Welcome to the new Boards.ie platform - Version 1.0 :)

Once again you miss the point of what moderation is - which is not solely to hand out warnings and delete posts, but to ensure that the forum being moderated is run in such a way as to encourage open discussion and contribution, not stifle it with unwelcoming bold text warnings and a list of banned users in a thread, edicts to get back on topic, and the obvious ignoring of some blatant stirring in certain threads (which I remain to be convinced is not a poor attempt to get others responding as the radio phone-in shows do).

Absolutely are there times when action needs to be taken but deleting posts, "thread bans" and the like should be sparsely used, not the default go-to seen all too often.

The issue of how the site is moderated in general is a separate but linked issue to why the place has declined to where it is.

time stamp still broken as far as I can see.

I think the time fix was rolled back because it borked something else. Every attempt to fix one issue seems to cause another.

@Boards.ie: Odhran - TherapyBoy above has summed up the situation excellently, but your reply above shows (in my opinion anyway) that you STILL don't "get" Boards to be honest.

You're looking at it solely from the commercial angle - Does it cost more than it makes? While this is key yes, you continue to miss that a broken site with a lot of other ongoing and longstanding issues (some of which TherapyBoy has outlined) is NEVER going to make money.

It's all very well saying that Vanilla costs a tenth of what the vBulletin site did, but that's ultimately irrelevant and futile really if the issues with that cheaper platform make the site somewhere between unusable and unwelcoming (depending on the day, how the user is accessing it, and what they're trying to do). There's also the old saying that "you get what you pay for", and it would seem to very much apply here. It's been a year and basic functionality is still broken or absent altogether. Worse (from your perspective I'd think), there are still calls for returning the old site despite the issues it had - not exactly a vote of confidence in the decision.

You also mention that the improving revenue situation is likely only temporary anyway as despite cutting costs to the bone, you're STILL losing money - and given your acceptance that ad revenues are declining, the recent heavy push of functionality-breaking ads that frustrate the remaining users even more seems even more pointless, and again a sign that you just don't seem to understand the site/community and why we still come here in an era of technically vastly superior alternatives.

While I appreciate that the site is still here for us to have this discussion, given all of this, I for one feel even less reassurance that this will be the case much longer and I'd certainly be interested in the other ideas you have in that regard - can you give some examples?

There is of course also a third option to the above that I mentioned previously - sell the site to a new owner with deeper pockets, or give it back to the community (as others have suggested) for them/us to run. I also mentioned previously how there is a wealth of technical, project management, dev and support knowledge among the community - which probably could have been leveraged for free (and probably still can for that matter!). Was this ever considered to address your cost issues?

Despite all I've just said, I appreciate your returning to engage, but I really do feel that if you continue to overlook the non-revenue issues that have been called out, this once great site will continue to slide into obscurity and ultimately oblivion.

What platform does the "other form" that can't be named use? It's a real pleasure to read and post in.

Has most if not all of the functionality this place used to have pre Vanilla.

It seems to be a one person operation and if Boards used a similar set-up, I think most of us would be very happy.

Surely thare are affordable options out there? Must be hundreds of forums across the web with good and dedicated platforms to run them?

Forum of Games uses a free platform too. That was set up to accommodate the old Games Forum here as the new platform here doesn't have the required functionality. A couple of regulars set it up, customised it themselves and designed a cool logo, all at no cost.

So that's 2 forums, one established forum that moved hitch free overnight, and a new one set up quickly.

How in the name of hell did Boards get it so wrong? Move to a new forum because the old one was full of customisations, then try to customise this one, yet each new "fix" sends something else askew.

I'm not really being that simplistic because a big chunk of the data all the attachments was never migrated. I strongly suspect the pictures I uploaded over many years (and usernames) amounted to much more data than the text I typed.

Drop in users here would also account for a massive drop in the bandwidth used contributing to getting nearer to breaking even.

Tbh, after a year I still can't see who "liked" a post and I still can't click on a thread and go back to where I left off. Gubu managed to get these things right from the start. So it cannot be THAT difficult for fecks sake.

If Vanilla needs extensions and mods to make standard forum features functional, then imho it's not really fit for purpose.

It seems like the past year has been a never-ending litany of mods, fixes and on-going glitches with no real roadmap for a completed operation.

You have to be logged in to see the thanks on g u b u afaik.

The other site is very simple to navigate through which is great. I have noticed, though, that its Radio Forum does not really have much of the anorak aspect to it that you find here, and there seems be little or no interest in music-driven stations or pirate stations. Boards, with all of its current issues, still has a lot more users and posts than the other site. That could change of course if this one eventually gets pulled. Boards has undoubtedly, for all intents and purposes, lost the Forum Games to another site that was set up after the changes here last year. It has the advantage, of course, of being a dedicated site, unlike Boards. Many of the regulars from the Forum Games of old here are now regular users on that Forum Games site.

For what its worth, I still regularly check into Boards for the Entertainment Forums, and still contribute to threads (and even initiate a few!). I am happy to use Boards still, whatever about its imperfections.

Sure it will be October soon and fix it self. Can take that off the list…

Winter is coming... 😀