Boards News - February 2020

Boards.ie: Mark

Hard to believe it's been 22 years since the first post was made on Boards! :eek:

To celebrate this, we're going to have some competitions, so watch this space! The first competition is live now, so if you'd like to win a Shower Gem for your home, head over to the Competition thread and tell us a funny (SFW!) shower story.



February rolls around and love is in the air. Of course, it is tradition at this stage for Boards Matchmaking to be mentioned. Can it help you find true love?

This February will also see an encounter by the Moon with Venus occur towards the end of the month. If looking to the skies at night is of interest to you, we’d recommend checking out the Astronomy, Space & Astrophotography forum. jSDAS has a comprehensive calendar available to download that offers advice to get started in astronomy, resources to check out, and a guide to celestial sights throughout the year.

After the last monthly update was posted, alfa beta made an eagerly awaited return to the “New, unregistered Irish-bought car from 1976” thread. And they brought some pictures with them! Boardsies have been offering advice as to what they can do now and some have even gone so far as to offer parts.

Something that will definitely require some repair work if they manage to find it is fergal.b’s boat, which is still submerged. The hunt continues, and fergal.b has managed to get out a few times already this year in search of it. They’re covering plenty of ground - or water, rather - but still no sign of it. They have come across plenty of other boats, just not their own. Hopefully they will be able to track it down, but the updates have been fascinating to follow.



The end of January also brought the results of the Boards.ie Games of the Decade. There were some runaway winners with Witcher 3 crowned Best RPG with 60.3% of the vote, Rocket League was Best Sports Game with 56.9%, and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was determined to be the Best Racing Game with 41.4% of the vote. Other categories were more hotly contested and you can see the breakdown of results and categories here.

Over the last few months, you may have noticed some Sponsored Threads for Noteworthy articles and proposals dotted around the site. Some of the very first ideas for stories came from users on Boards.ie, as highlighted by Journal Media CEO Adrian Acosta and Managing Editor Susan Daly in an interview with Dublin InQuirer; this article provides some more information about the project and the people involved. Thanks magicbastarder for highlighting this.

In something of a blast from the past, Boards was also mentioned on The Irish Post. Back in 2011, it was spotted that there was an Irish connection in a Japanese anime called Fractale; the Garda car was quite the eyebrow raiser! Sairus wandered around Galway, snapping photos of the city and comparing them to their in-show counterpart. It’s interesting to see Galway represented in this way and to see what liberties were taken.

As we mention anime, there have been some changes to forums and categories of late, including the Anime & Manga forum. It can now be found as a subforum of Comics. Meanwhile, the Musicals forum has been folded back into the Theatre & Performing Arts forum (now Theatre, Performing Arts & Musicals) to bring together similar topics.

Elsewhere, the Sustainability & Environment forum was renamed as Climate Change, Sustainability & Environment to better highlight the breadth of topics covered, and both it and the Infrastructure forum were moved out of the Environment & Infrastructure category and under the main Science, Health & Environment category.



Finally, in response to a forum request, Yoga & Pilates is now Yoga, Meditation & Pilates and can be found under Recreation & Hobbies rather than Sport. Hopefully it will help you limber and relax both body and mind.

Back in January, we removed unsupported skins so that we could better focus development efforts on the default skin. Some users preferred these long unsupported skins because of the colour options that were available and the level of contrast that they provided. Ads By Google took it upon themselves to recreate some of these skins using a Chrome extension, while Hotblack Desiato built upon this to try to recreate the white skin. You can find out more about these styles/reskins here.

We have some very popular AMAs running at the moment. With the situation in China, we're getting to ask questions of someone living there and how the Coronavirus outbreak is impacting their life. On the back of a request, we also have an AMA with a married person who is having an affair. If you would like to read through some AMAs of 2019 or find out what the most popular AMAs have been, Niamh wrote up a 2019 recap.

That's all from me this month. And we wish you the very best of luck in any competition that you enter! Unfortunately it's too late for me to hand in my notice so I can enter them

Boards.ie: Mark

A late addition, but the Motivational and Personal Development forum is now accepting access requests. You can head on over to the Notifications & Access Requests forum to request access to this forum (as well as the likes of Ranting & Raving, the Online Dating forum, and the Sex and Sexuality forum).

Boards.ie: Mark

The Boards Golf Society is back in action this month. Its first outing will take place on February 22nd when avid golfers will descend upon Portmarnock Links hoping to get their season off to a good start. And we hope that the weather picks up for them or it could be a very challenging day out! If you're interested in getting involved, you can find out more about the Boards Golf Society here: https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2058026497