Does NZ have any boards equivalent?

Cookie_Monster

Great and all as Boards is, it clearly does not have the mass of NZers on this forum to answer much local stuff, especially out side of the main cities.

The absence of any decent websites to find out general info or ask question like you can do at the drop of a hat on Boards rather annoys me at times, is anyone familiar with any general forum operating in NZ that would you have found useful for this kind of thing? Newspapers and asking friends / workmates only ever answer so much.

Mrs OBumble

I don't believe so: TradeMe message boards are the closest,and they're a very pale imitation.

I've been told that perhaps Ireland's poor background is part of the reason for this: geeks in the rest of the world were in to BBS systems and use-net in the 19900s. But with the rise of the web, the entry barriers reduced: any old mouthy Joe-Soap could get on, and many did - filling the forum with cr*p, which they weren't equipt to deal with from a moderation perspective. Whole on-line communities dies, as we oldies just couldn't be bothered dealing with the shyte.

However in Ireland, 2400bps modems, and phone lines good enough to use 'em, weren't as widespread. The BBS culture was not so strong, so there were sys-admin-ish and moderator-ish people more kindly disposed when boards.ie was getting started.

Matt Simis

While an interesting theory, its incorrect, especially if comparing Ireland to NZ. While NZ had a technical small headstart on Broadband rollout (mid 2000 vs 2002, 18mths), usage was very similar numbers wise with Ireland actually slightly overtaking in number of subscribers vs NZ from 2005 to 2007.
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.BBND?page=1


Graph comparison, by and large a similar rollout:
http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/IT.NET.BBND/compare?country=nz#country=ie:nz



I was using BBS's in Ireland and UK before Indigo (the "original" Irish ISP) was on the scene and then became one of their first customers. The success of Boards likely is more to do with the concentrated population here, the fact the youth of the generation were similarly educated, employement and shared similar interests (remember what Boards.ie was first?) and simple good timing, management and luck by early Boards people. The crap weather also has a lot to do with it, Ireland has long cold and dark winters and long wet Autumns, which is a hospitable environment to "virtual communities" if an inhospitable one to "actual communities".


Other countries generally have a better spread of population centres, employment tyres, education levels and more "outdoors" opportunity and distractions.

MrCreosote

Nothing I know of that's as all encompassing as boards.

Vorb.org.nz is a busy enough one, which was originally a mountainbiking forum. Still mostly cycling orientated

pclancy

www.geekzone.co.nz is much like Boards used to be as in filled with mostly IT industry workers and technology nerds. But its a good friendly forum to discuss way more then just IT.

But yeah there isn't really anything that compares. They bought the domain www.boards.co.nz years ago and there was a separate but very quiet forum there for years using the same basic design as boards.ie. After that was closed and some time passed we got the forum you're in now setup to be separate to the Oz forum.

God I havent thought of Indigo in years! I remember buying the access disk and rushing home to try dialing up on my crappy 2400 on board modem. My parents used to yank the extension cord out of the wall when they'd had enough of me being online

TrueDub

Matt Simis wrote: »

Indigo (the "original" Irish ISP)

I appreciate this is off-topic, but Indigo wasn't the original. Both Ireland Online and Internet Eireann both offered dial-up at least a year before Indigo appeared. What Indigo did was offer it for free, which was revolutionary at the time. I remember being an Internet Eireann subscriber when they went out of business. I still use my indigo email address!

20260622

Although it's mainly emigration/immigration orientated, I've spent a good bit of time on http://www.enz.org/forum/forum.php

Yet to find a general one as good as Boards though