The place seems to be a bit of a ghost town since the move, many people haven't come back
I have to agree with your last paragraph.
On the old mobile site m.boards.ie, not touch.boards.ie - I was able to view the most thanked posts of the day. Is that feature still available? Would appreciate a reply from a mod here as I've asked numerous times without a reply.
Sure, but cranky oul lads are a big demographic and have plenty of spare cash to spend and advertisers love them. Reddit confuses them, their wives are on Facebook, twitter doesn't appeal so much and tiktok is the sound the inherited clock in the hall makes. They're ripe for a platform. One could argue Boards was such a platform. Which brings the big problem with the change; oulfellas don't adapt well to change for the most part. Add in nightmarish navigation and here we are.
Oh and the young are just as impossible to please and generally more flightly and less likely to stay out of loyalty and nostalgia.
I think the more systemic issue for Boards in the medium term isn’t the move to a new platform (where things will be resolved) but rather its user base, which now appears to be mostly made up of cranky lads in their 40’s and 50’s moaning about change, political correctness, and modern music.
It’s a demographic that appears to be impossible to please, and, more importantly, a demographic whose opinions others don’t want to read or respond to. Bang of denim jackets, receding hairlines, and retro computer game consoles off the place.
and lack of users will result in lack of advertising revenue - so something will have to give😐️
It's also gotten really quiet on many of the forums where I'd usually expect to see a couple of new posts a day, if not dozens. That's my main fear for the future of Boards. That lack of discussion will turn people off coming here, which will result in less discussion and just churn attendance of this site down to nearly nothing. I hope not...but it feels like a real possibility.
I can just echo that the layout and navigation around the site is awful to the point of off-putting , even trying to find my regular fora and threads on the touch site is a pain.
In the motors forum, which was a pretty popular forum hereabouts, someone yesterday posted a thread asking about a potential car purchase entitled "Is this forum still active" No replies. Really not good on both fronts. The site is bleeding users and views.
Cool feature though: if you copy and paste the thread title the software turns it into a link to the thread. Great.
The singular problem of navigating the site itself is appallingly bad and should have been priority number bloody one. The site will continue if colours are a bit off, or whatever, but it is doomed if you can't find things to discuss on a discussion site. And clearly, very clearly people can't. About the biggest traffic for discussion in the place now is why the hell can't we discuss things. It beggars belief frankly. I do NOT blame Niamh or Mark the dev. Quite the opposite, I bloody well feel for them. Their stress levels must be off the scale dealing with this. I do blame management and the lack of basic cop on when faced with the bleeding obvious.
Come back P45.net!!!!!
It's definitely slower than before, but as mentioned most likely down to the new layout, white space and lack of previous features. But, as someone who uses this site completely free, I have literally no reason to give out. Over 20 years of content to be moved for thousands(?) of users, pictures, videos, links.... I don't know the structure of Boards, but I always assumed it was a skeleton crew to run it, considering it's probably free for 99% of the members. Fair enough if you're a paid subscriber, but that'll be smoothed over with free something or other.
I just hope it can return, because it would be a shame to lose it, it's the last forum I still post in, with the handful of others I liked closing down over the last 10 years. Can't be easy to keep a site like this going, hard to understand how it would be profitable tbh, but I'm not a business person. I'll keep sticking around anyway, the Gaming forum is basically my news source for gaming.
I just don't understand how they didn't do it in a test environment. Why wasn't everything tested first and then transferred to the live environment.
Surely even the basics could of be done in a test environment. Is it down to budget? The wrong people in charge?
I'm honestly stunned and bewildered how they let his happen without it all working in a test environment.
I'm not to judge but the way some of the regular long term posters were treated in prison forum by certain moderators is why the site is dying a death.
Are they going to change it? I can’t see boards lasting too long if they don’t.
Sorry, when you said “notifications”, I thought you meant “notifications”.
The lack of “my threads” and not having threads automatically bookmarked when you post on them is a pain in the arse, though.
Edit: Actually, check the Home page. Are the “My Forums” and “My Threads” tabs working as they did on the old site now?
As I said over in the Feedback thread, the problem is that what they've moved to (Vanilla) isn't fit for purpose - by which I mean setup to support a forum that was as customised as the old site (which was something often used as both a reason for not doing stuff and ultimately for this move) - and so now the staff are busy trying to shoehorn in changes that will ultimately result in the same huge amounts of customisation.
As this site is (as far as I can gather) now on a hosted platform, what happens if Vanilla decide larger issues are "unsupported" because of this, or what happens when they change the underlying platform or update the version? Will that break all the custom changes again?
