Opening of the Soccer Forum for the World Cup?

K-9

Yeah, it seems to be working out for the most part anyway and I was skeptical at the start. There'll be trolls trolling anyway. It being the World Cup helps as well with a more fun atmosphere, I don't think it would work during a PL season though.

gandalf

If it is working then it is purely by accident. Based on responses here it is obvious that very little planning went into the decision and the major motivator from the Distilled Media side was to use it as a "test" for their new widget. TBH I am actually surprised that no commercial activity was planned for one of the biggest sporting events on the planet.

There is also the concern that this was only brought up with the mods at the last minute and was no way flagged during the forum review process which only happened a couple of weeks ago. Again it is hardly a good way to engage with a active boards.ie community.

If this works, then great I'll be delighted. However as K-9 says when competitive league (and particularly premiership) football kicks off again then I think there will be issues.

Trojan

gandalf wrote: »

If it is working then it is purely by accident.

...

gandalf wrote: »

If this works, then great I'll be delighted.

gandalf

Care to address the central core of my and other peoples concerns the fact the community was not engaged at all Al, or is this cheap digs time

Dav

OK, first of all, it's just for the World Cup. Here is where I said this.

I've already explained that putting this to the community would have dragged the process out past the point where there would have been any point in doing it at all. That's not some sort of convenient excuse, we have a history of requesting feedback on changes to the site and they rarely gets wrapped up inside of a month when we start a process like that off (which is not a complaint or anything of the sort, it's a time consuming project to engage with hundreds, if not thousands of people at a time). This is why I brought it to the mods first as they can gauge the response far better than I ever could. Again, I'll state that we have gone ahead with this on a provision that the moment it causes trouble, it gets rolled back (and it would take me literally 5 minutes to reapply the previous access system). I'm not sure why that's not enough for you or why you seem determined for this to fail.

We didn't have a plan for the World Cup because we were too busy working on other things. None of us are soccer fans so it's not a big deal to us personally in truth, so that's why it wasn't in our heads. There are 2 people who work on the community team, we're ran off our feet and we don't have enough hours in the day to stay on top of the every day and emergency stuff. Similarly the 3 people in tech are equally frantic between trying to get the App finished and keeping the site ticking over smoothly from a technical point of view.

Finally, there is no "Distilled Media" there is only Boards.ie Ltd. We do not get the benefit of any of the other tech people in the building unless someone's really stuck. The only shared resources in this building (apart of course from the building itself) are the design team, but we have to submit requests for their help like the other 3 companies and we won't always get it when we need it. So can we maybe just put this notion of the "Distilled Media Overlords" having any say in the running of this company? I can assure you that's simply not how it works.

So can we please just get back to the business of enjoying the World Cup and posting about it with our friends - that's what this whole process was ever about.

gandalf

Dav thanks again for replying. One of the core reasons for my post was to register an issue with the decision. Knowing how decisions are made around here if there wasn't a record of concerns then if this progressed to the next logical level the typical response would have been "but no one relayed their concerns with us at the time".

I do think you are being a bit disingenuous about engaging with the community. As referenced in this thread the soccer mods engaged with the community in a feedback thread from the 24/05/2014 to the 31/05/2014.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057216622

They polled views of the community and that thread garnered 43 pages of responses before it was closed a week later. That shows the community in the soccer forum is very healthy and engaged. A thread in the soccer forum on a single issue like opening up for the World Cup could have been run over a couple of days and would have engaged the community and either shown positive support for the project after a discussion or give an alternative solution that would have been acceptable to all. At most that would have taken 3 days, the community would have been engaged, the mods would have had their concerns met and the site would have had a solution to the "World Cup" conundrum. Maybe next time you should look at a solution like this before you decide to make a fundamental change to a vibrant community on boards.

As for saying "why you seem determined for this to fail", that is not what I am saying. What I am saying is evident in the engagement on the feedback thread in soccer. We have a vibrant, engaged and on the whole intelligent forum to discuss soccer. The members of the forum make it what it is. If something puts that at risk please don't take offense if some of us point that out to you.

