When is the life support machine being switched off?

Traffic data reports from places such as Sitechecker paint a fairly grim picture.

Down from 3.5 million visits in July 2021 to 2.4 million in November. Those 3.5 in July would themselves be far down on the same time in 2020.

To be honest I feel like most of us knows one another at this stage. When your scrolling down and you see a username. You've a fair idea what they are going to comment without even reading it.

I can never understand this type of comment. I pretty much exclusively used the site on mobile before the change. Still do now with next to no noticeable difference bar some aesthetic changes which are of no concern to me.

Any forum I used was in my Chrome favourites, so one click to get there. After that I don't see any issues really. Certainly none that make it "practically unusable".

That forums have declined in general is a hell of a pity, as there are often no other venues for asking questions, or having actual conversations which you just cannot do in any useable or meaningful way on any other platform.

While I've got my grumbles about the changes on this platform, so long as I can find my pinned forums I'm happy and I can't say this was the worst change that could have been made.

The day this forum, goes the way of RadioWaves will be like Christmas Eve in 1988, which saw the death of truly independent broadcasting in Ireland.

Under no illusions. And people have been predicting the death of boards in my many regenerations here.

It is what it is. I enjoy it. Same way I enjoy Reddit.

Yeah, same here. I dunno, lots of angry nerds keep banging the drum about “dark mode” and “my forums” but seems incredibly nit picky.

Really seems that an angry cohort of users really feel like they are owed something by the owners of the site and, simply, won’t “accept” that if the site wasn’t moved it would have gone.

As for the moderation, I think the mods are doing a great job considering the “issues” with the mod tools but AH is getting overrun with Current Affairs “types” constantly putting up unseemly threads. If they could be flushed back into the “Current Affairs” forum, where they belong, that would be great.

Incels and, angry, bigoted lads really bring down the “tone” of this forum.

New platform sucks IMO. The lack of the dark theme makes long browsing uncomfortable. Lack of working search feature doesn't allow me to follow threads that I've posted in.

As Wibbs has said, the old forum was very much modded. Each time there was an OS update, I assume they'd need to update all the mods as well as the package itself.

Regarding the drop in modding, I assume COVID + life in general has meant some have less time to wade through the crap. Some have had kids, so that further limits the time they can spend wading through the likes of AH.

As for the dent in users, meh. Happens every few years regardless, often when another forum opens up. Numbers usually pop back up after a bit.

I, personally, would argue that the thread you’re, negatively, referring to, F, is an informative, irreverent and, downright, hilarious thread.

Of course, it doesn’t sit “well” with some of the more humourless, and bound up, individuals on this site.

Vanilla is successfully used by Digital Spy, which is a UK forum with a much, much bigger user base and much, much more traffic than Boards. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the platform - any technical issues are due to the implementation.

Fact is that people would have been giving out no matter what software they moved to.

A lack of dark mode (I personally don’t care, but the kids seem to want it) and broken search (annoying) aren’t in themselves going to stop people posting here. Boards has obviously taken a hit over the past number of years with the rise in social media and Reddit. I do think the prolonged outage in the summer during the migration didn’t help. It probably broke the habit of visiting and posting for many, and they just never picked it up again.

Does anyone know how the alt-boards that was set up at the time is getting on? They seemed to think they’d take over and usher in a modless utopia. I checked into it a couple of times at the beginning, but it was just full of people patting themselves on the back that they weren’t posting on Boards any more, and looking forward to giving out about travellers even more than they did previously. I can’t remember what it was called.

As for the Etiquette thread, I’ve never posted in it, only read a bit of it when it was first posted and have no interest in it, but it’s more true to the original spirit of AH than any number of threads giving out about so-called wokeness, or raging about American spelling. It’s like CA lite here sometimes.

Bebo, Yahoo Forums, MySpace, Boards

My theory is alot of people use social media at work. the office. Since many people started working from home there's less reason to post on any forum, since you can look at twiitter or listen to a podcast whole working from home without getting seen by your boss boards is an essential resource,Mods need to intervene when people start getting rude on a thread or going off topic or there's nothing positive left to say on a topic. Boards is essential because it's a forum to comment on topics from an Irish point of view or things specific to Ireland , politics, current affairs, TV etc everyday I see people giving honest opinions on various diverse topics forums with no mods tend to be negative, chaotic or tend to be taken over by trolls or people posting fake news conspiracy theory's etc posting on some American website is not the same as they are mostly run by American moderators who do not understand the Irish point of view or Irish current affairs politics in context Twitter is mostly used by journalist members of the media or else by people promoting their product company or links to their articles most writers or commentators are on twitter. I'm not a tech expert but I think the new layout is fine the only thing I, d like is a dark mode . Websites and services are constantly changing due to the livestyles attention of their users, the YouTube of 2021 is completely different from 5 years ago, I read now people under 30 spend more time watching tik Toks than watching YouTube videos

Deliriously obvious biscuits in a Ford Transit.

before 1989 there was no legal commercial radio in ireland and no ability to apply for licenses.

during the 1980s a large amount of pirate radio stations sprung up around the country catering to all tastes and formats, there had of course been pirates before hand but not on the same scale.

at the start of 1989, a new licensing regime was implemented, and any of the pirates who wished to apply had to close by the end of the year to be able to apply.

instead of a regulatory format based on the successful model that was operating before hand, we got a highly regulated, high cost base model of radio forced on operators by the new regulator and legislation.

a basic summery so as to not take the thread off topic so much.

if you would like to know more there is lots of material out there from sites such as radiowaves.fm and pirate.ie etc.

Actually, this sounds familiar. I think I did get a million emails and turned it off.

Ive gotten used to it but my browsing of the site is down considerably due to two problems. Firstly the Most Thanked posts feature never came back and thats what I used to discover all sorts of other threads to read. It was a kind of upvote system where the cream would rise to the top. Now its gone I dont have the inclination to wade through tons of mud to find the best posts so my browsing is significantly down. Secondly the sense of the site being some way busy is completely gone. When I see subbed threads only have 1 or 2 posts in the previous 24 hours its just pointless clicking in. When something feels like a dead zone lots of people dont bother posting, its a vicious cycle.

The lack of a dark mode is a third problem. I never used dark mode and have no problems using the site without it. But thousands of users did use it becasue their eyes hurt browsing bright web pages. That much was clear back in July when there was hundreds of posts asking for a dark mode. The powers that be never addressed that problem so those users clearly left the site becasue they werent going to hang around using something that made their eyes hurt. Not implementing a dark mode was Boards single biggest way of culling thousands of users.

Reddit and specifically r/ireland has clearly eaten a sizeable chunk of the Boards userbase. They were just below 400k subs back during the upgrade here in July and are now on 465k today. Thats 65k new users who came from somewhere, likely many from here as you can see a good few Boards usernames over there. Plus they have a dark mode for those who need it. r/ireland is now much closer to what After Hours was like 5 or more years ago. To me anyway the After Hours irreverence and humour has clearly migrated over there.