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Boards is becoming a Ghost Town
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We can still keep the option for people to close their account to satisfy Data regulations and have 'closed account' visible on their profile. We just don't need it under the poster's name in their tagline so it's showing in every post.
I think this would actually be a good solution that could be implemented in the new site. I just checked now and it still shows the "Closed Account" tag. I also think that when a user closes their account, that their username should be changed to something generic by way of giving them the right to be forgotten. That way at least only admins and mods would have access to check if a troublesome poster is a re-reg, and it would give re-reg posters who aren't troublesome, some form of protection against their post history coming back to haunt them. At least on other social media sites, a person can delete their account and that's it, their details and their post history are gone for good.
I understand however why this isn't really a feasible option for Boards, but that means that posters are going to care more about their personal privacy and protecting themselves rather than getting involved in discussions where they might say something and some inspector clueless decides to go post trawling and drag up something from their past to throw into the current discussion. People are always going to put their personal privacy and self-protection above the concerns of other anonymous users that they feel no duty towards to keep their accounts open.
One reason I closed my previous account is because I didn't need my son reading my posts, but he has no interest whatsoever in Boards now as he's all over the other social media sites and snapchatting, etc. I don't think even the new fisher-price look of the new site would attract him to get into discussions on Boards tbh.
The real explanation for why Boards seems to be dying on it's arse slowly IMO is because there's so, so much more choice out there now for generations that are growing up with even greater access to a whole variety of sites and communication tools than there was in Ireland even five years ago, and Boards is playing catch-up in a new age, with an old form of communication. The content just isn't there any more, and everyone wants more control over their own space.I was only thinking the same as I was catching up this morning actually.
Now some may disagree with what I'm about to say, and this is in NO WAY aimed at particular posters, but I think the issue is the Twitter-style nature of posting: short/one-line snappy answers that are just put out there without any clarification, supporting statement etc... it's a bit how back in the olden days we were limited to 160 characters for SMS text messaging.
I'm not saying every post has to be an essay or a wall of text, and of course there's always time when "brief and to the point" is best, but when you're reading post after post of one-liners back and forth between 2/3 posters in a thread it become very wearing and even the constant scrolling required gets annoying quickly.
I think that when Boards was in it's infancy, the fact that it was a small group meant that Boards found it's own style, and generally posters all thought pretty much the same as each other. Then as Boards grew and became what it is now, there are all different types of posters all with their own style and all with their own preferences for discussion. Boards simply can't be everything to everyone, so while some people like the twitter discussion style, some people like the wall of text style (there's probably universal agreement on the annoyance of those multi-quoting bastards
), but there's plenty I don't like about the way some discussions go, and then there's plenty more I do like about the way some discussions go.
One comment I will make about moderation is that I think overall the moderation on the site is just the right balance of, well, moderation! I can understand why some people might think moderation is killing the site, but really, it isn't, and I think less moderation would actually turn the site into something like 4chan for those people, and for everyone else they'd just stop posting.
I like to see moderators getting involved in discussions and not just handing out cards or telling people get back on topic or whatever. I think too that posters should be encouraged too not to be afraid to PM the mods if they have questions or whatever about the way a discussion is going. I think feedback is just as important to help posters get a better understanding for the vibe in a forum as they really are like smaller communities in one bigger community. Moderators too should be given more recognition for the work they put into the community, because they are unpaid volunteers giving up their own time to make their community what it is.0 -
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It's no fun to go away for a break and come back to a huge thread bashing the work your doing, but that's part of the gig
Many of you are pointing out that it's been whatever length of time and no one from the office has answered - again, fair comment, but not something I was able to address as I was away for a week and I've had to spend this one catching up. Yes, there are 2 Community Managers, but Niamh has as big, if not bigger list of responsibilities than me and so this side of the job usually falls to me to take care of - kinda makes sense I think cause I've been here the longest and have a better appreciation of the lay of the land. But I guess we should probably make our delineation of work a bit more obvious to the rest of the site.
Myradin has taken a big chunk of stuff out of this thread and has kick started some serious review amongst the admin team. There are some things that need an "official" answer though so here we are.
Closing accounts
It's a legal requirement, it can't and won't ever go away. I have been asking for a 2 week cool-down on it but it's as simple as simply deciding we want that, there's a non-trivial chunk of work behind that and we have to consult with the Data Commissioners as to whether or not we'd remain compliant. As soon as it was discussed, I predicted this cycle of "close, reopen" that some people have would happen, but that's not enough of a reason to stop being compliant with the law. It would be nice if people ceased this close/reopen nonsense, but I don't think we can change that as it seems to be some sort of societal issue. I'm honestly baffled by it, but I've spoken about that before.