Gordon

Baldy Conscience wrote: »

I can't actually remember the last time Boards.ie/Distilled Media gave actual sponsorship to the team (Dav was involved in getting EA Sports on board as jersey sponsors about 4 years ago or so, and did try recently to get companies involved, to no avail, but the last time Boards.ie gave money, despite an agreement to do so? I have literally no idea).

So you should really get your facts in line before throwing out lines in an attempt to be smart, thanks very much. The players and myself pay for that team, in full, out of our own pockets, and have the Boards.ie Crest on our chests, so in fact, we get the Boards.ie brand out there, every week, hail, rain or shine.

Ah right, I gotcha Although, I'm not trying to be smart, hence my question, no need for the dig attempt. Boards gave company time in the form of Dav liaising with, and getting a sponsor, time is money. And boards also paid the referees fees in the past as far as I understand.

Lovely Bloke

Gordon wrote: »

Ah right, I gotcha

Good, because I'd hate it for people to get the wrong idea from your post, which I am sure you never meant to happen.

Gordon wrote: »

Although, I'm not trying to be smart, hence my question,

Aye, right.

Gordon wrote: »

no need for the dig attempt.

Is that seriously directed at me? After your post? Great being an Admin.

Gordon wrote: »

Boards gave company time in the form of Dav liaising with, and getting a sponsor, time is money.

Yep, and the main people involved with the organising of the team have expressed our gratitude for that, which you can see here, but if that's what we are calling team sponsorship then I'm flabbergasted at the bloody mindedness of this post.

Gordon wrote: »

And boards also paid the referees fees in the past as far as I understand.

Yep, we had an agreement that Boards.ie would pay the referee fees each season (2 payments per calendar year), an agreement which we were never told was coming to an end by anyone, staff, Admin or owner. It just...stopped.

RasTa

Why do you continue to wear the boards logo if you hate them so much...

Lovely Bloke

RasTa wrote: »

Why do you continue to wear the boards logo if you hate them so much...

I don't hate anyone. I love the team, I love that the majority of the players are drawn from this community and I absolutely love the "Come on Boards, straight into them" that my centre half shouts at the start of every game.

I love that lads on the other teams know who we are and sometimes interact on the forum, and I'm damn proud that the guts of 200 people have played for or been otherwise involved with the team that was founded out of the Soccer Forum when 12 strangers met for a kick around in the park one August 8 years ago, and that myself and four or five others are the main driving force behind that.

I love that we are a team for lads who othewise wouldn't be playing ball due to work or family or whatever reasons, we've brought together business partnerships, I've seen one person turn up for a match, decide he was too unfit, stop coming, then turn up 18 months later fit as a fiddle, slot into the team and win an award for being part of the Best Defence in our league winning season.

I love that all that came from this website. I don't hate Boards, I never will hate Boards, it's a huge part of my life. My 7 week old son, my football team and my wife are all down to this website. I actually care passionatly about it, I dislike some of the directions it's gone it, and I'm vociferous about that.

Dav

So why is it that you can't simply be civil about giving us some Feedback?

If you love this site, then why must you constantly fight with and in many cases abuse the site's decision makers?

There was a time you were well able to articulate your feelings without the need to abuse people. The post above shows you still can when you want to.

So please, I'm making a genuine offer here Baldy, what is it that you expect us to do to help you when all you seem to do is shout at us? We're people too, why on earth do you think we deserve this sort of treatment?

Lovely Bloke

Dav wrote: »

If you love this site, then why must you constantly fight with and in many cases abuse the site's decision makers?

It's not constant, and it's not "fighting with" nor "abusing" - I comment on things that I'm interested in.

In this particular case, the "decision maker(s)" (You yourself, some board of directors, a steering committee or whatever way things are decided) have decided to stomp all over a well run community, in a fashion that seems haphazard and ill-thought out. You admitted yourself that the WC was "at the back of the minds" of the staff. I find that itself absolutely unbelievable, that a commercial website, Ireland's largest discussion website, had absolutely no plans to utilise the event - the World's largest event - in any way, shape or form until the last minute, meanwhile we are told almost constantly that decisions are made with people's livelihoods in mind. How can both of those positions be reconciled? It's a community that I've been posting in and been a part of for over a decade, it's a community where I myself have contributed good things, helped bring people together in real life (the team, inter-forum football matches (Soccer vs Poker referee), organised a collection for a rememberance stone in Landsdowne Road for a dear departed forum friend, forum meet-ups), and I've seen it dictated to and pretty much disrespected, just because there was no proper plan in place until the day before the World Cup kicked off. I found it a brash and cynical attempt to wring content and money out of something that I've, in a small way, and also many, many others helped build to where it is today.

