for free thinking and free-posting people who are the main value. You wouldn't charge a musician to make music, you wouldn't charge a philosopher to think, why would you charge someone who makes the Boards.ie "brand" better?

flogen

damien.m wrote:

Half the mods were muppets and txt kiddies when they started and it wasn't through bans that they changed their style and became respected, it was through influence and being shown the right way to get along on boards.ie.

Nowadays it is warn, let the established posters berate the kiddies and provoke the kiddies to lash out, then ban the kiddies. It seems a lot of the mods get off by having a fight and then banning the poster besides having a quite word. How many mods send a friendly PM to someone who is about to do something stupid enough to get banned and tell them in a genuine manner how things work and why they need to modify their behaviour? I can see dozens of replies saying mods don't have time to do all that. There are 40,000 members here, appoint more mods, divide and conquer the work.

That's well said; just banning people is something that I've been guilty of too; rather than a quiet word.
I'll be honest and say that I still see someone with a low post count and am instantly suspicious of them which is a terrible attitude to have (but I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking in); sure some newbies are muppets but there are plenty of idiots around here with huge post counts; in the hundreds or thousands. There are times I spot some idiot trolling people in AH and am amazed that they've been here for 2 years when they're acting like morons; but that's the way boards.ie works, thankfully.
I always try and ignore my in-built suspicion of noobs, it's something I just don't allow myself to judge on.

Devon

flogen wrote:

There are times I spot some idiot trolling people in AH and am amazed that they've been here for 2 years when they're acting like morons; but that's the way boards.ie works, thankfully.

But unfortunately this is not limited to those without mod status... it's not often that it happens with a mod... but it does happen....

flogen

jerryadams wrote:

But unfortunately this is not limited to those without mod status... it's not often that it happens with a mod... but it does happen....

Oh of course; there are idiots here regardless of their "rank". They're idiots in my opinion; maybe no-one elses; thankfully boards.ie isn't one persons site, nor is it the site of a group of people. Personal opinions should have no sway in the make-up of the userbase of boards.ie

Blue Peter

Another signature on the "Free Magpie" petition, for all the good it'll do...

I expect that like Nelson Mandela, he/she/it will eventually emerge victorious and go on to lead boards into a new era without mod/user apartheid.

Copy the sig TBH.

Stephen

I miss the boards of years gone by, I do think it was a much more fun place back then... That said, I was 17 when I joined boards, and am 23 now...

I'm still hopelessly addicted to the place.

p.s. set magpie free!

the_syco

So... the wish list so far:

Amp wants Oz
Asok wants a van
DeVore wants a dream

=-=

When I joined this place, I stuck to X, Y, and Zee, and have stayed in the same forums. Not much has changed. For those who think it has: have you styayed in the same forums, or have ye moved about? Some join one forum, and seep into other forums, thus making it seem like it has changed, but it hasn't really.

35:eek: I though ye were only late 20's, or something:p Anyhoo's, your site, your dream. As with any trip from A to B, you'll hit the odd pot-hole, have to take the odd detour, and maybe even decide to goto C, as when you arrive in B, you find its not to your liking.

That, or you find your van is sitebanned from B, so you have to move to C.:D

I've being banned from a few forums (and membership revoked from some of the "private" forums), sitebanned, and all in all, like the way the site is going. If I weren't warned, as others were, I'd/they'd would have just gotten worse. I've being part of one or two sites, where the sh|t got so bad, one user made the wrong comment, and the site was closed (hmmm... BISCUITS;)), so the way the boards is being run is not only good, but it keeps it alive.

=-=

Oh, and er, I just thought of something funny.

DeVore wrote:

We cannot withstand the growth we had last year again this year. If our level of growth even just repeated itself this year we'd have the busiest site in the country. Twice as busy as Ryanair.com. We havent a chance of surviving that as we are, we can hear the creaks already and by 2006 we'll collapse under our own weight.

DeVore wrote:

Boards as has gone from an underground, somewhat anarchic definitely definant subculture into something more mainstream. I guess this is the music worlds equivalent of "selling out" or "that difficult second album".

Would it because boards has become more popular, that not only are the people juimping off the side of the ship, but they're also making the sides of the ship bulge? You become mainstream, and one of two things happen: all the old people get replaced by new people, or the new people are just added on. The latter is hapening, and thus boards will soon be pretty damn big. You want main stream, but can you handle the gallons of water that it'll pump into you?