Ownership
Boards.ie is owned and operated by Boards.ie Ltd. There is no other company that has *ANY* kind of say in how we do our business. None. It's just us. We have our own in-house sales team now so that we can maintain that independence (previously we had Distilled Media Sales doing this).
Boards.ie Ltd is majority owned by the same parent company that owns two other companies that were a part of the Distilled Media Group. There's the company that runs Daft/Adverts/Done Deal and the company that run TheJournal and its collection of sites. Please note: Adverts.ie has been an entirely separate legal entity from, and has had nothing to do with Boards.ie for six years. SIX YEARS PEOPLE!
We haven't even shared an office with them for four years. We even had one idiot bring us to small claims court over something that happened on Adverts and despite our sending documentation to him, his solicitors and the clerks of the courts to say that we were not the same company, nor had we any say in anything related to Adverts.ie matters.
All of this is not even slightly the same thing as "Daft owns Boards." The folks at Daft are the ones getting abusive phone calls from anonymous cowards screaming about some nonsense that happened on Boards because this grossly inaccurate "fact" won't go away. So can we put this thing away once and for all? It's incorrect, and continues to cause people who have literally nothing to do with our company stress.
Search Functionality
Needs an overhaul is on the list as a Highest Priority item.
"I can't find my forums"
This is what the Follow Forum stuff has always been for and we've had that feature for years. The search bar being broken is not helping, we know, but as I said above, we're working on that.
Which brings us nicely on to the next issue...
Category Reorganisation
We asked for your input and help, this is the result. It was 100% community driven and I merely put the whole thing together and steered it. We've had subsequent clean ups of some topics, again, 100% community driven. There were of course some who thought it was a bad idea, but an overwhelming majority of you either thought it was ok, or were at the very least happy enough to not feel the need to comment. So I'm not entirely sure what it is I'm supposed to do here folks. We're obviously not going back to the old ones; the one thing we had agreement on that they weren't fit for purpose Shrinking the number of forums also helps for sure, we've seen some categories take that on themselves and we've made the changes happen. This is something the CMods and Mods of a category can talk to us about at any time, we'll make the leg work happen if asked.
"I have to click too many times you say" - you have one additional click. One. And again, you have less if you use the "Follow" functionality. That's not to say that I don't absolutely agree that if you're on the legacy site, the menu isn't good - but we can't have 2 separate sets of menus - that's just not technically feasible (at least this is what I'm told by the tech team). We need a fix for the Legacy Site menu though, it was always meant to be a temporary measure because we had hoped to be further along with our responsive site by now. I'm looking into an efficient means of fixing this and will come back to you.
Regional Forums
They're not the same as the rest of the site, they're not supposed to be. After Hours not withstanding, every forum on this site is dedicated to a specific topic. So you want to know about plumbing, you go to the Heating and Plumbing forum, You want to find a bargain, you go to Bargain Alerts, etc. However, if you want to know about getting a plumber in Dublin 15 or whether or not the Tesco in the Wilton Shopping Centre is going to have stock of that TV that's on sale, you want more specific and localised knowledge. You want to talk to your neighbours in effect and so that's why Regional Forums stand separately.
"People just see banned/closed accounts"
Well, we can't do anything about the legal requirement for a close account feature as I said above. Banned accounts are there for the Transparency that so many of you demand (and that's not a problem or anything, transparency on our community processes is vital). The community at large says it prefers to see posts that get people banned or sanctioned remain visible as a warning. So by extension, we show if someone's been site-banned so people know that the actions of this account will result in the same. It's the exact opposite of what I think we should be doing myself (for clarity, I think anything that is worthy of sanction should be removed), but this is not my decision, it's the community's. If we pull the tagline off the screen then we're undoubtedly going to face backlash about "Not knowing that was a moderator" or similar.
"The office just won't listen!"
It disappoints me that no one seems to be willing to give us any credit for the last 18 years of doing things based on community feedback and every time we propose some changes, no matter how big and small, we get insults, hostility and hyperbole. It makes this process take a lot longer and gets everyone bent out of shape. So please folks, we don't doubt your passion for wanting the best for Boards.ie, but I'm just asking that you to give us the benefit of the doubt and remember that we're just as passionate about it as you are. I know there's a lot of pressure for "instant" fixes to things, but that's just not possible when we need to have time to see how people react to things - if we had any feasible means of testing some of the stuff we want to work on anywhere but the live environment, we'd do it, but that's just not an option for things like UI/UX work. I don't know why you think there's some sort of "us and them" between the office and the site's membership, but if that's because of how I've communicated things, then I'm putting my hands up and offering an unreserved apology because this site means more to me than my family. We don't always think clearly when we're talking about the things we love, I guess I'm as guilty of that as anyone, but I do my damnedest to be clear.
