ROLL IT BACK

Doctors room ghost

Boards needs to go back to the way it was.this new version is cat malodeon.

cant find anything on it.

its a pity.was a great site

Will I Am Not

Talk to… the hand.

Dubh Geannain

You used to be able to use a search function within a forum when doing word searches. Now all there seems to be is a general site search which throw out loads of irrelevant posts and threads.

Boards.ie: Niamh

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117639776#Comment_117639776

@Beirut You can email hello@boards.ie or datarequests@boards.ie to request your account be closed (and anonymised).

Headshot

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117640284#Comment_117640284

That would mean they actually care about boards or the community which obviously they don't judging from this awful site and lack of communication

Not a peep out of CEO, Odhran and his ilk

They don't give a **** about us

The Nal

Question - is this the worst "upgrade" you've ever seen on a website?

Geuinely cant think of a worse one.

Final Approach

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117640284#Comment_117640284

I mis-read this and thought it said : those in charge are having an emergency meeting to discuss pulling the plug on this new platform...

The wave of relief that washed over me, I was like "YESSS!!!"............to then realise my mistake : (

To those in charge/responsible for this "upgrade". I am a very long time lurker, and despite not contributing much over the years, I have boards.ie bookmarked on my phone and would casually take a read of various threads/forums 5 - 6 times a day. Boards for me is (or was) a fantastic source of news, opinions, and general entertainment. It was a very small, but a significant enough part of my daily life to miss it more than I thought I would. I am speaking in the past tense, as, along with many others it seems, I feel that these changes have ruined the experience for me - probably enough to give up using the site. It is irritating as it is disappointing, because it really was one of my go-to sites for several reasons.

I can only imagine how those that are used to spending more time and energy than myself on this site than must feel like.

Please, for those of us that really enjoyed board.ie for everything it used to be, ROLL IT BACK! (It really is worse than you might realise. Really).

Elwood_Blues

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117635242#Comment_117635242

Thanks for the tip.. I've signed up and gonna keep calling Boards and gubu to see who comes to me first... In all seriousness, the migration approach wasn't great. Will still give boards a chance to see if things improve but will be cheating on it with gubu.

Arghus

Realistically though as much as we all want it to happen, it's never going to happen is it? The die has been cast.

I'd love to hear from someone who actually knows something about this. It's all very well for us to be screaming ROLL IT BACK without having the faintest clue if it's possible.

I know fck all about the development side of things. How desperate was the situation that it required a total change like this? How irretrievable is it?

Boards is still busyish, but traffic is way, way down. There's threads still on the front page of AH that haven't had a new post since 10 o clock yesterday morning. That's a crazy level of declined activity for such a previously busy forum.

You go into previously bustling threads now and you might find a handful of posts. The only place where some action is is these feedback threads where 90% of the contributions are voicing frustration. And unlike previous threads that become places for people to vent, it isn't just cranks. There's long time users and even moderators queuing up to say how much it all sucks.

There's not a single person using this site that prefers it this way.

fancy pigeon

I wouldn't imagine it's too easy to roll back. We've had a fair few changes over the years but I would (begrudgingly) eventually get used to the new site if the full functionality was there. Like when I want to go to the most recent post, but it just brings me to the start of the thread. Or no differentiation between stickys and threads

There's a lot of niggly bits that make the experience miserable and I hope they get sorted in due time

MrMusician18

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117642150#Comment_117642150

This often happens when a site gets totally revamped to be fair. The problem is that the old site had years of effort in its creation with functionality and tweaks added here and there that the users liked. This all has to be recreated in the new site. With one dev it will take months at best.

I am not knowledgeable enough to know why vbulletin had to go but it's clear that not even 10% of the necessary testing went into the new site - especially for a site that needs to hit the ground running. That said, I don't think a roll back is a realistic request either.

I know boards owes me nothing nor I them and they don't have to answer to me. It is sad to see such a great resource go down the swanee though. But all great projects ultimately end in failure.

