ROLL IT BACK

For fcuk sake will ye bring back old boards and forget about this new set up.

No cognisance from (most likely a volunteer) mod/admin (I can't tell any more) that these are extraordinary times then.

Mighty.

They won't roll it back, that much is certain to me. What I am struggling to understand is why they have replaced a heavily modded platform with, if all the amendments are implemented, another heavily modded platform.

If this new version of Boards looks and operates pretty much the same to you as it did beforehand, then you must have been using a Windows 95 based laptop to browse the site. I'm not one for hyperbole, but you're talking complete nonsense. There's near-sitewide levels unanimous dislike for the Vanilla version of Boards, not just because of the visual changes (we can adapt to them over time), but the near month long broken nature of the site. I could list more things that are now long-term broken, than I can things that actually work. Yes we can log in and post, but it's nowhere near "pretty much the same" as it was in June. I've been a user here since 2007, been through several site changes too....but this is by far the biggest failure I've ever see Boards endure. The time it is taking to fix basic navigation for users is beyond concerning.

Speaking of the visuals, the homepage looks fine, agreed. However, in forum/thread view the formatting is all off. There's swathes of wasted/empty space right here on my screen (and indeed many others). A month on I've still no Dark Mode option (seriously, it's 2021.) There's now tons of scrolling to do, instead of proper forum page delineation that there used to be (a HUGE pain when you click back out, and boom, you've to do all that scrolling again to get to where you where.) You now can't selectively quote a part of a post, another HUGE misstep which leads to yet more screen taken up with text that doesn't need to be there (you've to quote an entire post). The clock is wrong. Mods/Cmods/Admins aren't displaying properly. The new 'Like' function just isn't as effective or efficient as the older Thanks system. These are all bugs that are mere annoyances, and don't really prevent the use of the site itself too badly.

Speaking of navigation, this is where I find the real barriers to using the site. The list of My Forums, broken/missing a month on. This means having to either use the traditionally awful Boards search function to navigate, or hope that where you want to go appears on the homepage. You can also use the Topics bar, but that's a whole mess of scrolling, every forum listed but not broken up into categories, and yes, more and more scrolling. It doesn't drop down like it used to, again, a month on.

The text-editor requires more effort than before (on a discussion forum!), notifications are driving people slowly insane, groups are broken, categories button acts like the Topics button, ie, broken.....the discussions button lists the latest posts that are already shown on the latest posts section of the homepage...I could go on and on with navigational and display issues. By absolutely no means is it "pretty much the same" man, how can anyone claim that?

Half of me thinks we need to just wait it out, the other half thinks what the hell is going on four weeks later.....I do believe a bit more clarity is needed, maybe a roadmap of where we're heading? At first glance, to me it just looks like the site is in crisis at the moment. It's taking days & weeks to fix tiny little glitches like the breadcrumbs bar not floating (fixed now). Boards has only a single dev afaik, so things are not looking good. I don't think it's unfair to expect at least some explanation as to how we found ourselves in this mess....there's thousands of people using the site every single day. Not to apportion blame, but to just paint a picture for us to understand the problems, and things like that can turn public opinion around.

thats what I mean - i'd say some mods/admin are just as frustrated as we, the users

Please just restore the old version.

You can now edit your notifications properly. Scroll down to the list of forums, if you're on a mobile move the screen to the right and untick the relevant ones.

It's a relief to get rid of them!

If things really are that financially precarious, it's hard to see how the site can recover at all then from this migration. Forum activity has fallen off a cliff, and shows little sign of recovering...a month on. A few visible improvements are trickling through, and undoubtedly more so on the backend that we can't see...but with a large time difference between Boards and Vanilla, and having to submit PR's to make changes, using Vanilla doesn't appear to have been the most 'optimal' solution. I genuinely sympathise with the employees, I really do...these must be stressful times in HQ.

An Irish, or even EU based hosing service is what we need. I know this means more cash, but I fear it needs to happen. Couple this with opening as much as possible to some of our users with development backgrounds here (being GDPR compliant obviously), things would be running better in no time. Sounds like crisis management at this point.

I imagine most of the overheads are because now Boards.ie is a business, rather than simply being a forum. Salaries and rent/insurance/utilities/rates for head office being the big ones I'm guessing? I did ask myself the same question though, has Boards.ie grown too big as a business to sustain itself, and would it be better poised as a smaller outfit?

I can't selectively quote (another head scratcher on a discussion forum), but yeah, I've no answers for you. I don't know enough about business to know why trying to monetise the site was necessary, or even needed...but I agree with you in that it seems to have caused many more problems than it solved. I won't go and say we don't need staff, those are the livelihoods of people that might read this and I wouldn't wish anyone out of a job, but objectively speaking, your examples of other forums that tick along nicely without financial overheads is hard to shoot down.