Who Watches the Watchmen (Our Chit Chat Thread)

893bet · 30-07-2021 05:02PM

I still read this forum a lot and the farming forum. But that’s it.

I used always look at the “trending” threads and then read a lot and post a little in loads of other forums. But now the random interacts with other topics are gone.

Fitz II · 30-07-2021 05:03PM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117683583#Comment_117683583

Is there a irish watch subreddit or group....I am missing my watch banter fix....

Cyclingtourist · 30-07-2021 05:57PM

"Look at the number of likes the photos are getting in the "here is my watch today" thread...usually any old watch would get at least 8 or 9 now its 2 or 3. "

It's not just about the watch, I try to add a bit of interest to mine. I 'like' most watch photos whether they're "any old" or 'luxuary'. Someone's taken the trouble to post a photo and deserves it is my attitude.I

Part of the reason for the drop off could be that when you post in a thread you aren't automatically notified any more.

Anyway I'm doing my bit and as a social media phobe won't be joining any of those new fangled groups.

banie01 · 30-07-2021 06:14PM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117684133#Comment_117684133

Much like 893 I'd post spend most of my pre-change time on here with time on some other forums too and a weather eye on the trending threads that I'd often drop in and out of. The immediacy of the old style is gone, it's a slog to use, browse and even the threads like your YouTube thread, Blanchy's and the photos thread are dying a death.

Don't know about another Irish watch forum, but TF did mention a discord group and that's where a lot of folks on a private sub I'm on here have migrated to now aswell.

I have all the foibles of the "new" boards sussed in the main, and I still fúcking hate it! At this point, the craic and the camaraderie is gone 😣

Wibbs · 30-07-2021 07:45PM

Fitz Boards.ie is dead, I lament its demise but hard to see a recovery at this stage

It's severely wounded that's for damned sure F. I can completely understand a few glitches after moving a site this big over to a new platform, especially one in another timezone and one that doesn't work on weekends(WTF? An interwebs company???), but it's clear there have been monumental fcukups from somebody somewhere. the My Forums dropdown menu should have been in the top three must haves out of the box. That couldn't be any more bloody obvious and yet... The average person wouldn't have given a fcuk about posts from fifteen years ago, or even their old private messages(which we can't delete now BTW, which is well out of bloody order), but not adressing the ablity to navigate the site from the very start is beyond headscratching. When you can't find discussions(even your own) on a discussion site then that's you're bleeding out until you can.

The CEO chap said in the feedback forum that the old Boards steup was too expensive to maintain and Boards itself couldn't pay for itself anymore.

I quote: We have been out of runway in Boards.ie for a long time now. The site could not support itself financially ... If we did not do this there would be no Boards.

This explains the only Dev for the place, a lad who I have always had huge sympathy for and especially now. That's a concern given the Woo Flu injected a lot of extra traffic last year. So they had to move to a more easily and cheap to run platform. Cool beans. He also said they tested things before the move.

Reading between the lines it would be my opinion the gobdaws in Canuckistan fcuked up/couldn't be arsed. The fact that they started the migration on a Thursday, then after seeing the site wasn't live after two days the pricks buggered off for the weekend leaving dead air. I've subcontracted IT guys and companies before and a couple of times weekend and after hours work came up as these things will and never did any of them say, sorry have to clock off now. So the Dev lad and apparently they have others digging in to help now could have come up with all the fixes today, but the Vanilla crowd in Canada won't look at them until around noon on Monday, try them see if they work, maybe implement some that do and throw what doesn't back for another 24 hours.

scwazrh · 31-07-2021 08:09AM

If a site with as many visitors as boards had , pre switch over couldn’t make money there is something seriously wrong on management side .Very quick to blame the infrastructure for the costs out , I’m sure a bit of entrepreneurship on the money in side of things would of worked better than reducing the usability of the site .

Wibbs · 31-07-2021 10:24AM

Ad revenue on websites fell off a cliff a few years back, IIRC because of how google paid out on such things. I remember at the time DeVore(so we're going back a while) who was one of those who started the place said it affected them pretty badly. Plus the visitor numbers before this changeover were quite a bit down on the peak around ten years ago, though covid gave it a boost.

There are many more competing platforms today, people seem to prefer more echo chamber environments and most also use phones rather than PC's to access sites like this. Boards has been bleeding money for quite a few years. When Daft.ie bought it they did so to get Adverts, Boards was a nice sideline at the time, but not the main focus and has been passed from pillar to post since. If they had kept it as a loss leader then it would have been fine, but they didn't and it's been running on fumes for a while with nobody too sure about how to make it pay for itself, never mind turn a profit. A lot of the forums that are still out there are either tiny one man band operations or part of a much larger and profitable enterprise that keeps them going. The time where a forum could provide living wages and self support are sadly long gone.

unkel · 31-07-2021 10:30AM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117686188#Comment_117686188

Boards.ie might be loss making but that could have been easily fixed by cutting costs, no? 10 years ago or so, boards did not have any paid staff. And the site was bigger than it was in recent years (with several paid staff). Plenty of silly volunteers like yourself and myself who have donated thousands of hours of our time for free.

Surely there was no need to euthanise the site with this "upgrade"? 😮

Wibbs · 31-07-2021 11:30AM

IIRC Boards.ie did have "staff" or at least a couple of the founder guys were getting some revenue from it and to keep the lights on. I suspect more of the latter as they all had other main business/career interests.

If I were to try and save it, I would (searchable)archive everything over say two years old, reduce the list of forums to only those with daily posts. That alone would get rid of a lot of dead flesh. Move it to some proprietary platform like vbulletin or whatever has replaced it and don't customise it, so it doesn't need constant tweaking. Get users and mods more directly involved as far as hosting and running the site. Could you "cloud" a forum I wonder? Spread the load across loads of member's PC's?

