Welcome to the new Boards.ie platform - Version 1.0 :)

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118299897#Comment_118299897

i've made suggestions on how to improve things but they have been ignored by management. at a simple level a sticky at the top of each forum with the name of the mods and cmods for the forum would be very useful. Management don't seem interested in even that simple improvement.

Boards.ie: Niamh

We're actually working on getting lists of mods up at the moment, it might be a slow process but will notify here when it's up.

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118299963#Comment_118299963

how much work is involved in asking the mods of each forum to create a sticky? why would that be a slow process?

28064212

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118299791#Comment_118299791

Because they volunteered 2/3/5/X years ago to do a job on a system which was fit for purpose. Overnight, the rug was pulled out from under them, and the job they volunteered for became far more difficult to do. It's not surprising (or at least, it shouldn't have been a surprise) that a number of them decided it wasn't worth the hassle anymore

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118300026#Comment_118300026

well then have the decency to resign rather than just stop bothering to do the job.

Beasty

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118294177#Comment_118294177

If it's abuse towards another user drop me a PM with a link and I'll have a look

28064212

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118300035#Comment_118300035

Resign how? It's not a job, there's no notice period, they don't hand in their mod-badge.

Maybe they should have PMed the CMods of their category - except they can't actually check who they are anymore, so they needed to have that information in their head.

And how do you know they didn't?

JayRoc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118300035#Comment_118300035

Do you have a specific reason for thinking the mods in question are still active and haven't finished up?

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118300188#Comment_118300188

maybe they have but it is impossible to tell.

Tom Mann Centuria

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118300054#Comment_118300054

How long do they expect to rely on your good faith to keep going, trying to keep the site in any way useable?

It's dreadful.

DelBoy Trotter

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118300004#Comment_118300004

And this right here is why people don’t want to mod or help out with Boards in general, as all they’ll get is hassle. This is a perfect example of it…..user moans about something, Boards staff say that this is being done, instead of the user saying they are happy it is getting done, the user then questions why it’s a slow process when they don’t actually know what is involved behind in the scenes to get this done

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118300804#Comment_118300804

I asked why it is a slow process. I think that is a perfectly reasonable question given it involves asking the mods of each forum to create sticky. I wasn't rude or aggressive.

DelBoy Trotter

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118300828#Comment_118300828

But you don’t even know if that is how they are going about it. You’ve decided in your head how it should be done, and because you think that should be a quick process, you question the Boards staff as to why it isn’t done in the speed you’d like. They could be and probably are going about it a different way

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118300857#Comment_118300857

why would you go about in a way that involves a long process when there is a simpler and faster solution? The question is still valid. If you have a problem with me asking questions please feel free to report my posts.

Caranica

I was a mod. I didn't volunteer, I was asked. When I realised I was spending at least 20 hours a week at it, was stressed about it and was losing sleep over it, I decided to walk away. I let my fellow mods and an admin know (a cmod was a huge part of my stress) and gave notice so it wasn't a sudden drop off.

But that was when we had proper mod tools, even so simple as seeing reported posts by forum. By all accounts mod tools have been next to non existent since the move although I think that might have changed in the past week or so. It could be frustrating enough with proper tools, and knowing how frustrating this place has been since the move just as a poster, I can imagine that it's been a nightmare for the past few months for mods, cmods and admins.

DelBoy Trotter

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118301002#Comment_118301002

Unfortunately moaning isn't against the charter, so it would be a waste of my time reporting your posts!

How do you know your simpler and faster solution will work? What would most likely happen is that a number of mods either won't see the post/PM/notification for any number of reasons, and then you will have forums that don't have a list of mods stickied and it will be back to people moaning in here about it

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118301350#Comment_118301350

I'm asking a question. can you clarify if you think I am "moaning" @Boards.ie: Niamh

28064212

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118301002#Comment_118301002

It's not simpler though. There are 721 categories on Boards. A decent proportion of those are inactive or non-modded, but there's still at least 100 active categories. How do you start organising getting in contact with all the mods of those forums? Remember, none of the CMods or Admins are able to get a list of the mods of each forum. Who's going to manage and monitor it? Seems like it would probably be the very same people who are currently working on a proper solution, so your proposal is that they stop working on that to implement a stop-gap fix.

Irish Steve

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118301367#Comment_118301367

Moaning? Slightly, yes, in that you are expecting your solution, and that, as has been explained, may well not be appropriate for the entire site. What you are definitely doing is making a mountain out of a molehill, and posting a lot more posts than necessary to try and win the argument as to why your issue should get higher priority than the many other issues that are being addressed at the moment, and the person dealing with administrative issues in the office has to keep coming back to this thread to pick up the messages that are resulting. The Boards.ie operation is not large any more, and there is unfortunately not a whole team of developers waiting for issues to be dropped in their in tray. There have been posts that answered the issue, and one of the administative team (a volunteer by the way) has offered involvement in dealing with one of your concerns. If that's not enough, then I'm not sure that there's any other help or assistance available, and continuing to bang the drum is not going to do anything to speed up or change the result you are expecting.

