Boards is becoming a Ghost Town

intheclouds

Hollister11 wrote: »

So with your ideology Facebook engineers can work from home.

The managers, developers and designers need to be able to collaborate and have meetings when necessary, and I don't think they would be conformable doing that at home.

If you have a business, you need office space. End of.

Where I work we have offices in 3 different countries and lots of home based staff and we have skype meetings and video conferencing. Its software development. Its totally possible.

intheclouds

KERSPLAT! wrote: »

Ah will you go on outta that :rolleyes:

hate that smiley but I feel its appropriate here.

Servers, space, software licences, staff (of which I know there are definitely 3 but probably more), office (even a 1 room office in town costs a bomb), etc, etc.

3 x staff alone you're talking €100k+

Im not disputing the cost of staff at all. I simply dont know how many there are and have always assumed not many given the sheer lack of change over time.

Servers/space/software licences - again, I am not disputing this stuff but boards isnt a standalone enterprise, its is part of Distilled Media so the costs will be lessened by being a small part of a larger whole.

Office space - well see my comment above. I had the impression there were very few paid staff so would hardly need an office given the nature of the work and could probably borrow the odd meeting room elsewhere in Distilled Media if necessary.

Im simply curious is all.

irishdude11

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.

Its a mistake than the extremely annoying modding and even the disastrous redesign.

The functionality afforded by the old menu which just required hover-clicking was incredibly efficient compared to the way it is now. This was pointed out and complained about for months back when they changed it but the complaints weren't listened to - http://www.boards.ie/b/thread/2057416973/47?

What kind of idiot UX designers did they hire in that thought it was a good idea to sacrifice this functionality? The damage done by that move is too much to make up for, too many forums dried up.

smash

intheclouds wrote: »

Where I work we have offices in 3 different countries and lots of home based staff and we have skype meetings and video conferencing. Its software development. Its totally possible.

Yes it is totally possible, but in the case of boards a better approach would be for distilled media to say 'We have a pile of sites and a few isolated teams/offices... time to cut the fat and combine the expertise'

smash

irishdude11 wrote: »

What kind of idiot UX designers did they hire in that thought it was a good idea to sacrifice this functionality? The damage done by that move is too much to make up for, too many forums dried up.

There's a very logical explanation to this.

Either the designers are not forum users or management made the call to use the space to promote the commercial aspect.

I'm going to go with a little bit of A and a whole lot of B.

Beasty

Audited accounts are showing a cumulative loss of half a million at 31/12/14

The company made a loss in 2014.

It basically needs support (from Distilled Media I presume) to continue providing the service we do get. Of course some if us chip in a little via subs but let's face it they could pull the plug tomorrow.

Despite any problems/concerns with recent changes users are (except for subscribers) getting something for nothing here. I for one am grateful they do continue to invest in this business.

intheclouds

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.

Absolutely - couldnt agree more.

smash

Beasty wrote: »

It basically needs support (from Distilled Media I presume) to continue providing the service we do get.

I think that's too simplistic an outlook Beasty. Adverts would be nothing without boards and neither would talk-to (Which evidently looks like it's going to be set up as a separate site too). In order for these spring-off's to grow, boards is required and in order for boards to be sustainable the user base is required. I'm sure Distilled Media are happy to subsidise boards in order to meet their growth projections for the other sites but at the end of the day everything in their plan can come crashing down as soon as accounts start closing. Free service or not, we are their business.

K-9

ThisRegard wrote: »

I actually use the Touch site on all my mobile devices, I actually think it's pretty usable.

m.boards is great for new posts, think it is 20 pages, 25 threads per page. Might be too many but it seems a lot of people want plenty of new content to read.

K-9

Bambi wrote: »

Ontrapaynoor

Looks theres a gensai loads of dip****s in this country who think that word alone is some sort of social movement.

How do you think the web summit managed to fleece so many of them?

Subtle as ever Bambi, but yeah, lots of truth in that.

Dyr

intheclouds wrote: »

Where I work we have offices in 3 different countries and lots of home based staff and we have skype meetings and video conferencing. Its software development. Its totally possible.

It sure is totally possible to shift your costs onto your employees

It's also totally sleazy

intheclouds

Bambi wrote: »

It sure is totally possible to shift your costs onto your employees

It's also totally sleazy

Home based employees are compensated for being home based? Thats the norm in my experience (and currently).

gandalf

KERSPLAT! wrote: »

Ah will you go on outta that :rolleyes:

hate that smiley but I feel its appropriate here.

Servers, space, software licences, staff (of which I know there are definitely 3 but probably more), office (even a 1 room office in town costs a bomb), etc, etc.

3 x staff alone you're talking €100k+

And you all have missed hosting and bandwidth which coupled with wages would be substantial monthly running costs.

D

I seem to remember a while back that boards was on two servers. One was for the DB and the other was the front end.
This was before distilled media.
Personally I would go back to the classic look that was already posted.:https://web.archive.org/web/20110505195603/http://www.boards.ie/

Still use the cloud theme, or what passes for it these days.

HamsterFace

So, are we all agreed that the lads in the office need to take a paycut?

Beasty

smash wrote: »

I think that's too simplistic an outlook Beasty. Adverts would be nothing without boards and neither would talk-to (Which evidently looks like it's going to be set up as a separate site too).