It seems as if the people in positions like you hold within the Boards heirarchy/infrastructure don't care about any of that, don't care about the existing communities - almost everything that's done, every decision that's made is made to increase noise above signal, increase content so the ad-men can be dazzled with page views, or posts made or whatever, it's just not nice to be seen as just another content generation bot when I feel I've actually contributed much, much more than just words on a screen for the company to use as a sales pitch. I'm sure when new advertisers are being shown the greatness of the website that the various teams, clubs and whatever are used to show that there is a great community spirit here - well the reality is a bit different. It's like the overlords don't really care, and are just on the look out for the next money making opportunity.

In the previous "incident" an Admin who's been round the block more than once on this website stomped all over a community which I was and remain an integral part of, now there were wrongs on both sides, but the attempt by the other Admins at the time to make me and my friends out to be some horrible, petty little group of dickheads left a pretty bad taste. It took too long for even a modicum of an admission of any kind of wrongdoing or mistakes on the part of the Admin involved from anyone in an official capacity, in fact, it was totally a case of "our site our rules, accept them or take your Private Forum elsewhere", pushing the issue under the carpet, where it's remained until now, and will remain seeing as that's exactly what we've done. That's the past though, and I'd rather not rake it up -

Dav wrote: »

So please, I'm making a genuine offer here Baldy, what is it that you expect us to do to help you when all you seem to do is shout at us?

I'm not sure what the offer here is? I don't "expect" anything - actually, no, I expect things to go on as before. The decision makers riding roughshod over communities without a second thought.

Finally, I've not shouted at all in this post, I'm not angry, I'm not even slightly vexed, if it's coming across like that, then I do apologise, but there it is, I've tried to tone it down a bit there, and I hope that's coming across.

Dav

Do you know what, that is one of the most well reasoned an articulate responses I've ever had the pleasure of reading - no BS here, you have made your points well and you have enlightened me as to why you think about things the way you do and what your mindset is in relation to this site. It's a genuine shame you don't do it more often.

It's half six at end of a long and hot day and my brain isn't in great shape to give you the sort of answer that your post deserves. I will take it up again tomorrow, but there is one thing I want to leave you with:

I joined what would become the Boards.ie community in 1996 when I discovered Quake in college. I became a mod in 1999. I organised and ran Leagues and LAN Parties with the help of many other Boardsies for almost fifteen years. I organised all the Site Beers when I moved to Dublin almost ten years ago (back when we were still small enough for site beers). I have met employers, colleagues, my best friends in the world, house mates and girlfriends here.

I grew up here and in a lot of ways, this is my home.

It's disappointing that you think someone like me, who's been here and a part of this place long before you were, has somehow completely abandoned the ideas and principles that I know make this site my favourite part of the internet.

Calhoun

Baldy Conscience wrote: »

Finally, I've not shouted at all in this post, I'm not angry, I'm not even slightly vexed, if it's coming across like that, then I do apologise, but there it is, I've tried to tone it down a bit there, and I hope that's coming across.

A piece of wisdom an old boss shared with me from her culture was if your approach any situation with your dagger out, don't expect the response to be anything but the same (pointed response).

Your post is certainly clear but other posts would have had an adversarial tone to them and i think thats what people are picking up on.

Dav

Thanks for waiting for me to come back, I appreciate it.

OK, so first and foremost, I need to once again point out that there is no Distilled Media Overlords telling us what we can and can't do here. All decisions concerning Boards.ie Ltd are made by Boards.ie Ltd.

You're making a lot of incorrect and frankly, unfair assumptions about our decision making processes and I don't know why you think this way. We don't want more content, we want more members. They will grow communities, meet up in the pub, fall in love, have kids (sound familiar?) and tell everyone about how they met on a website where they initially joined to talk about what was on the telly last night and the process repeats. It's been doing so for fifteen years. You get that right and content just happens without needing to worry about it.

