What is wrong with the site? (Please read updated post #1)

muffler wrote: »

Hah! I managed to get logged in from the desktop PC which wasnt the case a couple of hours ago. Its a joke at this stage given the fact that its just an ongoing problem with issue after issue and no end in sight and not as much as a cheep from the shareholders of this establishment as to how they intend to progress matters.

I think this is the fist time in my 14 years here that I have become completely disillusioned withe whole setup. The same thing happened on Adverts.ie a few years ago where it was a community based and and community driven site but then it became commercial which was enough for me to pack in my role as a mod there at the time.

I see the same path being taken here where the site is being driven down the financial road but with a couple of flat wheels which may or may not be repaired. Helping and interacting with the community here is great but I for one am not going to place myself in a position where I see money/advertising/talk to forums/verified reps being more important than having an auld bit of a chat about something or other or looking for a bit of advice or whatever turns people on.

/ rant over

not a bad rant in fairness and some valid points. I'm not an employee so I cant speak for boards.ie as a whole but just on a few bits mentioned here:

site going down commercial road: it has to. no choice. if its going to stay online it needs funding, more than can be raised by subscriptions currently, unless subs become mandatory (and I'm guessing there are many who would prefer it not to go that way). I dont like commercialisation either but I see it as a necessary evil to keep the normal conversations alive. I do know that this is a concern the office is aware of and one that they are trying to address by avoiding the banner-ads-on-everything-possible-route , so things like sponsored threads which might be of interest to some, sponsored AMAs - which again may be of interest to some and are easily ignorable by others are being tested as an alternative to more intrusive advertising methods and strategies. I would much prefer not to have to click an ad to submit my post or wait for a timer to elapse before I can type a response. I would suggest that if users want to avoid the normal, annoying, commercial strategies, then we (all of us are users here) need to start helping make the lesser impact alternatives a success.

Boards needs funding, and its getting it. The office are investing heavily in boards. its going to take a while to see the benefits though. I saw a network diagram of the boards' infrastructure recently and its a lot bigger than the 2 servers I saw sitting in a rack in hosting365 years ago. The traffic levels are similarly inflated. All of this takes money - much more than the donated power/bandwidth/rackspace we used to have.

Cloudflare: I agree that its an issue. I hope that some alternative could be found but right now its Cloudflare and be offline for a series of short periods or no cloudflare and be offline until the latest ban-tantrum (bantrum? can that be a thing?) subsides and the LOIC gets given a rest. Not all of the outages are Cloudflare protecting the site but some are.

As for conversations being outsourced (I know, different post but related) its our content and our history of good quality content that attracts traffic and its that traffic that attracts commercial interest. So, yes, conversations are being sold to advertisers so that hardware can be maintained to allow conversations to be generated and so on. Boards ltd get to pay to keep the lights on and get a salary for the staff, advertisers get to sell products to people who are interested in them, users get to post and read posts.

I do indeed remember when the site was vbulletin only. I also remember when the site was hacked and I remember when other vbulletin sites were hacked repeatedly as vbulletin vulnerabilities came out of the woodwork. I also remember when boards.ie was considered a security risk by most companies and was a regular guest on the firewall blacklist. (recently I saw boards sitting happily in a whitelist!). Things change. technology moves on. Vbulletin didnt have the scalability boards needed so it had to be changed (and boards has not had a pure vbulletin codebase in many many years) , now boards needs to change again to meet demand. It cannot do all the features requested or suggested, actually it cant do half of them at all, let alone to a passably acceptable level. New codebase will resolve a lot of this but a lot (granted, not all) of the issues being experienced are (from my understanding) a result of trying to keep legacy (default) and responsive (new) running in tandem. If legacy could be dropped things would progress much smoother, but its not being dropped because a lot of users prefer it and the new site doesnt have all of the features migrated yet.

As for feedback being ignored. its not. but neither are changes being made for the sake of it or because it sounds like a good idea (anyone fancy a quick spot of castle storming?) at the time. Change means diversion away from planned developement and maintenance. Boards isn't the biggest site on the planet but its big enough that its less nimble than it used to be.

Now. this thread is for users to report issues with the technical aspects of the site so the devs can see that there is something wrong and fix it. How about we all help them do that and stop making it look like there no point bothering because sure its all a big con anyway.

Now, rephrase all of that in less polite and more...direct...language and you have my opinion on the issues.


admin hat on:
This thread is for reporting technical issues. please lets leave the feedback for the feedback forum so we dont dilute the actual reports on teh site with opinions on the business.