Who Watches the Watchmen (Our Chit Chat Thread)

banie01

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117666978#Comment_117666978

Do you think Omega might have be taking into account a flight to 2nd hand as a result of their supposed new policy?

I know the price of the new speedie has been discussed ad nauseaum but, I think they may have realized that their play for Rolex adjacent pricing has left them in an unattractive gap between Tudor and a few others V Rolex.

893bet

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117667213#Comment_117667213

Agree a million percent. But second hand ones at 4.5k is equally laughable. But the market is mad.

893bet

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117667280#Comment_117667280

No idea. But they are backing them into a funny corner.

Rolex are bad value for money (horologically) but amazing for the residuals.

Omega are pushing themselves into a position where they are equally poor vfm but with poor residuals. I am sure they know what the doing. It’s only 6 months ago that I sold 2 x omega cheap. And there was no que. Irish market is small and I wasn’t too bother waiting it out perhaps as when I decide to get rid I just want it gone. But still. second market is soft in Omega bar the speedmaster which seems to be better.

Tudor are the vfm brand at the minute but let’s not be fooled into thinking that they won’t bang their prices up as high and as fast as they can.

scwazrh

I need a valuation for my submariner for insurance company .With a Rolex valuation which is the correct valuation , is it the RRP of €8k or the real world replacement cost of closer to €11k?

Fitz II

Go to the likes of Dawson and get a valuation for the grey market price, RRP is a fictional thing. I insure all my watches for immediate replacement value. Its a PIA my insurance wont accept a chrono valuation. Dawson charge me 100 euro for a new valuation and 50 euro for an update

Mitch Buchannon

👆️ Is that 100 per watch Fitz ? I could probably do with getting my good ones updated on my policy.

unkel

Most insurance companies (like Zurich) accept valuations from any jeweler, they don't care if it is from a reseller of second hand watches like Dawson or from an AD like Weirs - the latter charge €250 for this BTW 🙄

I get mine done in my local jeweler, he charges €30

fulladapipes

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117663636#Comment_117663636

Nearly. He wears a Rolex Datejust 41mm.

Cyclingtourist

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117681468#Comment_117681468

I'm in his constituency and Rolex v Omega could be an election issue. 🤓

Cienciano

Very cool lamp in lidl for €20. Works wired or wireless, very bright and compact. Ideal for working on watches

Cienciano

Christ, I hate this new website!

cnocbui

I have one of these and find it amazingly useful for all sorts of things. It has an 18650 battery which is good, capacity wise. I really like how you can adjust the brightness level. About a third the price.

Boards is rubbish. I still don't know how you post a text quote from a website. Why is a thread on watches under 'health and environment'?

Cyclingtourist

Boards is rubbish. I still don't know how you post a text quote from a website. Why is a thread on watches under 'health and environment'?

Copy and paste.

Because watch collecting is a healthy hobby. 🧐

Fitz II

Look at the number of likes the photos are getting in the "here is my watch today" thread...usually any old watch would get at least 8 or 9 now its 2 or 3. There are very few people on the forum now, and the longer it goes on the more habitual their absence will get.

Boards.ie is dead, I lament its demise but hard to see a recovery at this stage

Cienciano

Traffic must be way down. I usually to check in a few times a day, now I just can't be bothered.

Ian OB

None of my watches are in any danger

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jul/29/warning-spate-luxury-watch-thefts-women-southern-england

893bet

I still read this forum a lot and the farming forum. But that’s it.

I used always look at the “trending” threads and then read a lot and post a little in loads of other forums. But now the random interacts with other topics are gone.

Fitz II

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117683583#Comment_117683583

Is there a irish watch subreddit or group....I am missing my watch banter fix....

Cyclingtourist

"Look at the number of likes the photos are getting in the "here is my watch today" thread...usually any old watch would get at least 8 or 9 now its 2 or 3. "

It's not just about the watch, I try to add a bit of interest to mine. I 'like' most watch photos whether they're "any old" or 'luxuary'. Someone's taken the trouble to post a photo and deserves it is my attitude.I

Part of the reason for the drop off could be that when you post in a thread you aren't automatically notified any more.

Anyway I'm doing my bit and as a social media phobe won't be joining any of those new fangled groups.

banie01

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117684133#Comment_117684133

Much like 893 I'd post spend most of my pre-change time on here with time on some other forums too and a weather eye on the trending threads that I'd often drop in and out of. The immediacy of the old style is gone, it's a slog to use, browse and even the threads like your YouTube thread, Blanchy's and the photos thread are dying a death.