You seem to be of the opinion that every member of staff in here is somehow only out to "exploit" this site's members and communities in the pursuit of money. That is flat out nonsense. What possible benefit does the company get by focussing only on short sighted ideas like that? Had anyone in this building had any interest in essentially committing the equivalent of strip-mining this site and leaving an empty polluted husk behind, don't you think that would have happened by now?

So what exactly was the point of the World Cup stuff?

We thought "maybe we can use that elections thing to make a kind of quick link list for people who might be new or who only want to see World Cup info on the Soccer Forum." It's the biggest soccer related event in the world and we wanted to see if there was some way to do something that might be useful to mark the occasion. We want to make sure that anyone who wants to talk about the World Cup can. We have an entire forum dedicated to Soccer, so that's where the discussion belongs and hey, maybe this will help ad some numbers to the soccer community?

I floated the idea with the mods, they thought it was pretty cool, but noted that Soccer's access system stops people posting there, so they asked themselves what they thought about us taking that down for the duration of the World Cup and they asked me if it was technically possible. They were obviously apprehensive, but the majority of them thought that if it was something we could try and roll back the moment it caused any sort of problem then it was certainly worth doing. Again I note that maybe this would bring new members to the Soccer Community who would be happy to go through the access request system when we put it back in place after the Tournament. The Mods were not forced into this, they were not told it was happening, this was a suggestion *they* made and a decision that they were all a part of. There was a lot of discussion about how it would impact on the current charter and rules, and again, this is something the mods organised amongst themselves and the only thing I added was an assurance that should anyone want to abuse the system with re-reg's etc that I'd be permanently site-banning their accounts.

There's an ad there for Adverts - up until about 5 minutes before it went live, it was a picture of Polandball that Andres just put there for fun as a placement holder. We don't get paid by Adverts for it or anything, It could have just as easily been a link to Daft or TheJournal (I suggested that it link to TheScore's World Cup content). It is the sort of thing that we can sell an ad space for though - I'm not trying to suggest otherwise. We were hoing to get a sponsor to run a competition in conjunction with it, but that didn't materialise. I don't think the widget in it's current form will be the final design though and I personally would much prefer if it didn't have the ad space.

Again, I restate, to ask all of the Soccer Community for feedback on this would have meant that nothing would have been done. Taking and weighing the opinion of hundreds of people takes days to do properly. The competition would be half way through before we had even the first semblance of a plan. This is one of the reasons we have mods. They represent their communities when we need to ask them questions on behalf of the company and we're not familiar with the community first hand. So I don't know where you take this notion that us interacting with the Community's representatives and working with them is "stomping all over" that community. I'm not for one moment trying to pass this off on the Mods, but they're far more informed about Soccer than I am. If this had been something to do with Computer Games, then I'd have been all over it because this is something I have a major vested interest in. As it happens, I've been working on a community building project with the Games people by inviting some Irish companies in to talk about what they do. There's no money involved, just good content. If we were of the mind you seem to think we are, surely we'd be charging all of them for the opportunity to talk to our members?

The company is here to support the community platform, not get rich off it. If this was a "get rich" scheme, then it's already failed, as I don't believe Boards will never make millions. It is my opinion that the powers that be here will be happy if it can pay for itself and be able to put aside money for capital investment when we need new hardware and things like that. Do you think that any of us working here want this site to fail or to no longer exist because we have somehow taken all the good ad sales opportunities out of it and now we're done? Do you think DeVore and Vexorg and Cloud (who are all still on the Board) would allow that to happen? I've already stated what this site means to me and how much of myself I invested in it long before there was any talk of becoming an employee. We're not stupid, we know what we're doing. We see a bigger picture than everyone else - this is what we're here to do. The reason you've seen us talking more about how we manage our ads and commercial stuff in the last three years is because the bottom completely fell out of the online banner sales market. In less than a year, revenue from banner ads on this site, which was our primary source of income, dropped to about 15% of that they were (Google Ads is the reason by the way in case anyone is wondering). We had been at a stage where we were making a small profit, then this happened. It's not like we were about to be turfed out on the street with a beggar's bowl, but we had to take some action to try and make the deficit back up. Talk To forums were the first step in that and work was already well under way with them before this crash happened, similarly with Boards Deals (which was always profitable for as long as it was around - it was wound up before it became something that cost money).

