boards.ie in June 2022

Grady Boyd

What will boards.ie and after hours be like in 5 years time ? I'd say a lot of smaller forums will have closed, others will have merged and after hours will be more of a General discussion forum merged maybe with all the politics fourms.

Tipsy McSwagger

It will have kicked itself in the face by then

Birneybau

Hail Putin! will be the new greeting.

Id say boards will still be around, bu it will have declined even more than it has in the past 5 years. I can see Reddit and Facebook groups picking up a lot of the users. Only reason I enjoy boards so much is force of habit, I have been here for years (on a previously closed account) and I just like the community. I do think the site will lose a lot of traffic.

Mutant z

Who knows maybe the same, maybe different, maybe there will be another site that hasn't been invented yet that users will gravitate to, we really can't predict how it will be in the future.

LirW

Inb4 "WW3 killed us all!!!11"

SEPT 23 1989

We will be discussing the fallout from the second coming

Birneybau

SEPT 23 1989 wrote: »

We will be discussing the fallout from the second coming

10 Story Love Song is decent.

tomwaterford

There'll be ads telling people not to post while driving their hovercars

And all mention of games of thrones will be outlawed

RayM

Some of the posters who hate Muslims will still be around, but they'll have moved on to hating some other group by then.

MightyMandarin

RayM wrote: »

Some of the posters who hate Muslims will still be around, but they'll have moved on to hating some other group by then.

Hopefully they'll be after the feckin Greeks by then. They invented gayness.

bear1

Still debating if the m20 will be built.

If internet businesses reflect what happens in physical businesses you can be sure it will belong to an even larger corporate set up in five years time than it currently does. In 20 years time prepare to have a comparatively small number of companies owning all the most visited websites in the world. You'll still have your outliers - loads of them - but watch the more popular ones be swallowed and firmly part of the new global business establishment.

I'd die happy if the entire Independent Newspapers group could be pushed off a financial cliff for once and for all. And with it The Irish Times (I wouldn't have said that about the IT 10 years ago). Journalists in Ireland are lazy, agenda-driven, backslapping, duplicitious, partisan bastards in the service of the powerful (most of whom have done the bidding for Anthony O'Reilly for the past four decades). Yes, I mean the entire profession with perhaps five exceptions who were investigative journalists (Joe McAnthony, Frank Connolly, Vincent Browne, Mary Raftery, Fintan O'Toole).

SEPT 23 1989

[Deleted User] wrote: »

If internet businesses reflect what happens in physical businesses you can be sure it will belong to an even larger corporate set up in five years time than it currently does. In 20 years time prepare to have a comparatively small number of companies owning all the most v@isited websites in the world. You'll still have your outliers - loads of them - but watch the more popular ones be swallowed and firmly part of the new global business establishment.

I'd die happy if the entire Independent Newspapers group could be pushed off a financial cliff for once and for all. And with @it The Irish Times (I wouldn't have said that about the IT 10 years ago). Journalists in Ireland are lazy, agenda-driven, backslapping, duplicitious, partisan bastards in the service of the powerful (most of whom have done the bidding for Anthony O'Reilly for the past four decades). Yes, I mean the entire profession with perhaps five exceptions who were investigative journalists (Joe McAnthony, Frank Connolly, Vincent Browne, Mary Raftery, Fintan O'Toole).

Apart from Connolly we can agree on that

Its rotten to the core

People.have woken up

osarusan

My PUA game will be top notch.

Rumpy Pumpy

The prison forum will still be entertaining, mostly for the tragedy of the whole thing.

ArchXStanton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8E_zMLCRNg

oneilla

Hopefully in ten years people here will have figured out relationships, gender and sexuality and stop asking inane questions.

Noveight

AH will still see weekly terrorist attack or RIP celeb threads. Definitely.

freshpopcorn

When I read the tittle of your thread I said to myself 2022 is about ten years away not five.

Turtyturd

I think the plug will have been pulled by then. But if not it'll be clinging on and centred around some of the bigger forums like AH, Politics and Soccer the man united forum.