To the extent Talk To made a profit in 2014 that would be reflected in the Boards accounts.

To the extent Boards generated business for Adverts there should arguably be some kind of compensation to Boards, although that would be more subjective and difficult to quantify.

Wibbs

How much did this rejig cost? I'd suspect a fair oul whack.

The fact is forums are bloody hard to monetise. The payments from ads went off a cliff a few years back. Even if ads were good for revenue too many ads and people drift away, or block them. Few will pay subs for what appears to be already "free". Sponsorship seems to be another revenue stream I've seen on other forums(on a few car forums I'm on they'd have a few of those). In a way Daft "sponsors" Boards. Other forums are loss leaders for much larger enterprises. Touch of the Daft.ie there too.

Some forums can break even, maybe even make a little profit, but they're pretty much all "one man bands" run as very tight ships with about as much extra fat as a stripped down racing snake. Maybe Boards could tick along if it was one or two bods and a couple of servers in a privately owned space, but then you'd have to expect much more creaking and down time and something like a DDOS attack would render it extinct. Things like Cloudflare are monthly expenses nobody wants, but a site like Boards needs it.

intheclouds

How was it paid for in the days before ads?

Wibbs

intheclouds wrote: »

How was it paid for in the days before ads?

Barely.

intheclouds

Wibbs wrote: »

Barely.

Thats not what I asked. I asked how it was paid for.

Was it just an individual forking out his own money to run it?

IRLConor

smash wrote: »

Possibly for the entire distilled media network. But no way for boards on it's own. If this is true then they desperately need to hire an architect.

When I left about 5 years ago it took the following to run Boards.ie (working from memory here):

2 cache/load balancer/firewall machines in an active-active pair
8 web servers
3 database servers – 1 master, 2 slaves
1 NAS
1 metrics/monitoring/utilities box
+ some AWS EC2 machines for the search indexes (Solr)

I think the search machines are back in house now, but you'd need to ask someone actually working on it now. The physical hardware is pretty cheap and gets run for a long time before being replaced. All the hardware was needed because vBulletin is a pig. I was ripping chunks out of it continuously to keep giving us enough overhead.

You could probably run fewer boxes if you bought all new hardware but it's more cost efficient to rotate the hardware more slowly. For example when we increased from 5 to 8 web servers we probably could have bought 5 new ones and replaced one-for-one. That would have given us a similar capacity increase and reduced the number of machines, but would have cost a lot more and saved us nothing.

smash

intheclouds wrote: »

Thats not what I asked. I asked how it was paid for.

Was it just an individual forking out his own money to run it?

Subscribers, ad revenue and less staff.

IRLConor

smash wrote: »

Subscribers, ad revenue and less staff.

+ the founders putting their hands in their own pockets

K-9

Beasty wrote: »

To the extent Talk To made a profit in 2014 that would be reflected in the Boards accounts.

To the extent Boards generated business for Adverts there should arguably be some kind of compensation to Boards, although that would be more subjective and difficult to quantify.

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

smash

IRLConor wrote: »

When I left about 5 years ago it took the following to run Boards.ie (working from memory here):

2 cache/load balancer/firewall machines in an active-active pair
8 web servers
3 database servers – 1 master, 2 slaves
1 NAS
1 metrics/monitoring/utilities box
+ some AWS EC2 machines for the search indexes (Solr)

I think the search machines are back in house now, but you'd need to ask someone actually working on it now. The physical hardware is pretty cheap and gets run for a long time before being replaced. All the hardware was needed because vBulletin is a pig. I was ripping chunks out of it continuously to keep giving us enough overhead.

You could probably run fewer boxes if you bought all new hardware but it's more cost efficient to rotate the hardware more slowly. For example when we increased from 5 to 8 web servers we probably could have bought 5 new ones and replaced one-for-one. That would have given us a similar capacity increase and reduced the number of machines, but would have cost a lot more and saved us nothing.

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.

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.

intheclouds

smash wrote: »

Subscribers, ad revenue and less staff.

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.

smash

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.

What's your definition of recent?

_Kaiser_

Hollister11 wrote: »

So with your ideology Facebook engineers can work from home.

The managers, developers and designers need to be able to collaborate and have meetings when necessary, and I don't think they would be conformable doing that at home.

If you have a business, you need office space. End of.

If I recall right, there was a big outcry on Adverts around the time that they introduced the whole Success Fee idea and part of it was the point that they'd all just moved into expensive new digs (kitted out with all that "employee friendly stuff" like bean bags and such) in the city centre.

That's a fairly significant cost I'd imagine.

Esel

intheclouds wrote: »

Interesting.

I thought Distilled Media would have a hardware budget - cant imagine boards.ie itself using much in the line of heavily expensive hardware.

Same comment for software. I didnt think vBulletin was that expensive anyway. (I include licensing costs in software).

Premises - for who? Surely staff can work from home given the nature of the site?

Staff - who? All I ever see here is people going on about Mods being volunteers - so there must only be developers and admins. And given the speed of development Id be surprised if its more than one person. How many admins?

Bills and Rates - if staff worked from home they wouldnt need office space.

Id be interested to see a breakdown tbh, how did the site run before there was advertising revenue?

Wtf? Wow...

Be interesting to see the Adverts.ie balance sheet.

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

gandalf

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.