Boards is becoming a Ghost Town

Beasty

intheclouds wrote: »

Before ads.

I dont understand, subscribers are only a recent thing.

Im asking how the site was paid for before there were ads at all, and before there were subscribers too seeing as they are only recent.

The accounts show accumulated losses of €500k. Those have arisen over the existence of Boards via a limited company (not sure when that happened). Costs have almost certainly increased significantly as the site grew. That presumably required additional investment in hardware as well as developer support. Then there was the recruitment of other full-time staff.

In the early days I am guessing it was run on a shoestring with the original owners dipping their hands in their own pockets as required. When taken over by Distilled Media clearly the whole cost base would have grown as they looked to build the site and improve its functionality to a larger userbase as well as its attraction to advertisers. Essentially Distilled Media have, since they acquired Boards, been funding the business, covering the losses through capital and loan injections

smash

gandalf wrote: »

Apparently Adverts is now separated totally from boards according to this article. http://www.irishtimes.com/business/retail-and-services/daft-ie-and-donedeal-ie-merge-in-new-venture-1.2278241

Makes sense so they can play the 'we run at a loss' card.

gandalf wrote: »

I would also say that eventually it will probably be merged into Donedeal as well given the two are basically competing with each other.

What's donedeal got to do with any of this? It's a completely separate site with a completely different business model(a successful one) of which Distilled Media are not the sole owner. There's no way they compromise DD with a merger.

Beasty

Esel wrote: »

Wtf? Wow...

Be interesting to see the Adverts.ie balance sheet.

Adverts would not exist if it has not been for Boards. I hope the bean counters realise that.

gandalf wrote: »

Apparently Adverts is now separated totally from boards according to this article. http://www.irishtimes.com/business/retail-and-services/daft-ie-and-donedeal-ie-merge-in-new-venture-1.2278241

I would also say that eventually it will probably be merged into Donedeal as well given the two are basically competing with each other.

There is no separate balance sheet for Adverts,ie that I am aware of. It would appear that Daft, Donedeal and Adverts have been merged into a single legal entity. That company has yet to file its first accounts at the Companies Registration Office

intheclouds

Beasty wrote: »

Essentially Distilled Media have, since they acquired Boards, been funding the business, covering the losses through capital and loan injections

I suppose since DM own lots of sites, they just move the money round the balance sheet.

It could be seen that boards.ie is a cost but it facilitates other (presumably) profitable sites (such as adverts and talk to) that wouldnt exist without it.

Beasty

smash wrote: »

What's donedeal got to do with any of this? It's a completely separate site with a completely different business model(a successful one) of which Distilled Media are not the sole owner. There's no way they compromise DD with a merger.

From the link provided by gandalf

Distilled and Schibsted will each have a 50 per cent shareholding in the new vehicle, which will own the three sites.

gandalf

smash wrote: »

What's donedeal got to do with any of this? It's a completely separate site with a completely different business model(a successful one) of which Distilled Media are not the sole owner. There's no way they compromise DD with a merger.

I was talking about Adverts.ie and not boards. It means the suggestions that Adverts be used to fund boards is a non-runner. Also I am unsure if Adverts.ie even makes money.

smash

Beasty wrote: »

From the link provided by gandalf

I acknowledged all of that in my post... My point was what has it got to do with anything? A lot of businesses run competing sites against each other and DD and adverts are completely different models which you couldn't ever merge. And wouldn't want to merge.

IRLConor

smash wrote: »

That seems like an unnecessary amount of hardware to run boards. I've worked for companies with many multiples of the traffic that boards gets and they run on less.

vBulletin. Unless you've run it in production at the scale boards.ie runs at, you've no idea how much resources it needs.

To give you a taste: there was one data structure that caused a ~20MB allocation on every page view. At peak traffic that's several Gbit/s of memory traffic just for one data structure.

It's approximately 250k lines of PHP with no tests.

You weren't there man, you weren't there.

smash wrote: »

Also, there a lot newer versions of vBulletin now including vBulletin cloud. This thread alone has listed numerous sites larger than boards who use it.