But, and there's always a but, the office ultimately has to make the decisions that keep this site here for the next 18 years and beyond. We make these decisions with our analytics numbers, our intuition and of course, our community. But our community is not, for example, a web development team or a team of lawyers, so we have to do the work and get feedback from the relevant parties - designs by committee as anyone will tell you don't work, but we do try for "design by consensus" which allows us to get at least most of the people happy most of the time. Taking the responsive site as our latest example. You don't like it - that's both abundantly clear and perfectly fine - we're bringing parts of it back to the drawing board. But we needed some time to see how it was received by not only our logged in active members, but the visitors too. However, if we read through the thread about it, you'll see the office is "forcing you" to use it (we're not, we asked you to try it if you wanted and the legacy site hasn't gone anywhere) or that we're somehow doing it just for advertising revenue (there are less ads on every page of the responsive site than the legacy site by the way). If you think the levels of vitriol being thrown at us and me personally about the design of a website are somehow acceptable then we have a very different point of view about life. If you think that we're just going to ignore it and plough on regardless then I'd like to know why you think we'd want to operate that way because it makes as much sense as a chocolate teapot.
"Moderation is rubbish!"
I don't support this statement at all. I will offer this though, our moderation is the single biggest issue people have with our site. We have a reputation for being ban-happy and that's well earned. We decided a long, long time ago to not allow this place to become a wild west like Usenet became (and if you don't know what Usenet is, think Reddit except done by email and with no up/down voting). It's mostly worked I think. It can improve though. Certainly our tone isn't as good as it should be when the automated processes are sending messages etc. There's also a pressing need to talk tact and tone with all mods in order to minimise the opportunities to be misinterpreted. Consistency is the number 1 problem facing Moderation on this site because 1) we're all human and 2) different forums have different standards of acceptability and the general public doesn't care about that, so feel it's unjust. 3) there's no willingness to accept that experienced mods/Cmods/Admins with their fingers on the pulse of a forum and its community do know what's best when a tough decision has to be made, instead we have "outrage" when decisions are made and/or whilst a team of mods is trying to fix an issue on what might be a fast paced and constantly evolving issue. We can't apply quick fixes to big problems, they only make for more and bigger problems.
"We never see the staff on the site"
Well I've got a personal account since Feb '98 with 26 and a half thousand posts on it, so I'm not sure that's entirely accurate Niamh's got one too, she's not been here as long as me though. But here's the thing, if a member of staff of this site sees something that's in breach of the law, we *MUST* delete or act on it. This is one of the only protections against the weekly legal threats the site gets and it's not even about any of them specifically, it's about being able to stand up in court, under oath, and being able to honestly say that we have taken all care and precaution to make sure that anything illegal that we're made aware of has been actioned. I've mentioned this before, but three separate solicitors have told me that I should never read AH as it's the biggest source of the sort of content I have to delete (the most innocuous of comments made off the cuff are still legally actionable as they've been published on the site). Now a lot of people seem to think that we're "hiding" behind these laws and should be taking on the exorbitant costs of fighting these battles on your behalf in the high court - if they've got 2 or 3 hundred grand to spare for a single court battle (which we'll almost certainly loose by the way), then we await your cheque. If you want to get angry with anyone over this then get angry with Fianna Fáil, they introduced this disgraceful law in 2009. It is, to my extremely limited knowledge, the only law in the land where you have to prove your innocence rather than the prosecution having to prove your guilt as our legal system is supposed to work.
There's still some stuff in this thread that I want to address, but I didn't want to let this go another day with out a more fully fleshed out response.0 -
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It's no fun to go away for a break and come back to a huge thread bashing the work your doing, but that's part of the gig Many of you are pointing out that it's been whatever length of time and no one from the office has answered - again, fair comment, but not something I was able to address as I was away for a week and I've had to spend this one catching up. Yes, there are 2 Community Managers, but Niamh has as big, if not bigger list of responsibilities than me and so this side of the job usually falls to me to take care of - kinda makes sense I think cause I've been here the longest and have a better appreciation of the lay of the land. But I guess we should probably make our delineation of work a bit more obvious to the rest of the site.
I'm one of the people that criticised this. Yes you were away on holidays and everyone is entitled to holidays. However boards as a business foisted changes on their users with a half baked site and no matter what you say about people having a choice there were a lot of complaints on the threads in AH and the ones here in feedback where overseas users were forced onto the site and they couldn't change back easily to the current or legacy sites.