A pity but there's only so many times management can tell users they're listening to their concerns yet keep ignoring them before the users move on to another platform.

petes

It won't be around in a lot shorter time than that. Just checked feedback and you can't post on any of the current threads. A quote from Niamh herself 'to combat negative whinging' that's the view from the top down. Site has gone to **** in the last year. Any suggestions fall on deaf ears, the moderation is a joke and always has been.

I only frequent a couple of threads now but can't see myself staying either.

xzanti

I've been hanging around these parts for 12 years now. It's still pretty much the same, more forums though.

_Kaiser_

xzanti wrote: »

I've been hanging around these parts for 12 years now. It's still pretty much the same, more forums though.

But impossible to find under the "temporary" menu if you're on "legacy" layout.

Boards will hopefully still be here but I agree that it'll be a lot quieter.. some of the recent changes in the past fortnight alone seem to me that the powers that be still don't get what it is that the userbase wants .. a userbase that has changed significantly in the last 10 years and likely will again in the next 5.

Oh well.. despite that, it's still a useful local (Irish) resource and way to discuss things without the chaos of Reddit or nonsense of Facebook. I'll probably be here till that changes anyway.

Collie D

The usual AH event mega thread will be opened up for the World Cup and then we'll realise some dope decided to let a desert host it and it's been moved to winter

Dirty Dingus McGee

The place does seem to be getting increasingly preachy in how it is moderated and I'd imagine that will turn away a lot of people as time goes on.

I thought After Hours was supposed to be a bit of a free for all and you could talk about anything but threads constantly seem to get shut down if they don't go along with the mod personal biases.Why not let people say what they want and leave it be regardless of how supposedly offensive it may be to some people. People have the right to not read what is being said if they want to so I never understand all the censoring of threads that occurs at times.

Richard Hillman

Should we still accept refugees from Corbyns Britain in case they may be socialists too?

TomSweeney

petes wrote: »

It won't be around in a lot shorter time than that. Just checked feedback and you can't post on any of the current threads. A quote from Niamh herself 'to combat negative whinging' that's the view from the top down. Site has gone to **** in the last year. Any suggestions fall on deaf ears, the moderation is a joke and always has been.

I only frequent a couple of threads now but can't see myself staying either.

Carefull now ! Hitler and Stalin will be on here with the banhammer!!

Biggest lickspittle on boardz

petes wrote: »

It won't be around in a lot shorter time than that. Just checked feedback and you can't post on any of the current threads. A quote from Niamh herself 'to combat negative whinging' that's the view from the top down. Site has gone to **** in the last year. Any suggestions fall on deaf ears, the moderation is a joke and always has been.

I only frequent a couple of threads now but can't see myself staying either.

I have to agree. Boards.ie has a well deserved reputation for comically over the top moderation. They've now moved into full blown Stasi/North Korean mentality, where any negative feedback is simply 'negative whining'. Dissent is always the enemy of authoritarian types, whether it is a military dictator or a corporate control freak.

In short, boards.ie has a spectacular record of driving away all the 'talent' from the site, i.e. the entertaining users. But as long as the senior management are squeezing a nice wage for themselves, who cares? Milk it for as long as they can. And we're bigger fools for making money for our management. It is US who provides the talent, material, and entertainment totally free of charge.

When you think of the thousands of people who have been banned over the last decade, that's a very significant chunk of the Irish population. And they are no doubt warning people off boards.ie at every chance they get.

The only people still left are the old timers, diehards, and those who are lingering about like acid casualties at a rave that should have finished up a few weeks ago. Even the notoriously liberal Rubberbandits have a negative opinion of this site:

Boards.ie is like a pub beside the Dole office where people go because they don't charge for pints of Mi Wadi.

It's very frustrating to see what used to be an edgy, entertaining site being deliberately dismantled and replaced with a beige, family friendly, corporate advertising puke fest.

The blandness of the threads is really starting to become noticeable lately, it's like 5th class discussions now i.e. "what really annoys you", "what makes you happy", "what's your favourite crisp".