Tokyo

Let me preface this by saying that I am posting my opinion rather than as site admin. It's fair to say that we are all struggling with the new forum software until changes have been made - mods and admin as well as regular users. And I do think that Niamh and Mark have tried to be as transparent as possible with where areas of focus are right now, namely site speed and navigation. vBulletin -> Vanilla was never going to be a like for like migration in all areas, particularly with 20 years worth of content, vBulletin hacks and so on. I imagine that once core issues have been sorted, issues that are more shopfront facing and visible to the user will be addressed. But I understand that it can be frustrating when what's being worked with under the bonnet isn't always immediately visible.

For those saying, "roll it back", "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and so on, I do think there is an element of rose tinted glasses or convenient ignoring of the truth going on, depending on how you look at it. To the best of my technical knowledge in this area, vBulletin, or at least the revision used by boards, was never designed for the amount of traffic Boards received. Nor the size of the threads that endured on the site. Multiple hacks were incorporated into the site over the years to implement certain functionality, to address database issues and so on. The software as it stood was most definitely broke in that it had reached its capacity, and people are forgetting the myriad of 503 errors, freezes, and so on. My personal opinion is that an upgrade to the forum software wasn't just necessary, but long overdue, and that Boards simply wouldn't have been able to continue in any reasonable capacity on its existing platform.

That's not an argument that the site as it is right now is something I'd wish to stay in place, but I do believe it's a far more stable platform to build on than the previous, outdated, hacked together vBulletin platform, and I think that with some time and patience, the functionality that we all want can be brought back in a far more stable form. Again, personal opinion rather than any great insight into what's happening behind the scenes, but I imagine that once things have settled with the new platform, development time can actually be pointed towards improving the user experience, rather than almost all development time put towards keeping the site up and running, which I believe was the case in the past.

Just my 0.02c...

Discodog

The question is will the few posters using it hang around until it's finally fixed & then will Boards be able to attract the additional posters to replace the ones that have left or just given up ? I can't see a way that Boards comes out of this mess with more traffic.

By the way Tokyo it's a good job you mentioned Admin as there's nothing to say your an Admin :)

MrMusician18

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117642796#Comment_117642796

There are some issues with that comment. Boards traffic is way way down on its heyday of 2010/11, so it was not traffic issues. Granted the database is bigger than ever before but a much much simpler solution would have been to archive threads that have seen no action in say 5 years. I don't know why that wasn't the road taken but that's somewhat besides the point. The key point is that the migration has been a complete and utter shambles. The team were obviously not at all ready for it.

You might think that's easy for me to say, captain of infinite wisdom hiding behind the keyboard but at the moment at work in managing a technical transition too. Failure is not an option in any sense. We must embed the new technology and it cannot result in downtime or lost data. That's why it's a parallel project, executed on the new system and copied to the old at the end of the day. Yes, we don't see the productivity gains all immediately, in fact it's probably negative and expensive but when the system is mature and we are comfortable we will drop the evening copy. As I said failure is not an option.

Traffic is critical for this site to survive as a business and the move is killing it. I cannot for the life of me understand why this transition was carried out in such a half baked careless manner - since the staffs jobs depend on it being a success. It was obvious to everyone, that while a lot of effort had gone into the template, it wasn't in the ballpark of being ready, it's an alpha stage release.

That said, those hoping for a roll back are not going to get it, it's vanilla or bust at this stage.

Snickers Man

[Tokyo said:] I am posting my opinion rather than as site admin. ....... I do believe it's a far more stable platform to build on than the previous, outdated, hacked together vBulletin platform, and I think that with some time and patience, the functionality that we all want can be brought back in a far more stable form. [/tokyo said]

With all due respect, that comes across as the opinion of a site admin or a techie who looks under the bonnet to see the arcane stuff that the rest of us mere mortals neither know nor care about and says: "Hey that's neat! Compared to what it was." What he/she hasn't considered is what the users experience, ie the basic access and navigational controls of how to use the site.