Don't know about another Irish watch forum, but TF did mention a discord group and that's where a lot of folks on a private sub I'm on here have migrated to now aswell.

I have all the foibles of the "new" boards sussed in the main, and I still fúcking hate it! At this point, the craic and the camaraderie is gone 😣

Wibbs

Fitz Boards.ie is dead, I lament its demise but hard to see a recovery at this stage

It's severely wounded that's for damned sure F. I can completely understand a few glitches after moving a site this big over to a new platform, especially one in another timezone and one that doesn't work on weekends(WTF? An interwebs company???), but it's clear there have been monumental fcukups from somebody somewhere. the My Forums dropdown menu should have been in the top three must haves out of the box. That couldn't be any more bloody obvious and yet... The average person wouldn't have given a fcuk about posts from fifteen years ago, or even their old private messages(which we can't delete now BTW, which is well out of bloody order), but not adressing the ablity to navigate the site from the very start is beyond headscratching. When you can't find discussions(even your own) on a discussion site then that's you're bleeding out until you can.

The CEO chap said in the feedback forum that the old Boards steup was too expensive to maintain and Boards itself couldn't pay for itself anymore.

I quote: We have been out of runway in Boards.ie for a long time now. The site could not support itself financially ... If we did not do this there would be no Boards.

This explains the only Dev for the place, a lad who I have always had huge sympathy for and especially now. That's a concern given the Woo Flu injected a lot of extra traffic last year. So they had to move to a more easily and cheap to run platform. Cool beans. He also said they tested things before the move.

Reading between the lines it would be my opinion the gobdaws in Canuckistan fcuked up/couldn't be arsed. The fact that they started the migration on a Thursday, then after seeing the site wasn't live after two days the pricks buggered off for the weekend leaving dead air. I've subcontracted IT guys and companies before and a couple of times weekend and after hours work came up as these things will and never did any of them say, sorry have to clock off now. So the Dev lad and apparently they have others digging in to help now could have come up with all the fixes today, but the Vanilla crowd in Canada won't look at them until around noon on Monday, try them see if they work, maybe implement some that do and throw what doesn't back for another 24 hours.

scwazrh

If a site with as many visitors as boards had , pre switch over couldn’t make money there is something seriously wrong on management side .Very quick to blame the infrastructure for the costs out , I’m sure a bit of entrepreneurship on the money in side of things would of worked better than reducing the usability of the site .

Wibbs

Ad revenue on websites fell off a cliff a few years back, IIRC because of how google paid out on such things. I remember at the time DeVore(so we're going back a while) who was one of those who started the place said it affected them pretty badly. Plus the visitor numbers before this changeover were quite a bit down on the peak around ten years ago, though covid gave it a boost.

There are many more competing platforms today, people seem to prefer more echo chamber environments and most also use phones rather than PC's to access sites like this. Boards has been bleeding money for quite a few years. When Daft.ie bought it they did so to get Adverts, Boards was a nice sideline at the time, but not the main focus and has been passed from pillar to post since. If they had kept it as a loss leader then it would have been fine, but they didn't and it's been running on fumes for a while with nobody too sure about how to make it pay for itself, never mind turn a profit. A lot of the forums that are still out there are either tiny one man band operations or part of a much larger and profitable enterprise that keeps them going. The time where a forum could provide living wages and self support are sadly long gone.

unkel

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117686188#Comment_117686188

Boards.ie might be loss making but that could have been easily fixed by cutting costs, no? 10 years ago or so, boards did not have any paid staff. And the site was bigger than it was in recent years (with several paid staff). Plenty of silly volunteers like yourself and myself who have donated thousands of hours of our time for free.

Surely there was no need to euthanise the site with this "upgrade"? 😮

Wibbs

IIRC Boards.ie did have "staff" or at least a couple of the founder guys were getting some revenue from it and to keep the lights on. I suspect more of the latter as they all had other main business/career interests.

If I were to try and save it, I would (searchable)archive everything over say two years old, reduce the list of forums to only those with daily posts. That alone would get rid of a lot of dead flesh. Move it to some proprietary platform like vbulletin or whatever has replaced it and don't customise it, so it doesn't need constant tweaking. Get users and mods more directly involved as far as hosting and running the site. Could you "cloud" a forum I wonder? Spread the load across loads of member's PC's?