FFS, this is pathetic, utter drivel. And everyone knows it.

Anyway mods, you'll only have yourselves to blame when this site closes down. In the meantime, don't forget to keep thanking each others posts and shutting down anything that could even be considering a mildly controversial thread.

A recent example was the "Get your tits out for the TDs" thread.
Yes it was toilet humour, and probably would have burned itself out after a few pages. But there was some very funny replies and interesting input from users. In short, there was, (to use a word I dislike) "banter" taking place.
But Helen Lovejoy a mod decided immediately this thread was not allowed on the righteous boards.ie. Shock, horror, outrage. We don't do that sort of 'thing' here.

See, the thing about humour is that it is subjective. Some people hate D'Unbelievables, others love them. There's something for everyone, and least there should be. Everyone finds their own groove. One man's cringe is another man's craic. But this only works if you let the place flow and ebb naturally. Cracking down on threads and posts is a guaranteed way to make the site suffer. If you don't like it, don't partake in it. Simples.

Time to have a serious chat with yourselves, boards.ie. But it's probably too late now anyway.

_Kaiser_

petes wrote: »

It won't be around in a lot shorter time than that. Just checked feedback and you can't post on any of the current threads.

I noticed that... a lot of people made a lot of constructive suggestions and genuine feedback, but now the whole forum is effectively locked down? Pre-moderated threads??

Ditto the new Cafe... While yes there were a lot of issues, the traffic is WAYYY down in its latest incarnation. 11 threads in a week?

This thread will probably be locked too before long.

super_furry

I get the feeling that boards is being left behind by younger people who just don't see it as a place they'd visit. Instagram, Youtube, Snapchat and Twitter are the places where the newer communities are forming and I'd be very interested in seeing the boards.ie demographics. I'd bet there's very few newer users under the age of 18/19 here nowadays.

RDM_83 again

I thought this was a interesting post over on Reddit about the future here that wasn't just the standard complaints

Contrary to most views expressed here, though, heavy moderation can't have been Boards' only problem - I would say it just defined the shape of the collapse. Politics.ie, which is very lightly moderated, has also died a death compared to its previous heights.
Both forums suffer from the same basic problem - capture by small groups of users. In the case of Boards, the small groups tend to reflect the preferences of the forum mods, in the case of p.ie, it's the more extreme posters. Both result in ever-smaller ranges of opinion, with the same people making the same points about every new thing.
There might be some kind of 'habitable zone' for forums, with death by runaway processes either side - cold runaway (Mars/Boards) with heavy moderation, hot runaway (Venus/p.ie) with none. I don't think any forum has a permanent place in the sun.

Personally I think the way that there is literally nowhere for users (this thread will be locked most likely), who are the content generators to post about the direction of the site and recent changes that have occurred says a lot about the site.

I see the plug being pulled on the site, I would have thought it would be a gradual decline but the changes to Feedback the way and the response to the issues in a very busy forum (politics cafe) point to whoever runs the site these days not being that concerned about growing the site and retaining existing users.

RDM_83 again

super_furry wrote: »

I get the feeling that boards is being left behind by younger people who just don't see it as a place they'd visit. Instagram, Youtube, Snapchat and Twitter are the places where the newer communities are forming and I'd be very interested in seeing the boards.ie demographics. I'd bet there's very few newer users under the age of 18/19 here nowadays.

I think there is some space for these types of forums even if its reduced in the amount of total traffic, not everyone who is younger likes to have everything linked to their real name. Reddit has a pretty young userbase AFAIK.

super_furry

RDM_83 again wrote: »

I think there is some space for these types of forums even if its reduced in the amount of total traffic, not everyone who is younger likes to have everything linked to their real name. Reddit has a pretty young userbase AFAIK.

Yeah but people leave here and they're not replaced. It's an interesting point you make because /r/ireland is almost exactly the same kind of place at After Hours was maybe 10 years ago. There's more than a few people there that would have been regulars here in the past but left for one reason or another.