[Tokyo also said] I imagine that once things have settled with the new platform, development time can actually be pointed towards improving the user experience, [/tokyo also said]

IMPROVE?????

How about starting with "Retain"?

You/they have thrown out the baby with the bath water. The user experience has been completely sacrificed to please the techies. For example, when I tried to quote these two sentences from your post to reply to you, the only option offered is to quote your entire post!!!! You used to be able to click "Quote", the entire post would appear and then you could delete all but the line or lines you wanted. Now, to do the same thing, I have to manually cut and paste each phrase. And that's just a minor gripe.

How on EARTH is it a good idea to completely disregard how users access the site just to make some under the bonnet modifications that, I'll take your word for it, might have been necessary?

It's like taking your car in for a service and on collection finding that the garage has taken out the seats, disconnected the radio, reprogrammed the dashboard computer so that it now appears in Kanji and saying "Hey your oil and air filters were in rag order but now they're brand spanking new and we've also replaced the head gasket! You'll really notice the improved compression. Did you really want those seats anyway?"

I'm all for making techies' lives easier and reducing their stress levels by limiting the amount of repetitive crap they have to deal with but this is the sort of heedless "upgrade" that gives techies a bad name.

Was this performed by the BOFH?

Looks like it.

Glaceon

Definitely can't see a rollback happening for the reasons outlined in @Tokyo's post above. Also because it would result in the loss of all data from the Vanilla version and I couldn't see a "reverse migration" being done for those. I'm guessing that migrating to a supported version of vBulletin was probably not possible due to the amount of hacks and mods made to it over the years.

I don't know the ins and outs of this but I feel it could have been handled better. I don't understand why it wasn't possible to beta test the new environment before going live because the state it came back in had definitely left a sour taste in many people's mouths. As did the long downtime to migrate it (was it not possible to take a live snapshot followed by an incremental sync during downtime?). Even the much-hated responsive site didn't produce such a serious reaction, although in fairness it wasn't mandatory either.

BorneTobyWilde

That says it all

Lik

e

MrMusician18

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117642968#Comment_117642968

90% of the data since the migration has been about complaining about the migration.

They really should go live with a parallel vbulletin old.boards.ie while they fix this.

And when it's actually ready then kill the old site.

Del.Monte

Is it possible to close an account and remove all posts? I know the official answer but two well known posters (Fratton Fred and Srameen) come to mind as posters with huge numbers of posts who seem to have removed everything.

ben.schlomo

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117642882#Comment_117642882

It literally says Admin under their name. A lot of people's complaints re speed and not being able find things seem very odd as I've no speed issues and don't find it difficult to find anything now that I know where the soccer forum is. Is it down to the browsers people are using? I'm on chrome on mobile and find it no better or worse than the old site for speed.

My only gripes are similar to an above post mentioning no differentiation between sticky and threads. No name of user and last post time in a thread. No email updates for threads, as far as I can see.

Discodog

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117643055#Comment_117643055

It doesn't say admin on my desktop

Del.Monte

You have to click on profile and then go there to find out whether a poster is what they claim to be.

Del.Monte

mossie

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117643143#Comment_117643143

Nor on mine

I can see he's an admin.

I can live with the new design but having to search for forums I use is madness. Definitely my usage is, way down.

Rollback won't happen and a parralel site isn't workable as it builds up data which will then have to be transferred

Disappointed that the menu fix didn't work. Not seen an explanation for it.