That's not a business model though. The business model is what we're seeing here. Keep it "in house", move it to another platform, likely the cheapest if they don't "do" weekends and take their sweet time to update things and hope the monthly costs of that are covered by what ad revenue is earned so the place wipes its face and runs itself. And probably put the existing staff on part time, or...

Wibbs

There's another site that was set up in the wake of Board's update and it's going well now, but it's got under 400 members and is in the honeymoon stage. The first bit of rancour or disagreement will tell how it will go on. It won't be easy for a "one man band" to navigate that. Boards started off with a couple of forums and no mods at first. And let's face it people seemed to be a lot more polite in the interwebs past. It had a cost of entry and most people online were "geeks" and "nerds" who tend to be A more intelligent than average and B generally more easygoing. These days any Karen or Ken can mash their barely opposable thumbs on their new AndriPhone. Democratisation is great, but it brings in its wake more arseholes.

njburke

Would a small annual subscription not have fixed their revenue issues? It might also have addressed the Karen and Ken issues. I suppose if they monetized the forum that way it might be hard to keep a small army of unpaid moderators.

Fitz II

I think there are two issues being conflated here wibbs, wheather boards.ie makes money or not really doesnt have much to do with the platform. Hosting a VB board is pretty cheap even one with terabyte's of data. THe most expensive thing is changing platform so I call total bullshit on that excuse. It may be that the monetisation capacity of the Vbullitin was limited but thats another issues altogether.

When boards emplodes I can see the murder rate going up as the Admins will have no outlet for their their feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness IRL.

Wibbs

I think there are two issues being conflated here wibbs, wheather boards.ie makes money or not really doesnt have much to do with the platform. Hosting a VB board is pretty cheap even one with terabyte's of data. THe most expensive thing is changing platform so I call total bullshit on that excuse.

Depends entirely on how it is run too Fitz. If it's a more homegrown, a few servers in someone's gaff type of affair it's pretty cheap alright. That's if the VB setup is standard and not patched to all hell as Boards was, because VB couldn't handle a site of the size it was with the number of active forums it had. The other expense is it went "Business", well business school business anyway. Adverts was a good example of that where they started tarting up their office like a cut price google with beanbags, coffee machines and the dregs of a closed pub sale with old bicycles on the wall, thinking this was good for the Optics(tm) on social media. Went Celtic Tiger when that particular feline species was already extinct and stuffed and mounted in the National Irish Museum of WTF Were We Thinking. Middle managers love that crap. It's like catnip to them. Ditto for long meetings, funky office space and paying chancers for projections on Powerpoint. You may as well fly in a witch doctor and get him to throw the bones. And when you bring in Talk To forums trying to inject more cash it's middle managers talking to other middle managers in their best Linkedin speak. There can be a lot of dead weight and wasted money spent on that sorta thing when business gets involved. It should have been open sourced as much as possible way back IMHO.

There are hidden expenses too. Legal being a big one as a publisher in Ireland. Ambulance chasers know publishers without very deep pockets are on the back foot under Irish law. Hell a few years back there was an Irish bloggist whose name escapes who was taken to court over some opinion piece they wrote on their blog and were fined tens of thousands of beer tokens. Boards.ie would be and was in the firing line for that stuff. Just dealing with the MCD thing would have cost a lot in legal fees. If they had gone to court/lost, game over. Then the aforementioned Talk To forums which were a good idea on paper. Again you've to hire someone to talk to those entities and be on the other end of a phone and to have an office space to meet with them. To look serious bizness and professional an' that. That costs money.

So yeah something like I dunno an Irish car forum with a few hundred members running on VB or whatever is cheap as chips to run, but a forum with tens of thousands of members with a wide range of subjects, with thousands of posts per day at its peak and a talk to business section, not nearly so cheap at all.

Wibbs

Actually one could argue the current CEO guy inherited the "business" bloated Boards.ie and this move was a way to downsize those costs by going to a newer cheaper platform.

When boards emplodes I can see the murder rate going up as the Admins will have no outlet for their their feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness IRL.

As for admins; I've met a load of them down the years, most of them I'd reckon. Some I liked, some I wouldn't have gotten on with and vice versa, but were otherwise grand and that's cool. Including one who after he found out about a bereavement I was going through dragged me out for drinks to get me out of my funk and I'd only met the chap once before in the real world. I can only think of two who I really didn't get on with and didn't respect because they were indeed fond of powertripping. Given the number of people who've held that role that's a pretty good split IMHO. Oh and most of them were doing pretty well(a couple very well) in life beyond Boards, so no inadequacies there that I could see.