Has the 1 week downtime & move to vanilla killed this place?

Scalable, but in which direction? Given the user base is diminishing, will it be trimming the fat to make the experience load at a less than glacial pace?

There's a certain irony that the ad that keeps popping up is one for a website builder (and its not vanilla)!

Think of it like a building/bridge with a serious structrial defect. It's going to fall down eventually, so do you replace it now, or wait for the final collaspse.

The set up for some is different BUT the barometer that I am seeing is that the first page of after hours still has posts going back 2 days. Previously you might only see posts going back 6/7 hours before having to move on to page 2.

A lack of m.boards has seen my usage decrease. Far too difficult to navigate.

It really is bad and I don’t think people are being hyperbolic when they say it’s now a “ghost town”.

When I find the threads I’m generally a part of nobody is posting. The abysmal effort of the mobile site will do damage. The weeks downtime made people move on. The pains of navigating the new site will do the same.

i commented this morning and i'm still on the front page :)

How was it broken? And if so, fine, its broken or its out grown the previous platform.

But migrate to something better, not some bag of sh1t platform.

Does anybody know where one can obtain the list of moderators of a particular forum... maybes I’m going blind but I’m not seeing it.

There’s more wrong with this site now then what’s right with it.

its an awful pity.boards was great.could they not shut it down for another week and put it back the way it was.

The idea that the switch was made without full functionality of the My Forums feature absolutely boggles my tiny little mind. It's how the majority of regular users navigate the site. It's really put me off even browsing now both on PC and phone because it's a shambles trying to find most of the forums I'd look at the most.

The Save Draft feature is annoying as sh*te too because sometimes I'd half type a message, decide not to post, and then can't get rid of the f*cking thing because it keeps showing back up in the text box the next time I visit the thread, not to mention it's more difficult to delete links and quotes.

There just also seems to be a ridiculous amount of redundancy in the new system. The Activity function only seems to appear on the mobile site, yet it's utterly pointless anyway. Clicking Discussions and just Boards.ie at the top banner is basically the same thing. The range of emojis is stupid too, this is a discussion forum not a Whatsapp group.

Whatever about the stability and stuff on the backend that will be beneficial to the Boards team etc, the useability of the site and some of the new features for me now are utterly pointless and detract from the user experience.

I fully agree with you. Any migration plan should have include a trial "pre-migration" with some QA and at least some minimal UAT with either the mods or some trusted users.

UAT doesn't need to be done by staff. A small panel of volunteers, mods and end users (i.e., us) would have identified loads of problems that could've been addressed in advance. I daresay there's a good chunk of users with design/testing experience, too.

They're popping up on the threads in the feedback forum frequently enough. They've acknowledged that people are frustrated.

The whole thing has been badly handled that's as clear as day, but it's easy for us to speculate and say what we would have done differently without having any first hand knowledge. We haven't a clue what behind the scenes goings on set of circumstances led to the current state of affairs.

It's already happened, over at ****

Beginning to lose patience myself, we're 3 weeks in now and the site is still awkward to use. Threads Im subbed to used to get 40-50 new posts a day and now they are down to 4 or 5 posts a day at best.

This migration was supposed to make Boards more user friendly and financially viable but the main migration that has happened here is a big chunk of the community has gone over to Reddit. Even if Boards somehow worked perfectly in the morning there is still very few people around to post and many former posters won't be coming back, thus advertising revenue will be way down and the objective of making the site financially viable is completely scuttled.

Sad to say but I think this whole migration fiasco is the beginning of the end for Boards. Its hard to see it being around in 12 months time when the user base has been completely hollowed out and found other forums to post on.

Just for the record, I take no joy in posting that or recommending the other forum. My preference was always for Boards to come back improved but they've made a total and complete balls of it.

The lack of a public "look, we screwed up, it's been a disaster, sorry folks" stings too. We all know it, it's received almost a 100% pasting by the user base. And management clearly know, but are playing it off like it's acceptable. It's not.

I don't know why anyone's posting "they had to change, look they can fix this in a while". Nobody's disputing boards was creaking along but the bridge analogy above is perfect. You can replace software but you can't replace habitual customers. Once they're gone, why would they come back? It's not like they're being offered a better experience here.

The engine of a discussion board isn't the software or a server, it's the users having a discussion. If that's not happening, you've no momentum and you're dead in the water.

I wonder if the new site is a bolt hole set up by boards.ie that they can turn off in a few months when this place is sorted?

That’d be some Machiavellian shít.

I can’t see any notable improvements on the user end after last night’s down time. Site is still as slow as Christmas. What is actually going on?

Another big issue is that when drunk it's even more impossible to find your threads and forums. Tested that last night myself.