The place seems to be a bit of a ghost town since the move, many people haven't come back
It was one click to see my threads before on mobile. Now I simply don't know where any of them are.
It's definitely a step back
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've been on this site for years and while not the most prolific poster I did spend a lot of time browsing various forums and topics. This new layout and navigation is horrendous. There's and old saying , " if it ain't broke , don't fix it " .
i commented this morning and i'm still on the front page :)
It was broke though. That was the problem
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.
It was very unstable and the whole thing was a patchwork of add ons and sticky plasters that could (and did) topple over at any moment. A change was needed. Unfortunately it does not seem to be going well
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.
It is not available at the moment. If you want a list for a specific forum I can find out for you. Just pm me
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.
Lovely analogy, but let me take it further.
You are worried the bridge will fall down so you start building a new one to replace it.
But the old four lane bridge with speed limit of 100kph on nice tarmaced surface is closed and replaced by the half build bridge with only two gravel covered lanes open, speed limit is down to 40 kph, you have traffic lights in the middle and it no longer links up with roads on one side but ends in the middle of a field.
I have done a fair migrations in my time, mainly ERP and service desks/help desks.
If I was responsible for a comparable fook up on this scale I would have ended up with an ERP system with half the stock missing, half the customers missing, no way of adding orders and no way of quering pricing.
I think everyone would deem that an epic failure.
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 only use the mobile site, and since the upgrade, it's absolutely sh1te.
Its rotten looking, weird scrolling motion, there's no proper separation to the posts, it's just horrible to use.
The lack of activity and usability here has driven me to the other site (I'm not gonna spam it) which is easy on the eyes, easy to use and is gaining in nunbers of users (including prolific and known users) so that it FEELS like being back on Boards.ie.
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.
Resource issue I would guess. There are only a couple of people employed by boards.ie
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.
To be fair and to be obvious, there is a massive resource that was always available - users of the site.
Some of them even have professional knowledge, imagine that!
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.
Is there any forum where we can provide feedback?
I think someone is going to take advantage of this and setup a new Irish forum site which users will flock to.
Just copy the list of forums here and set it up on another forum software and to save money only allowed embedded images.
I can see it happening with the right person doing it.
Boards. What have you done? This new platform is about as good as a kick in the nutsack. It looks similar to the old platform, but has none of the useful functions of the old. I mainly use desktop version. Multi-quote is missing and I can't find my previous posts...only threads I started. I'll give it a week or two in the hope this sheetshow get's fixed. If not, goodbye boardsies. It was fun....moreso in the early days when mods in some of the forums didn't let the power get to their heads. I think a lot of people won't return here. Booooards!
It's already happened, over at ****
No info now from a username about who is a mod or what forums they are on.
Can't figure out how to search within a thread, the old advanced search was great if you were looking for a particular post.
Drafts are saved whether you want to save them or not.
How can you see what posts you've thanked?
Looks decent enough. Gonna register.
I don’t doubt that a change was needed and the site was being held together with sticky tape, but I’m not sure why they went the direction they did. The software is shite and I’m not sure it was the best option for a community platform. Someone on another thread mentioned Xenforo and at a quick glance, what they offer is far superior to what Boards has gone for with Vanilla. Xenforo was even created by the lads behind VBulletin. So while a change was needed and a move understandable, this ain’t it
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.
Looks pretty good. Just registered.
See a few familiar names there.
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 guess I'm starting to understand the frustrations. I've never a prolific poster in the past, but I suppose if I was and had invested as much time as some I'd feel the same.
Still hope they manage to recover the situation.
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.
![Photo of [Deleted User]](https://www.boards.ie/applications/dashboard/design/images/banned.png)