My read of it all is... either,
Someone either got the spec/requirements BADLY wrong, or were taken in by a sales pitch and promises of great aftersales support (by a company 5 hours behind our timezone and that doesn't work weekends)
or
It was a pure cost-based decision vs maintaining the old site
In any case...
I've called on Odhran and co to provide a clear statement on all of this - how we got to this point, acknowledging the clear message from most of the users, and a real plan (with feedback-led priorities and timeframes) for how they plan to fix it... but it seems the idea of engagement is a "dump and run" post of random updates daily with Niamh (in fairness to her) trying to add some bits as well.
To be honest though, I have a feeling that it may already be too late to recover from.
No they ain't, previosuly if you commented on a thread, the thread woud subsequently show up in "my threads". The notification options are for emails or pops, which would be cat piss in comparison
I'd like to thank the three (I may have missed others) posters on the various threads about the interface woes/annoyances who have posted the bits of css to help wrestle the whitespace and fbook/twitter sprites and even adjust the quote boxes and the recommendations for the two extensions for the most popular desktop browsers, Chromium based ones and Firefox - Stylebot and Stylus
Ads by Google, fritzelly and Gregor Samsa
To these guys the little bits of css might be trivial but it's enormously helped me staying on here daily as I was pre-downtime and I've learned the power of such snippets for other sites that annoy the feck out of me!
Cheers.
Yep I'm still lost. I am more of a browser anyway but it's not that friendly there either.
I've tried and tried to come back but it just isn't happening for me, my interest is wavering fast especially with the touch site.
Just after seeing the top navigation now ;)
I can't navigate the new setup at all - can't find any topics or categories? I'm using touch, maybe I'm missing something obvious?
They are back (must be since yesterday).
Go into Edit Profile - Notification Settings, and configure the notifications you want.
there’s actually better, more granular notification settings than there was on vBulletin.
I just set mine up a few minutes ago, and was notified about your post.
Again, where Boards went wrong here was not having this available from the start, giving the impression that the new system lacked features the old one had.
If the new site was a car it would be launch of the VW Mk3 GTI 8v
They need to get rid of whiteness + long scroll on mobile.
I'll stay because I love the weather forums but couldn't be bothered looking up anything else anymore, so I suppose I'll save myself a lot of time!
They can't revert, that's just not going to happen. This isn't just a new design they've put on Boards, they've changed the entire software they're running on. They moved for a reason: because the old platform was held together with customisations and hacks that were becoming untenable. We've all suffered through the glitches and performance issues and outages over the past couple of years. They weren't going to go away without a change like this.
The problems we're facing now are with the interface. They can be fixed.
The problems they were facing was with the infrastructure. That can't be fixed anywhere near as easily.
So in that situation the right thing to do is to move to a more stable and sustainable infrastructure. Where they went wrong was in not preparing properly. Downtime was far too long, and when it came back up, things obviously weren't complete. But they're one full-time developer and a volunteer helper.
I manage teams that implement and maintain ecommerce sites. On our bigger clients, I've teams consisting of 4 or 5 developers, 2 or 3 QA, a Solution Architect, two project managers and a Business Analyst - and that's just for dealing with the front end. For a site the size of Boards, they're vastly under-resourced.
Get rid of the 'Like' button with the thumbs up thing. I don't think the Facebook aesthetic is a direction to be moving in. There was nothing wrong with the old thanks system and the way the names of the posters would appear in the thanks list below your post.
C'MON those in authority - listen to the people revert to the old version for the love of god
"lord bless us & save us"
😐️
These screenshots are full-screen on a 2k 27" monitor.
Original:
With my Stylebot script:
The huge amount of white space in the second post in the image above is actually a signature that user has added. The whitespace in the third post seems to be cause by the user hitting the return key a few times after typing their post, so effectively this whitespace is content and not the fault of Boards. Most posts are like the first one, without excessive white space between the content and the reaction buttons.
install Stylebot in Chrome (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylebot/oiaejidbmkiecgbjeifoejpgmdaleoha?hl=en)
Visit Boards.ie, and then open the plugin and click "Open Stylebot"
Make sure you've got the "Code" tab selected, and paste in the CSS from my attachment (or write your own).
It auto saves, so just hit the X to close the code window. The CSS will only apply to boards.ie, not any other sites.
EDIT: I will say that the much improved image management features of Vanilla made this post much easier to make than it would have been on vBulletin.
how do you implement it?
![Photo of [Deleted User]](https://www.boards.ie/applications/dashboard/design/images/banned.png)
![Photo of [Deleted User]](https://w0.vanillicon.com/v2/0c95fbacfd3f8db330cceee65321bca3.svg)