Discodog

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117643219#Comment_117643219

Thanks. I thought that I must be blind :)

mossie

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117643384#Comment_117643384

It shows admin on mobile but not on desktop. Another glitch I guess

podgeandrodge

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117643055#Comment_117643055

You "literally" should make sure you're right without having a go at other people 😆

ben.schlomo

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117643564#Comment_117643564

Well I was right, it literally says it under their name. I'm on the mobile site. I can't be accountable to others choices to use a desktop. 😄

Tokyo

^^ I think we're getting hung up on the wrong thing here :) Mobile site shows user titles, but it seems that the custom layout for the desktop site doesn't yet.

99nsr125

https://boards.ie/discussion/2058199400/roll-it-back

Yep

Ye fųcked it, just put a classic option in

fritzelly

They seriously should have just taken their time and programmed their own software their own way rather than trying to hack another forum software to work the way they want it to work - they complained about vbulletin being an issue but that was surely down to all the custom modifications they made to it and they are doing exactly the same thing now

If a software does not fulfill you requirements out of the box with future upgrades then you write your own code

I could have written the base code for what Boards "did" in the space of a few weeks - we're not talking rocket science when it comes to forum code, it's a bit of html, a bit of css, a bit of js and some DB optimisation

I was looking at the business plans for Vanilla - nearly 700 euro a month and we end up with this crap after 2 weeks and no end in sight

namloc1980

The soccer forum is absolutely gone since the change. It's like a ghost town over there. Actually seeing a lot of forums are only a shadow of what they were in terms of updates and regular posting.

CantGetNoSleep

It is absolutely unexplainable how there are still no drop down menus on the desktop site, and still no easy way to access my forums (the 10-15 forums that a user might use on a daily basis) on the mobile site, over a week after going live and following a few hours of down-time the other day

stronglikebull

I've never used the Feedback forum before this week, and now it's practically the only thing I'm looking at. Mainly to see what's being said about "the big disaster", but also because it's just about the only place with any new threads or posts.

Also, the forums no longer list any of the mods, cmods or admins, and there's no way to know if a poster is a mod/cmod/admin when they post, or if they're just a regular joe barking at people (on desktop anyway). Could lead to a lot of unnecessary aggravation.

Inviere

Not to pile on the weight the staff are no doubt feeling right now (God help them!), but I think it's so very telling that ten years ago nearly to the day, the site was like a Rolls Royce compared to what it is now - https://web.archive.org/web/20110721122309/http://www.boards.ie/ I really miss that version of the site, it was damned near perfect for what Boards aspired to be. Efficient use of space, nice delineation, functional, intuitive, was easy to explore and discover new communities, and was in general just a pleasant place to visit.

There's no doubt in my mind that everyone behind the scenes is putting their heart and soul into this migration, but to be fair to all (staff, volunteers, and users), it's been an unmitigated disaster. It's head scratching how the green light for the migration was given. I've been around Boards to see several site updates....they're never received well, usually because people don't like change. This is way, way, way beyond merely change though....the site actually shouldn't be live right now it's that bad. We seem to have lost some defining features of what made Boards unique, and the site is very very broken at the moment, & traffic seems to have plummeted as a result, there's the usual acres of empty/wasted space we see with some 'contemporary' site designs, scrolling has increased massively, clicking seems to have increased significantly, and on the whole, the site is far too much effort to be bothered to try and use. It's definitely not, a pleasant place to visit today.

It could improve with time, bugs squashed, problems resolved, tweaks made here and there....if the site survives the prolonged periods with such reduced traffic, reduced function, and such reduced relevancy. I can already see the seeds of some of the improvements, tagging users in posts, embedding media, and so forth. I feel though that the next 6-12+ months will be spent chasing a version of the site I was able to use 3 weeks ago, with a handful of modern updates tacked on. Even at that, personally I've hated the look of the Talk-To forums for years, and now that the whole site looks like them, I'm not confident about liking the eventual finished result. My time here, like many at the moment, has reduced significantly, and that doesn't look to change any time soon.