We have other things like competitions, verified reps, sponsored threads now - all of which are not here to exploit the site, but to help pay the bills in a manner which provides rewards to our members in exchange for their continued support by simply being a part of the site and adding to it's communities. If and when something big comes along that we think is worth a shot, but is a change to how things operate on the site, then we'll ask - like we did with Talk To forums, like we did with verified reps, like we did with competitions, like we did with changes to the home page layout, like we're currently doing with the app development, etc. If a smaller scale opportunity comes along like this World Cup stuff or like the Games Dev stuff, then we go to the mods to see what they think. We're quick to put our hands up when we make a mistake and fix things and we do our best to explain every decision we make, but that never seems to be enough for some people. There is no other company I know of that invests the amount of time we do in engaging with it's members (and remember, you're not users or customers here, you *ARE* members) and if you think we had no interest in adhering to their wishes, why would we even bother?

So I hope that explains things from my and the company's point of view. If you just stopped fighting us all the time, I wouldn't have to spend the majority of my day writing up posts like this. That's time I could be spending on other projects, including finding the soccer team a new sponsor. Incidentally, it's worth noting that you simply stopped asking for the ref's fees to be paid, we didn't make a decision to stop paying them. I've reviewed my PM's to see if I missed anything and I don't see it there, so that offer is still there. I appreciate that the Summer season has already started, but when the next season starts, talk to me.

Turtyturd

Dunno if this is the right place but is there any way to remove the world cup widget from the touch site?

It makes trying to navigate the Soccer Forum a nightmare.

Darkglasses

Turtyturd wrote: »

Dunno if this is the right place but is there any way to remove the world cup widget from the touch site?

It makes trying to navigate the Soccer Forum a nightmare.

Red X in the top right corner

Mickeroo

Darkglasses wrote: »

Red X in the top right corner

I don't think there is one on the touch site? I couldn't find one before.

Turtyturd

Darkglasses wrote: »

Red X in the top right corner

None that I can see.

Maybe it's just my phone but when I scroll down through the main pages it just springs back to the top.

Darkglasses

Ooh..I never use the touch site. Dav'll be around shortly I presume! Or you could try the site development forum possibly.

Zaph

There's a small arrow on the right hand side of the box on the touch site that minimises and maximises the widget.

Turtyturd

Does nothing, was wondering if there is a way to completely remove it like with the normal site.

Zaph

Works fine for me on Android 4.4.2. Maybe try clearing your cache? Failing that, Dav might have another suggestion when he's back around tomorrow.

Unknown Soldier

Dav wrote: »

Hello all.
It's what we had originally planned to do for the European and Local elections (but so few of the players involved showed any interest it wasn't worth rolling out).

.

Kunkka

So have you seen an influx of new users for the soccer forum since this experiment?

hullaballoo

Kunkka wrote: »

So have you seen an influx of new users for the soccer forum since this experiment?

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=451

The number of access requests looks to me like it has gone up somewhat but only the Soccer Mods can answer that.

Beasty

You need to bear in mind a backlog of applications built up once the open access was removed, and that we are still in the close season. There were certainly a lot of fresh faces during the open access period, but only time will tell how many will now seek permanent access (and to be clear this experiment was never anything to do with increasing traffic through the forum - I was always more curious about seeing the general behaviour of those who never had to go through the access process, which was actually quite positive)

weisses

pfff i decided to use the opening of the forum to post there and asked for access at the same time

Had to make 2 requests in the end .... :P

It was actually made harder for people to sign up.

Darkglasses

weisses wrote: »

pfff i decided to use the opening of the forum to post there and asked for access at the same time

Had to make 2 requests in the end .... :P

It was actually made harder for people to sign up.

It was announced on the access request forum that no requests were going to be processed here - http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=91196641

weisses

Darkglasses wrote: »

It was announced on the access request forum that no requests were going to be processed here - http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=91196641

I saw that ... It was put up there 10 days after my first request ... And its not a thread you will go visit very often ... I spotted it in the end and made my second request...... Luckily I didn't had to crawl through the charter for a second time