DelBoy Trotter

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118301436#Comment_118301436

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118301524#Comment_118301524

Thanks, articulated what I was going to say!

ohnonotgmail

Right, I'll shup up now. It is clear only certain feedback is welcome.

Beasty

Your feedback is appreciated ohnonotgmail. The post you were asking about was nasty and had turned into the topic of a very different thread. I was able to step in and tidy things up a bit.

And yes it is a pain when there are very few of us doing the heavy lifting.

What I am noticing are a few new (not re-reg to my knowledge) posters who seem happy enough in the likes of the CA and Coronavirus forums (which I am very active in modding). I suspect that over time they will start exploring a little further afield. Some of these may eventually become mods without the knowledge of what we are missing from the old platform.

Very much early days and those 2 forums are the busiest across the site. Hopefully signs of some upturn in interest although that may be more down to the latest developments in the Covid world.

Speaking personally I feel a bit more comfortable navigating the site now. Yes we remain short of some mod tools but I am happy to keep working with what we have in the hope there will be some further improvement.

Deja Boo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118299963#Comment_118299963

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118300004#Comment_118300004

This ^ does sound like a reasonable (and helpful) idea... a temporary solution, until the mod lists Niamh is working on, can get done. I no longer mod in the new format, but catmods or mods simply popping up a sticky, (atleast in the busiest of forums) doesn't sound like a Herculian task (if it is, then ... I get why mods are struggling.)

StupidLikeAFox

I'm getting SSL errors on random pages now aswell

Irish Steve

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118301730#Comment_118301730

No, the feedback is needed, but there is a very small team working very hard behind the scenes to sort out a wide range of issues that were not meant to have happened the way they did, and they do know what they are doing. The point I was trying to make, without much success, is that once the team are made aware of an issue, and have acknowledged it as a valid issue, they will prioritise it, and work out the best route and strategy to achieve the result needed, and ideally, they don't need the distraction of arguments betwwen users about how best to achieve the wanted result.

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118304122#Comment_118304122

Well maybe talk to the person who started the argument. I asked a reasonable question and got it in the neck from people who have contributed nothing.

New Home

"Not contributing" and "not getting the answer you want to hear" are very different things,

Irish Steve

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118304299#Comment_118304299

Welcome to the sort of life that is regular for the volunteer moderators. It wasn't easy on the old site, the migration to Vanilla has been a disaster in so many ways, and it's very (too) slowly getting sorted, but in the meantime, it's not easy!

DelBoy Trotter

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118304299#Comment_118304299

A member for 17 years, and a mod for about half of them, I’ve contributed plenty to the site instead of giving people who are trying to fix the current iteration hassle in the form of “feedback” when the things I want aren’t getting done quick enough. And then embarrassingly throwing toys out of the pram….

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118301730#Comment_118301730

I won’t bother replying to anything else in this thread, as the few mods that are working have enough to be doing.

To Niamh, the staff in the office, the current mods and admin, while the migration and new iteration of the site was a disaster, I personally think the site has improved a lot since it first went live, and all the hard work is appreciated 👍

_Kaiser_

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118302212#Comment_118302212

What you call moderation, I call micromanagement and stifling discussion, and it's rampant across what's left of this site and community.

Moderation should be to discourage and deal with situations like personal abuse, bullying, posts that might cause legal issues, and so on - not trying to control the flow and content of a thread with random bold formatted edicts to "get on topic", "post x in y thread" etc. Using your own example above, what you consider to be active moderation is in reality really only an obsessive need to micromanage the forum and discussion in it.

It's the same approach taken to Feedback - post here only if you fulfil x, y, z random criteria and expect more bold writing if you don't! You talk about new users perhaps venturing further across the forum, but why would they when they are reading what seems like trivial/petty instructions being issued on the threads they DO view/partake in?

It's this attitude from those "in charge" that is killing this site and has been for a lot longer than this disaster of a platform migration.

While of course a site like this will need SOME level of oversight and ground rules, too many of the Mods/Admins view the forums they oversee as their patch that should be run their way to reflect what they want to see/read, rather than a standardised largely hands off approach unless intervention is genuinely needed - something very ironic given the aforementioned obsession with process and micromanagement.

There's a lot more needs fixing on this site than just the platform and UI. Boards management (hi Odhran!) need to really take a long hard look at how the site is run day-to-day, and while relying on unpaid volunteers might be good for the balance sheet, it doesn't gel with the idea of having a consistent, welcoming and OPEN experience for the users without whom there would be no point to the site at all!