The calls for the site to be rolled back to its previous incarnation....yeah, that's never going to happen, ever. Boards seems to have had major, major struggles with bringing itself up to date...remember the previous 'responsive' site? Another absolute disaster, but at the very least it went live alongside a legacy version of the site. Thankfully, that exposed enough shortcomings that it was eventually pulled. Not the case this time unfortunately, and we're stuck with this version now I feel. I suppose I'm just at a loss as to how Vanilla managed to convince Boards management this was the way to go.... Yes there's improvements coming, but with a single developer at the helm (can you imagine being that person?), the workload is unrealistic for the site of this size. Somebody somewhere made a colossal mistake in green lighting this mess, and a site that tens of thousands of people cherish every day of the week, seems to have gone down the toilet as a result.

The only person responsible for this mess is the CEO, Odhran Ginnity.

The responsibility comes with the authority, which comes with the position.

It’s not personal, it’s just a simple fact.

Pintman Paddy Losty

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117646017#Comment_117646017

Lad he's the CEO of a small regional messageboard not Jeff Bezos.

People need to chill out about this stuff. It's not the greatest injustice since the incarceration of Alfred Dreyfuss, its a site update that hasn't gone as smooth as expected.

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117646122#Comment_117646122

Hear Warren Buffett has been monitoring the situation closely, and is looking to oust most of the Boards.ie C-Suite.

DarkJager21

Is it just me or do spam threads seem to be a lot more prevalent on this platform? Counterfeit money yesterday, some sort of moving company today...

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117646122#Comment_117646122

Nonsense.

He's a professional CEO, member of multiple boards of directors, an experienced business strategist and currently sits in the driving seat of what at least was at one time the largest online community in Ireland.

Call a spade a spade. He was handed a shovel, thought it really needed to be a spade and put time and effort into beating it into a form that nobody wants, a tool that's no longer up to the job when a shovel is what's needed and not the spade they've turned it into.

The 'ah sure, it'll be grand' stuff has no place here. Over the past while, user experience and the user community here have ended up as backseat concerns, while all efforts have been made to secure commercial benefit for the business owners off the back of literally decades of that communities contribution. It's about time someone gave this consideration instead of lip service.

And nobody needs you to be making excuses for them here. They know what they've done. They know they've screwed this up. Just like most of us looking at what's in front of us today versus what was here in the past.

mdwexford

Is any Admin or anyone actually giving updates on what the plan is or reading this thread?

They said the site was going down for an hour the other night to restore the my forums and still no sign of them. If this goes on much longer the site won’t recover. People will find other forums and won’t return.

Mickeroo

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117646624#Comment_117646624

Niamh and Odhran have been giving updates each evening the last few days, over in this thread: https://boards.ie/discussion/2058198814/welcome-to-the-new-boards-ie-platform-version-1-0#latest

Laviski

honestly, using it less now than ever

poor migration, hiccups can always allow but this......

Overheal

How do I unfollow a thread that doesn't show up as bookmarked but keeps hitting me with notifications

Boards.ie: Niamh

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117643011#Comment_117643011

No it's not possible. You can request your account be closed and anonymised (which is done on a thread by thread basis). You can request this by sending an email to datarequests@boards.ie or hello@boards.ie

Silly Gilly

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117646122#Comment_117646122

I think people are just looking for competency, Paddy. Like for example if your Nigerian favourite prostitute, Graceful Nwo. failed to take sufficient hygiene precautions during a night of scat play it would not be pleasant.

What Boards have done is analogous to that. Gone balls to the wall when they are not nearly ready. It has resulted in a messy experience for all involved. Nasty business.

J. Marston

How is there not a "My Forums" option? Old boards had it, Reddit has all the subs you follow at the top of the page, Twitter has the people you follow. Why go through 3 or 4 pages to get a forum you post on?

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117647400#Comment_117647400

A complete Warholiean Mess.

Tchaikovsky

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117645001#Comment_117645001

Most wouldn't be bothered requesting access to a forum that they had access to before. I know I wouldn't, especially if there's nothing going on there now.