By the time I left there was no vBulletin cloud and 4.0 was quite new. I had a look at 4.0 and it had retained most of the things that we had had to rip out for performance reasons. On top of that it still had some extremely hard to work around security issues. (It probably would have required us to make the admins no more powerful than mods.) It wasn't a viable option. Also, the moderation tools are not portable into a hosted solution, so we'd have to rebuild the entire process of moderation if boards.ie moved to vBulletin cloud.

And "larger than boards" is a difficult thing to quantify. The scaling issues with vBulletin are not one dimensional. Pages per second is only one side of it. The size of the forum tree is a critical factor, as is the behaviour of the users in terms of thread access patterns. The logged-in vs logged-out ratio matters hugely too. You can have a site with a billion posts in a million threads and run it on less hardware than Boards.ie if the other factors line up right.

Beasty

K-9 wrote: »

So boards is a bit like Google and Apple, except for the making money part.

It took time for each to get there, but they had a global marketplace to aim at

Boards has potential, but will only be really successful via monetising it's userbase. Yes adverts and Talk To are ways of doing that, but I'm seeing no evidence they are anywhere near there in terms of making a return on their investment yet

gandalf

Personally I think the way forward for boards.ie is to simplify things. Have a simple forum based site with a condensed number of forums. Kill the current topic based menu and bring back one similar to the legacy menu. Stop trying to cater for everyone, you won't and you will please no one with that attitude. Accept that boards will never make a profit but will drive traffic to the sites that Distilled own that do. Have a mechanism in place where these sites fund boards based on the amount of transfer traffic. Talkto or any other similar ventures won't be a compelling prospect for a paying company to get involved in without the boards.ie traffic stats.

AND FOR GOD'S SAKE TEST ANY FUTURE UPDATES PROPERLY BEFORE INFLECTING THEM ON YOUR USERS!

smash

gandalf wrote: »

AND FOR GOD'S SAKE TEST ANY FUTURE UPDATES PROPERLY BEFORE INFLECTING THEM ON YOUR USERS!

This is a serious bone of contention for me. It's as if Distilled Media bought boards for the user base, not for boards. That's fine, but they handed the site to the dev teams and said "here you go, here's your baby... We have the data we wanted" and dev went nuts with it. You'd never see them doing a release on daft like the do on boards! There's zero collaboration between the staff of boards and the the likes of daft!

maudgonner

irishdude11 wrote: »

The single biggest mistake made by boards.ie in its history was the category reorganisation that buried the entire site under the Topics menu, requiring loads of clicking of submenus to navigate.

The bit I can never fathom is why Regional gets its own top level menu. I'd love to know whether they draw enough traffic to justify this? Talk to - grand, pays the bills. Adverts - seems excessive to me, but if it makes money, fair enough (seems to be gone from the new site anyway). But Regional, really?

I pop in and out of my local forums, they're a nice resource, but I don't think they 'make' the site. Many of them are deathly quiet. The comment in the article about having geographically tailored content was interesting - I guess the powers that be see them as more important than I do.

gandalf

maudgonner wrote: »

I guess the powers that be see them as more important than I do.

I would be very interested to know if the people in charge of boards are active users of the site. I suspect they aren't and this is the root of the problem here.

smash

maudgonner wrote: »

The bit I can never fathom is why Regional gets its own top level menu. I'd love to know whether they draw enough traffic to justify this? Talk to - grand, pays the bills. Adverts - seems excessive to me, but if it makes money, fair enough (seems to be gone from the new site anyway). But Regional, really?

I pop in and out of my local forums, they're a nice resource, but I don't think they 'make' the site. Many of them are deathly quiet. The comment in the article about having geographically tailored content was interesting - I guess the powers that be see them as more important than I do.

If this happens and recommend content is forced upon users based on location it will drive users further away as it will completely change the dynamic.

The Moldy Gowl

gandalf wrote: »

I would be very interested to know if the people in charge of boards are active users of the site. I suspect they aren't and this is the root of the problem here.