With the rollout of a radical new site a member of staff from boards should have been monitoring and responding on a daily basis. Given there is another Community Manager I would have expected her to step into the breach.
Feckin off for two weeks without a response does nothing to help the optics of a them and us mentality that users believe is osmotically spreading. Again this is not personally aimed at you it is aimed at the whole boards staff.Category Reorganisation
We asked for your input and help, this is the result. It was 100% community driven and I merely put the whole thing together and steered it. We've had subsequent clean ups of some topics, again, 100% community driven. There were of course some who thought it was a bad idea, but an overwhelming majority of you either thought it was ok, or were at the very least happy enough to not feel the need to comment. So I'm not entirely sure what it is I'm supposed to do here folks. We're obviously not going back to the old ones; the one thing we had agreement on that they weren't fit for purpose Shrinking the number of forums also helps for sure, we've seen some categories take that on themselves and we've made the changes happen. This is something the CMods and Mods of a category can talk to us about at any time, we'll make the leg work happen if asked.
"I have to click too many times you say" - you have one additional click. One. And again, you have less if you use the "Follow" functionality. That's not to say that I don't absolutely agree that if you're on the legacy site, the menu isn't good - but we can't have 2 separate sets of menus - that's just not technically feasible (at least this is what I'm told by the tech team). We need a fix for the Legacy Site menu though, it was always meant to be a temporary measure because we had hoped to be further along with our responsive site by now. I'm looking into an efficient means of fixing this and will come back to you.
Thank you for revisiting this because along with the DDoS issues earlier this year I believe this is mainly responsible for the death of some forums on the site."The office just won't listen!"
It disappoints me that no one seems to be willing to give us any credit for the last 18 years of doing things based on community feedback and every time we propose some changes, no matter how big and small, we get insults, hostility and hyperbole. It makes this process take a lot longer and gets everyone bent out of shape. So please folks, we don't doubt your passion for wanting the best for Boards.ie, but I'm just asking that you to give us the benefit of the doubt and remember that we're just as passionate about it as you are. I know there's a lot of pressure for "instant" fixes to things, but that's just not possible when we need to have time to see how people react to things - if we had any feasible means of testing some of the stuff we want to work on anywhere but the live environment, we'd do it, but that's just not an option for things like UI/UX work. I don't know why you think there's some sort of "us and them" between the office and the site's membership, but if that's because of how I've communicated things, then I'm putting my hands up and offering an unreserved apology because this site means more to me than my family. We don't always think clearly when we're talking about the things we love, I guess I'm as guilty of that as anyone, but I do my damnedest to be clear.
But, and there's always a but, the office ultimately has to make the decisions that keep this site here for the next 18 years and beyond. We make these decisions with our analytics numbers, our intuition and of course, our community. But our community is not, for example, a web development team or a team of lawyers, so we have to do the work and get feedback from the relevant parties - designs by committee as anyone will tell you don't work, but we do try for "design by consensus" which allows us to get at least most of the people happy most of the time. Taking the responsive site as our latest example. You don't like it - that's both abundantly clear and perfectly fine - we're bringing parts of it back to the drawing board. But we needed some time to see how it was received by not only our logged in active members, but the visitors too. However, if we read through the thread about it, you'll see the office is "forcing you" to use it (we're not, we asked you to try it if you wanted and the legacy site hasn't gone anywhere) or that we're somehow doing it just for advertising revenue (there are less ads on every page of the responsive site than the legacy site by the way). If you think the levels of vitriol being thrown at us and me personally about the design of a website are somehow acceptable then we have a very different point of view about life. If you think that we're just going to ignore it and plough on regardless then I'd like to know why you think we'd want to operate that way because it makes as much sense as a chocolate teapot.
Again going back to my issue with no response at all for two weeks after a major relaunch of the site that does suggest to me that the office does not care. You may care loads but unless you are interacting with your users during the rollout of something that makes major changes in the way they interact with the site they will not know that. Now that's the case if the beta was a site that was in anyway fit for release.
Releasing that half baked site was a disgrace and not only suggests that the office doesn't care about the user base it creates the optics that they hold them in complete contempt. Whoever deemed that site worthy for release should be fired. If that was you Dav I am sorry. If it was your development team then they have painted a huge target on your back, they should apologise to you before they are fired. If the order came from the top level to roll it out then they do not understand the damage that doing something like that has done.
I have no problem with change once it is done in the correct manner. I have put my thoughts on what should happen earlier in this thread. The UI/UX testing needs to be revamped. I think we are all in agreement when I say that putting a half baked site into the wild would be extremely counter-productive and will damage the offices reputation even further with the user base.
