Boards News - September 2018

Boards.ie: Mark

Hello everyone,

The big news from the last few weeks is obviously the announcement that Boards.ie Ltd is to be integrated with Journal Media Ltd. Sean detailed the what, the why, and the when in this Feedback thread and responded to concerns that were raised along the way.

Across the website, communities are organising meetups of all sorts and sizes. The Boards Golf Society will be heading out on their final outing of the year to Rosses Point in Co. Sligo. As is customary on the final day, the Golfer of the Year will be crowned, and the Ryder Jug team and Captain's picks will be announced.

In the American Football forum, a group of users is planning a meetup for gameweek 3. They'll be gathering upstairs in The Woolshed on Sunday, 23rd September at 5:30pm and it looks like there might be some food and beer on hand for Boardsies. If interested, you can add your name to the list here.



Finally, the Motors forum will once again host the Motors Midway Meet this year. On Sunday, September 16th, Boardsies will descend upon the Midway Food Court in Portlaoise to grab some food, check out and chat about cars. If you'd like to head along on the day, be sure to copy and paste the list into a new reply and add your name.

In general forum news, the Accommodation & Property forum has added shiny new prefixes, based on feedback from users. These should help keep things more organised and find threads that may be of interest to you (as you can filter by prefix). mike_ie has listed the various prefixes available here and these can be tweaked over time if necessary.

Meanwhile, the Cool Vids, Pics & Links forum appears to be experiencing a technical hitch whereby some posts, particularly those taken from "pbs.twimg.com" are not visible to everyone. As a result, the Mods have asked that users include the full URL of the image if posting such images.

The True Crime forum has been approved and the Mods are currently trying to settle on a charter that will encourage interesting discussion without causing issues down the line. We will have an announcement, and be sure to highlight it in a future update, when it is live.

There have been some interesting threads, achievements, and positive stories across Boards in the last month or so. For starters, Bykobap took to the Soccer forum to ask how to buy a match ticket at a stadium 2,000km away. In the end, they took the chance and travelled to Salzburg in the hopes of getting a ticket. They succeeded and had a great time (with some twists and turns along the way).

In the Cycling forum, users were interested to see how NamelessPhil got on in the Race Around Ireland. She took part in the Ultra, a simple matter of cycling 1,100km with a time allowance of 74 hours :eek: She absolutely smashed it, finishing in 68 hours 1 minute, thereby just missing out on the men's time limit by a minute. Incredible stuff!



On a less positive note, after working on a classic wooden speedboat build for some time, fergal.b lost it to the bottom of Lough Ree back in 2015. They've been searching for it ever since and been posting updates of other ships found in what seems to be Ireland's own Bermuda Triangle. It's an interesting read and we're hoping that fergal.b will have a more positive update for us in the future!

Skip passing (sorry!) over to the Rugby forum, pauraic1990 shared their ambition of starting an Irish Deaf Rugby Team with the goal of taking part in the next Rugby World Cup. They are working with Leinster Rugby and the IRFU to start the team, and are hoping that Boards users will share the word with anyone that they know who is hard of hearing. You can find out more here.

There have been a few shows of late that have boosted the activity of forums. Naturally, the end of Celebrity Big Brother was much talked about on the Reality TV forum (though it also earned a thread in The Gentlemen's Club), while The Great British Bake Off has been the subject of discussion in the Reality TV forum and the Food forum where some of the bakers have been following along with the challenges, including piratequeen.



On the flip side, you might think that the Christmas forum would be deserted until after Halloween at the very least...but then you underestimate its users' love of Christmas. Loughc started a thread, which is the first part of a series of debates, asking what the best box of sweets is. You can choose between Roses, Quality Street, Celebrations, Miniature Heroes or submit a suggestion, and the winner will be revealed on Monday.

If you're hoping to pick up a box of one of the above for a good price in the run up to Halloween (and Christmas), you should keep an eye on this Bargain Alerts thread.

A new AMA was launched this morning with a MACRO Photographer and Videographer. If you've any questions about capturing images or videos of things at close ranges, pose your question to our guest here.

Finally, we'd like to wish the best of luck to all those taking part in the Berlin Marathon this weekend. You can keep abreast of their progress and finishing times here. And that's it for this month! Thanks for reading!