They have 2 accounts and post regularly as far as I know.

LizT

maudgonner wrote: »

The bit I can never fathom is why Regional gets its own top level menu. I'd love to know whether they draw enough traffic to justify this? Talk to - grand, pays the bills. Adverts - seems excessive to me, but if it makes money, fair enough (seems to be gone from the new site anyway). But Regional, really?

The reasoning for regional having its own heading was that it didn't fit under the topics heading apparently. I don't really understand why, I think it could have just as easily been moved there.

maudgonner

smash wrote: »

If this happens and recommend content is forced upon users based on location it will drive users further away as it will completely change the dynamic.

Dublin based users would get the thread discussing whether Supermacs is an overrated restaurant. Culchies would get a thread asking how we can nominate it for a Michelin star

12Phase

I think it's largely the new layout. A lot of people can't find the legacy option.

gandalf

The Moldy Gowl wrote: »

They have 2 accounts and post regularly as far as I know.

So Seán Coughlan definitely is active on Boards.ie then?

I know some of the staff are and I believe the original owners stick their noses in every now and then but I am talking about the actual decision makers. Do the Fallons have accounts as well?

The Moldy Gowl

gandalf wrote: »

So Seán Coughlan definitely is active on Boards.ie then?

I know some of the staff are and I believe the original owners stick their noses in every now and then but I am talking about the actual decision makers. Do the Fallons have accounts as well?

I only know 2 for sure. No idea about him

I would imagine he does? Would be weird if he didn't.

IRLConor

gandalf wrote: »

Do the Fallons have accounts as well?

I think both of them posted on Boards before Daft had anything to do with Boards. I'm not sure if either of them still use it though.

gandalf

The Moldy Gowl wrote: »

I only know 2 for sure. No idea about him

Do you mind me asking who you are referring to?

I would imagine he does? Would be weird if he didn't.

It wouldn't be the first time a CEO didn't have his finger on the pulse of the lifeblood of the business he fronts. I find it interesting that he has been anonymous to the users/"products" on the site.

The Moldy Gowl

Wouldn't be my place to say.

Hollister11

No input from the main men recently.

Are there any metrics backing up OP's statement?

KERSPLAT!

Hollister11 wrote: »

No input from the main men recently.

Dav is normally who we hear from for these type threads. He's pretty busy this week as far as I know but I'm sure he'll be along Monday or Tuesday with some input.

Nody

Hollister11 wrote: »

No input from the main men recently.

I'd have to disagree; Dav did come back quickly and say Legacy will remain until at least the end of the year from what previously sounded it would go away a lot faster. That means someone listened to the noises; the question now what's the next steps (because there needs to be some streamlining from the current 4) and how / when they will happen which I'd guess takes a bit longer to figure out.

Halloween Jack

This does kind of remind of the hullabaloo when they started charging fees on adverts.ie. I stopped using the site around then, I used it mainly for guitar stuff. I've checked up recently and the breadth and quality of ads for guitar related gear has fallen off a cliff, people must be using other outlets to sell gear there is a fraction of the stuff available now compared to a few years back

smash

Halloween Jack wrote: »

This does kind of remind of the hullabaloo when they started charging fees on adverts.ie. I stopped using the site around then, I used it mainly for guitar stuff. I've checked up recently and the breadth and quality of ads for guitar related gear has fallen off a cliff, people must be using other outlets to sell gear there is a fraction of the stuff available now compared to a few years back

People don't generally appreciate being offered shíte in return for quality goods so they'll sell them on platforms where they won't be offered shíte.

Wibbs

Plus I think people, more and more are cynical when obvious BS is obvious and wrapped in American Corporate Business Speak. The Irish are particularly cynical on this score. "Success fees". OK, can we have a side order of "Happy Headache" too? To come out with that at the same time as posting pics of your how to make a cut price Google vibe office "space" with beanbags and bright colours. Fixed wheel bike on the wall a bonus point. You just know that came up at a Meeting(™) and a Consultant was consulted.