Thanks again for responding and remember the criticisms are not personal it is just business.0 -
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It's no fun to go away for a break and come back to a huge thread bashing the work your doing, but that's part of the gig
I don't think its a personal thing nor would the membership provide feedback in this manner if it no longer cared. I think it should be acknowledged that this is not a personal attack on you or anyone but i there is feedback in this manner no matter what the company it would point to their being an issue with communications.Search Functionality
Needs an overhaul is on the list as a Highest Priority item.
Is there a roadmap for this? Big part of the problem folks will have seen is the past is that things are a priority but it takes time to happen and the road map not being clear makes folk think stuff aint happening.
"The office just won't listen!"
It disappoints me that no one seems to be willing to give us any credit for the last 18 years of doing things based on community feedback and every time we propose some changes, no matter how big and small, we get insults, hostility and hyperbole. It makes this process take a lot longer and gets everyone bent out of shape. So please folks, we don't doubt your passion for wanting the best for Boards.ie, but I'm just asking that you to give us the benefit of the doubt and remember that we're just as passionate about it as you are. I know there's a lot of pressure for "instant" fixes to things, but that's just not possible when we need to have time to see how people react to things - if we had any feasible means of testing some of the stuff we want to work on anywhere but the live environment, we'd do it, but that's just not an option for things like UI/UX work. I don't know why you think there's some sort of "us and them" between the office and the site's membership, but if that's because of how I've communicated things, then I'm putting my hands up and offering an unreserved apology because this site means more to me than my family. We don't always think clearly when we're talking about the things we love, I guess I'm as guilty of that as anyone, but I do my damnedest to be clear.
But, and there's always a but, the office ultimately has to make the decisions that keep this site here for the next 18 years and beyond. We make these decisions with our analytics numbers, our intuition and of course, our community. But our community is not, for example, a web development team or a team of lawyers, so we have to do the work and get feedback from the relevant parties - designs by committee as anyone will tell you don't work, but we do try for "design by consensus" which allows us to get at least most of the people happy most of the time. Taking the responsive site as our latest example. You don't like it - that's both abundantly clear and perfectly fine - we're bringing parts of it back to the drawing board. But we needed some time to see how it was received by not only our logged in active members, but the visitors too. However, if we read through the thread about it, you'll see the office is "forcing you" to use it (we're not, we asked you to try it if you wanted and the legacy site hasn't gone anywhere) or that we're somehow doing it just for advertising revenue (there are less ads on every page of the responsive site than the legacy site by the way). If you think the levels of vitriol being thrown at us and me personally about the design of a website are somehow acceptable then we have a very different point of view about life. If you think that we're just going to ignore it and plough on regardless then I'd like to know why you think we'd want to operate that way because it makes as much sense as a chocolate teapot.
Maybe i have missed some of this thread but was the feedback really that bad and when does feedback become vitriol? It shouldnt be acceptable at all but folk should feel empowered to provide feedback as if they dont feel they can give it they will go elsewhere."Moderation is rubbish!"
I don't support this statement at all. I will offer this though, our moderation is the single biggest issue people have with our site. We have a reputation for being ban-happy and that's well earned. We decided a long, long time ago to not allow this place to become a wild west like Usenet became (and if you don't know what Usenet is, think Reddit except done by email and with no up/down voting). It's mostly worked I think. It can improve though. Certainly our tone isn't as good as it should be when the automated processes are sending messages etc. There's also a pressing need to talk tact and tone with all mods in order to minimise the opportunities to be misinterpreted. Consistency is the number 1 problem facing Moderation on this site because 1) we're all human and 2) different forums have different standards of acceptability and the general public doesn't care about that, so feel it's unjust. 3) there's no willingness to accept that experienced mods/Cmods/Admins with their fingers on the pulse of a forum and its community do know what's best when a tough decision has to be made, instead we have "outrage" when decisions are made and/or whilst a team of mods is trying to fix an issue on what might be a fast paced and constantly evolving issue. We can't apply quick fixes to big problems, they only make for more and bigger problems.
I think this misses a big part of the feedback in this thread, it wasn't a general charge of being rubbish that was being put across. A good part of thefeedback dealt with politics taking hold within moderation and some of decisions were driving the place to become an echo chamber. As advised i have seen example of this happening in one of the sub forums i posted in, when the crimes of the wider online community were impacting on our community here. This was been driven by a category moderator who we are supposed to put 100% trust in that they know the community.
If we cannot provide feedback on the moderation community because they are volunteers then it leaves it well open to abuse as there is no accountability. Again you find yourself in a situation where people will stop posting.
Editing to clarify i dont think there would ever be intentional abuse but group think is something that has plagued many an organization.0 -
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