Boards.ie probably has weeks/days left to live.

41 comments

1. It may as well be gone to me. Nostalgia aside, it’s a shite clunky forum of the dark ages internet wise.

2. Let it die.

   All the wankers from there are here now anyway.

3. I’m only on reddit because of *that* update.

4. They should put it out if it’s misery

5. People have being saying that for years.

   I won’t believe it until the final nail is in the coffin.

6. Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened

7. I hope the weather guy starts a new board somewhere. He’s amazing

8. I blame MCD.

9. Bit of a mad journey, seeing how [adverts.ie](http://adverts.ie) was carved out of it. It’s a real legacy from the 2.0 era and mad to see its still around. I think a lot of the energy places like niche forums had around music and culture has passed on to Substack etc.

10. Boards.ie is a relic that has massively over modded threads where slowly but surely the actual valuable / active posters were banned, which was why so many of the subs are ghost towns.

    Add to that the massive UI , update fail, and well RIP boards.

    One thing is for sure it definitely does not have enough value to be subscribing to the site these days.

11. They should have stuck with and improved on vBulletin, why oh why did they move to that Vanilla product, from day one it gave issues and some serious ones at that, data was firstly hosted in US and caused a lag and a fair bit of downtime.

    They should move back to vBulletin and streamline the site as a starting point.

12. They killed it years ago

    Since then it has died

    For years they banned everyone and kept the trolls as it drove more posts etc

    its a pity as some of the sub forums are very good with every nice and intelligent people but the main groups are just full of the worst online scum in Ireland

13. Will Andrew J. Renko be able to exist in that Vacuum?

14. Trent!

15. It was great for the Airsoft buy and sell a few years ago , that was about it

16. [Boards.ie](http://Boards.ie) had some awful mods but the decline of message boards is a loss. They were far more positive environments than Reddit

17. I have contacted RTE on numerous occasions with the idea of combining The LATE LATE SHOW and boards.ie and have it broadcast 24/7 everyday of the year. They haven’t formally acknowledged my concept, which leads me to suspect that they have stolen my idea.

18. Where are the leaving cert students going to go to cheat on their mocks now?

19. I would have paid, had HQ not decided to buy off-the-shell Support Ticket Software and try to turn it into a Discussion Forum. The migration happened 3-4 years ago and yet in that time stability went to the dogs and longstanding issues remained.

    Feel sad that I had to say cheerio to a site I’ve done my best to be an active voice on; yet something that _should_ be casual and conversational, became unwieldy and frustrating to use. In turn leading to an exodus of the more level-headed interesting contributors.

    Totally respect the fact that vBulletin & hosting was costing a bomb, but in attempting to give Boards a haircut, they basically scalped the site from working properly or consistently.

20. Seems like they are gearing up to say….”not enough people subscribed…you guys killed Boards off”

21. Annoying. Only use it for the gigs+events board but its so good. Loads of well informed people on there. Be sad to see it go

22. Ran into the ground by over zealous mods and finally killed off by it’s latest iteration that made the site look and feel like something from the dial up days. It was brilliant back in the day but that day was 20 years ago.

23. To be fair to [boards.ie](http://boards.ie) it has a recorded historic wealth of information going back years (decades?) that you simply won’t find anywhere else online.

    And there’s not many places better to get answers and discussions around all sorts of queries and topics specific to Ireland.

24. I’ll miss the Bargain Alerts, occasionally some very good Ireland specific bargains. Awful lot of the rest of the place is completely dead.

25. I guess banning the entire audience you serve ads to was a bad business model.

26. In a sense boards contains a time capsule of Irish online culture and I’d hope that’s preserved somewhere. But on its own merits, it has probably had its day just like a lot of legacy internet platforms.

27. It used to be a great site but that terrible botched upgrade, combined with ridiculously over-zealous moderation on some forums, killed it completely.

    It’s a shame because at its height it was really a place you could spend an entire day on. I’d say I started using Reddit a lot after the infamous upgrade from vBulletin which left the site unusable or out of action for long stretches.

28. Now how will I find out about Civil Service recruitment campaigns? Publicjobs.ie won’t hit the same.

29. I won’t lie, I’m a bit of a roads nerd and I used to love reading through the roads sub there.

    I’ll definitely miss it.

30. Delighted, I was a fan back in the day but it became overly censored and full of power trip mods. So I stopped using it.

    Roll on a few years and encountered a condescending arrogant arsehole of a parent at my kids school, turns out they were a mod on boards going back years.i was not surprised. I mentioned I used it, and the full on aggression that I needed to tell them my user name all while saying they didn’t need to tell me their mod name.

    Die and burn boards.ie die and burn

31. Boards has or had some fucking excellent communities and once you stayed away from certain threads/forums/members/mods, you could live a nice online life with a good community.

    Vanilla blew that to shit, but it was rolling downhill and picking up momentum for years now.

    It’s a pity, for the heights it achieved and the even greater heights it could achieve, even with the move towards new social media.

    There are some amount of cabbages on the site though and some very obvious reregs, serial trolls and sockpuppeting going on in certain sub-boards.

32. I don’t post there but Boards is a lot better for Irish info than this place.

33. Crappy search killed it.

34. Worst interface, hate using it. Not surprised, but surprised if someone pays for it

35. The Farming and Forestry board was handy to get the perspective of those in that sector on environmental issues.
    Some completely opposed to any regulation, some cautiously embracing change.

36. I have a three digit boards user ID (from 1999) but I stopped using it when the mods got a bit power trippy, around 2013/14. I personally know one of the founders who made some decent bank when they sold it, but I think that act of selling marked the start of a slow (but now accelerating) decline.

37. Let it die. The mods and lack of any discussion is killing it. Particularly Beasty/Necro and Big Bag of Chips. Current Affairs is so curated to one voice it’s beyond ridiculous. Shocking mods. It’s too late for the platform as it lost so many good subscribers during the outage when they changed to Vanilla.

38. They had a fantastic forum with a large user base covering a wide range from niche to general topics & fucked it up through poor moderation, a badly executed redesign and a head in the sand attitude among other issues.

    It would be an interesting case study of what not to do…

39. Oh no.

    Anyway.

40. The site realistically has three severe problems.

    The first is Vanilla. It’s atrocious and has only gotten more so since release. It’s hard to justify paying for that when I can click Reddit and not have the bouncing.

    The second is the horde of angry racist incel types who turn as many threads into unreadable trainwrecks as possible. Imagine trying to discuss current events and the same people want to derail threads to push their racist agenda?

    Finally, there’s Odhran. He hasn’t posted in almost two years now. He clearly doesn’t care about the place at all, not even to engage with users some of which have been there for almost two decades.

    I’m surprised it’s lasted this long honestly.

41. I tried posting on Boards.ie about why people really left.

    It’s not just Google, AI, or ad blockers, it’s because long-time posters were driven off by heavy-handed moderation for years. Beasty and the same mod style that pushed people away are still in place, yet now they are passing around the collection basket to ‘save the community’.

    I said this politely twice, both posts were deleted.

    They want your money but not your honesty.

    If they will not even allow an open discussion about the moderation that wrecked the place in the first place, why would anyone pay to keep that same culture alive?

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