Yourself isit

petes wrote: »

It won't be around in a lot shorter time than that. Just checked feedback and you can't post on any of the current threads. A quote from Niamh herself 'to combat negative whinging' that's the view from the top down. Site has gone to **** in the last year. Any suggestions fall on deaf ears, the moderation is a joke and always has been.

I only frequent a couple of threads now but can't see myself staying either.

It's fairly insane that a customer complaint forum is basically shut down in response to customer complaints. Because too complainy.

The new politics cafe forum is dead but AH threads are being shunted in there to die. As a business proposition this removes traffic. In a web site with declining traffic.

I too think many people will move on by 2022. I don't like reddit though. Not sure where I will be.

koumi

I dunno about boards but I have a missed call on my phone dated the 20/03/2022 so I'll let you know then what happens.

.......

This post has been deleted.

super_furry

Yourself isit wrote: »

It's fairly insane that a customer complaint forum is basically shut down in response to customer complaints. Because too complainy.

snowflaker

Boards will be dead. Tommy Robinson appreciation threads excepted

Fred Swanson

This post has been deleted.

Lackey

super_furry wrote: »

I get the feeling that boards is being left behind by younger people who just don't see it as a place they'd visit. Instagram, Youtube, Snapchat and Twitter are the places where the newer communities are forming and I'd be very interested in seeing the boards.ie demographics. I'd bet there's very few newer users under the age of 18/19 here nowadays.

Easy to see by looking at the Leaving Cert forum,
Serious decline in posts from a few years ago

RobbingBandit

The great Tayto shortage of 2021 will still be hard to bare, the vote on a united Ireland will be narrowly defeated and will cause the site to implode,

osarusan

The changes to Feedback are in keeping with the tendency to do nothing for too long and then suddenly go the other way and completely overreact.

Setanter

petes wrote: »

It won't be around in a lot shorter time than that. Just checked feedback and you can't post on any of the current threads. A quote from Niamh herself 'to combat negative whinging' that's the view from the top down. Site has gone to **** in the last year. Any suggestions fall on deaf ears, the moderation is a joke and always has been.

I only frequent a couple of threads now but can't see myself staying either.

Safe trip

Irish Guitarist

After the robot uprising there will be a thread about it's racist to judge all robots by the actions of a few. Just because they wiped out two thirds of the human race doesn't mean they're all bad. Someone will reply to this thread saying "my entire family was killed by robots". Someone else will quote them and change the word 'robot' to 'aliens' to make a point.

There will be another thread about a robot that asked a bakery for a cake but was refused because it was run by members of the resistance. The robot decimated every staff member by shooting them with his laser beam eyes. The general consensus will be that the staff deserved it for their prejudice.

RobbingBandit

What about the monkey uprising, followed by the ape uprising followed by the snail uprising till we salt the ****ers thus causing the tayto shortage.

Jurgen Klopp

Things were bad, but Jesus the pre moderation they brought in for feedback said it all tbh.

Essentially closing down your complaints forum because you got too many complaints

It's like a small shop down the road from an Aldis and Lidls where instead of doing everything they can to keep loyal customers the staff are constantly being rude to customers, never stock most items people want and charge €2 more for each item compared to shops down the road, then regularly have meetings behind closed doors trying to figure out why no one is coming in anymore

Fr_Dougal

I'd say numbers will have dropped off even more.

Usually BS excuse will be given as a reason for this, 'ah shur Facebook and Twitter are killing us off, derp de derp".

Grady Boyd

So any suggestions on how boards can stay relevant going forward ?

Laois_Man

Grady Boyd wrote: »

So any suggestions on how boards can stay relevant going forward ?

In the short-term, the mobile app needs to be dramatically improved.

In the medium to long term, think it needs an AR facility accessible by wearable devices the doesn't just take keyboard inputs - said facility needs to come stocked with an abundant supply of Coke & Hookers.

Boom_Bap

Mod Note

Can I ask that you don't use After Hours to take a steamer on the changes to Feeback or the Politics Cafe please.

Feedback is the place for that, the forum still exists for that purpose.

Cheers