Whos driving this bus?

mike65

Is it time for a full time boards.ie admin team to run this site? ie they get paid, it'll be thier job!

The ongoing systems glitches are, I'm sure really starting to piss many off.Some of whom may drift away to Thumped or P45rant etc. As I type there is some sort of issue with an adserver. It may be being addressed, it may not.

We don't know cos no-one has told us, is there anyone out there?

Mike.

DeVore

This site is run by a team of unpaid volunteer admins (supported by SMods/Cmods/Mods/HMods) who (mostly) match to the directors/shareholders of the site.

I know of no issue with the adserver and its not affecting me so either its localised, or its fixed already.

Noone currently is paid by boards.ie

DeV.

mike65

Check this thread

http://89.234.66.107/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055079499

Mike.

DeVore

Ok, I see the problem now, bizarrely it doesnt affect any of the forums I regularly use myself. I'm talking to Ecksor about it now. Give us a while, this looks to be something pretty freaky.

DeV.

mike65

I'm now switched to IE6 (ugh) and its fine (so far....)

Mike.

DeVore

It was forum dependant. Something to do with forums that had no ad to show. Probably got itself in a tizzy about that...

Anyway, we've deactivated the ads until we look into it.

Not sure many commerical companies would have a response <-> fix time of < 6 hours either...

DeV.

Nevyn

mike65 wrote:

Is it time for a full time boards.ie admin team to run this site? ie they get paid, it'll be thier job!

The ongoing systems glitches are, I'm sure really starting to piss many off.Some of whom may drift away to Thumped or P45rant etc. As I type there is some sort of issue with an adserver. It may be being addressed, it may not.

We don't know cos no-one has told us, is there anyone out there?

Mike.

/BOGGLES

How can a mod not know this ?

Sparky

I get paid by boards.

Ask Beruthiel

>_>

copacetic

Thaedydal wrote:

/BOGGLES

How can a mod not know this ?

I think mike does know this but is saying maybe there is a better way..

Beruthiel

Spanky-s wrote:

I get paid by boards.

Ask Beruthiel

>_>

That was something entirely different though...
*ahem*

Cloud

The ads server went belly up yesterday afternoon - it's been disabled until we fix it. If people want to go to Thumped or P45, it's good to spread the love around.

r3nu4l

Cloud wrote:

The ads server went belly up yesterday afternoon - it's been disabled until we fix it. If people want to go to Thumped or P45, it's good to spread the love around.

Having visited Thumped following an AH thread, I can safely say I'll be staying here thank you very much

Boston

Hmm, if you had to start paying people to run this site, you'd need an entire team of people, getting paid a large chunk of money.

muffler

Well if it keeps the peace I will volunteer to get paid

6th

r3nu4l wrote:

Having visited Thumped following an AH thread, I can safely say I'll be staying here thank you very much

Seconded!

biko

/hugs boards

godtabh

What would the going rate be to manage a site like this?

What would be involved?

Boston

kearnsr wrote:

What would the going rate be to manage a site like this?

What would be involved?

Well look at the people that normally run this site, most of the admins do/did work in the commercial sector. Very well paid for their leet haxor skills from what I know.

Zaph

A subscription is €50 per year, and it's voluntary. We'd need an awful lot more subscribers than we have right now to be able to afford to pay someone full time and have enough money left over to pay for servers, etc. Making the subscription compulsory would drive away a huge number of users and completely change the whole feel of Boards. Personally I think that Cloud, DeV, Regi et al provide us with a great service and are generally on the ball when it comes to problems like yesterday's. I agree it was frustrating at the time, but I wish the IT department where I work would respond as quickly when something goes wrong.

Oh, and another who won't be joining Thumped any time soon.

seamus

kearnsr wrote:

What would the going rate be to manage a site like this?

What would be involved?

Well, this is my understanding of it. In order to employ somebody to "manage" the site, the assumption would be that this person could work 100% autonomously - that is, without having to run to any of the existing admins for help.

This would require (briefly):
1. Primarily, ensuring that the servers are running
2. Defining performance levels for the machines, tweaking them to achive that, and the monitoring them to ensure that the performance levels are maintained.
3. Recovering the data if/when it goes belly up.
4. Ensuring that data backups are performed and are available for said occasions.
5. Performing upgrades
6. Performing the other tertiary functions - managing forums and users, managing subscriptions, adding moderators, and so on.

This would require someone with (briefly):
1. Extensive experience in Unix, MySQL, Apache, sendmail (or whatever is used) and network load balancers/clusters.
2. Performance management experience in Unix, Apache and network load balancers/clusters.
3. Data/Disaster recovery experience
4. PHP Coding experience.
5. DBA Experience, particularly in terms of Database performance tweaking with MySQL.
6. Extensive vBulletin experience.
7. Fairly decent administrative skills (you'd be surprised how many non-administrative professionals can't organise to save their lives).
8. A fairly in-depth understanding of what boards.ie is, how it works and where it's headed.

To name but a few items.

It would be a relatively busy (if not overly stressful) role. You couldn't hire someone to do it competently for less than 50k. Given the nature of the work, it's plainly obvious that the only people qualified to actually do it out of the box, are the admins. And they won't work for 50k

DeVore

And thats just the tech stuff... what about the Marketing, PR, Sales, Sales planning, Advertising, Growth Planning and Budgeting to name just a few...

Finding one person to do all of these things, or even just to have the capacity to do all of these things, is nearly impossible.

The team of admins consists of some of Irelands best in their fields and have demonstrated that here. They are backed up by our best ever decision on boards.... the Smods. If it werent for them, we'd have completely collapsed by now. Replacing those people is simply not possible imho... certainly not with our cash reserves and certainly not with one or two people.

Then there is the mods... lets hope they dont get pissed off if someone is getting paid and it aint them! People have given of their time and efforts quite incredibly and we want to respect that.

Commericalisation will come because it will have to come. We simply live in a world that is based on capital but as ever we will do that on our terms and on our timetable.

DeV.

mike65

Thats more like it! I was starting to fear a lentil/open sandal collective mentality was afoot!

Boards must be getting near the site with the largest number of page impressions per day for an ie domain.

Mike.

gandalf

Step 1 - Make me an S-Mod
Step 2 - Get back into that engine Room DeVore and keep shoveling the coal!!!
Step 3 - Setup Boards-escorts.ie and get Ruthies details up and watch the cash fly in (might be a bit optimistic with this one!)

marco murphy

Who currently looks after servers and all of that?
Does it take up much of your time and do you have another profession?

And Dev what exactly do you mean by Commercialisation?
What does it entail?

Blowfish

I am but a hapless n00b, but I can attempt to answer.

Poblachtach wrote:

Who currently looks after servers and all of that?

AFAIK regi is the main hardware admin. The boards servers are hosted by digiweb where he works in any case, so it is possible for him to poke them during the day if they fall over

Poblachtach wrote:

Does it take up much of your time and do you have another profession?

They all have 'real' jobs too. Add to that, some of them have families and other responsibilities, plus some of them actually have a social life, so they aren't exactly twiddling their thumbs all day.

Saying that, they do seem to drag in people to help if they need them.

marco murphy

Why dont the admins promote subscriptions and maybe add a couple more things on
Would'nt that be worth looking at? Easy money.

You missed this, right?

Nothingcompares

The team of admins consists of some of Irelands best in their fields

What's Devore's field?

Hagar

Shiminay

Nothingcompares wrote:

What's Devore's field?

pwning n00bs and building the bastardest

Blowfish

Nothingcompares wrote:

What's Devore's field?

He's a shill for a multinational music corporation.