That's not a business model though. The business model is what we're seeing here. Keep it "in house", move it to another platform, likely the cheapest if they don't "do" weekends and take their sweet time to update things and hope the monthly costs of that are covered by what ad revenue is earned so the place wipes its face and runs itself. And probably put the existing staff on part time, or...

Wibbs · 31-07-2021 11:36AM

There's another site that was set up in the wake of Board's update and it's going well now, but it's got under 400 members and is in the honeymoon stage. The first bit of rancour or disagreement will tell how it will go on. It won't be easy for a "one man band" to navigate that. Boards started off with a couple of forums and no mods at first. And let's face it people seemed to be a lot more polite in the interwebs past. It had a cost of entry and most people online were "geeks" and "nerds" who tend to be A more intelligent than average and B generally more easygoing. These days any Karen or Ken can mash their barely opposable thumbs on their new AndriPhone. Democratisation is great, but it brings in its wake more arseholes.

njburke · 31-07-2021 05:01PM

Would a small annual subscription not have fixed their revenue issues? It might also have addressed the Karen and Ken issues. I suppose if they monetized the forum that way it might be hard to keep a small army of unpaid moderators.

Fitz II · 31-07-2021 05:19PM

I think there are two issues being conflated here wibbs, wheather boards.ie makes money or not really doesnt have much to do with the platform. Hosting a VB board is pretty cheap even one with terabyte's of data. THe most expensive thing is changing platform so I call total bullshit on that excuse. It may be that the monetisation capacity of the Vbullitin was limited but thats another issues altogether.

When boards emplodes I can see the murder rate going up as the Admins will have no outlet for their their feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness IRL.

Wibbs · 31-07-2021 05:45PM

I think there are two issues being conflated here wibbs, wheather boards.ie makes money or not really doesnt have much to do with the platform. Hosting a VB board is pretty cheap even one with terabyte's of data. THe most expensive thing is changing platform so I call total bullshit on that excuse.

Depends entirely on how it is run too Fitz. If it's a more homegrown, a few servers in someone's gaff type of affair it's pretty cheap alright. That's if the VB setup is standard and not patched to all hell as Boards was, because VB couldn't handle a site of the size it was with the number of active forums it had. The other expense is it went "Business", well business school business anyway. Adverts was a good example of that where they started tarting up their office like a cut price google with beanbags, coffee machines and the dregs of a closed pub sale with old bicycles on the wall, thinking this was good for the Optics(tm) on social media. Went Celtic Tiger when that particular feline species was already extinct and stuffed and mounted in the National Irish Museum of WTF Were We Thinking. Middle managers love that crap. It's like catnip to them. Ditto for long meetings, funky office space and paying chancers for projections on Powerpoint. You may as well fly in a witch doctor and get him to throw the bones. And when you bring in Talk To forums trying to inject more cash it's middle managers talking to other middle managers in their best Linkedin speak. There can be a lot of dead weight and wasted money spent on that sorta thing when business gets involved. It should have been open sourced as much as possible way back IMHO.

There are hidden expenses too. Legal being a big one as a publisher in Ireland. Ambulance chasers know publishers without very deep pockets are on the back foot under Irish law. Hell a few years back there was an Irish bloggist whose name escapes who was taken to court over some opinion piece they wrote on their blog and were fined tens of thousands of beer tokens. Boards.ie would be and was in the firing line for that stuff. Just dealing with the MCD thing would have cost a lot in legal fees. If they had gone to court/lost, game over. Then the aforementioned Talk To forums which were a good idea on paper. Again you've to hire someone to talk to those entities and be on the other end of a phone and to have an office space to meet with them. To look serious bizness and professional an' that. That costs money.

So yeah something like I dunno an Irish car forum with a few hundred members running on VB or whatever is cheap as chips to run, but a forum with tens of thousands of members with a wide range of subjects, with thousands of posts per day at its peak and a talk to business section, not nearly so cheap at all.

Wibbs · 31-07-2021 06:00PM

Actually one could argue the current CEO guy inherited the "business" bloated Boards.ie and this move was a way to downsize those costs by going to a newer cheaper platform.

When boards emplodes I can see the murder rate going up as the Admins will have no outlet for their their feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness IRL.

As for admins; I've met a load of them down the years, most of them I'd reckon. Some I liked, some I wouldn't have gotten on with and vice versa, but were otherwise grand and that's cool. Including one who after he found out about a bereavement I was going through dragged me out for drinks to get me out of my funk and I'd only met the chap once before in the real world. I can only think of two who I really didn't get on with and didn't respect because they were indeed fond of powertripping. Given the number of people who've held that role that's a pretty good split IMHO. Oh and most of them were doing pretty well(a couple very well) in life beyond Boards, so no inadequacies there that I could see.

Fitz II · 31-07-2021 06:21PM

I have run VBulliting forums in the past, the cost nothing to run, and VBullitin has no size limits, and old data puts no increasing burden on the database it just sits there on the databasee out of the cache.. All servers are virtual these days run from large data centres and again this costs very little. Renting rack time in a data centre is again not expensive and devolves all the uptime issues, DDos etc to the datacenters.. The traffic is down on what is was ten years ago buy their own admission but yet running costs are up and somehow a new platform will solve it?? It makes no sense what so ever.

Having meeting pods etc in Boards hq is likely the issue here. The admins I have had interactions with here were officious, disloyal and had totally incorrect understanding of the GDPR legislation. DeVore was sound I knew him, and those were the golden days, but the current crop of admins have run the site into the ground. They never quite appreciated that with user generated content you need to respect the users, epically the old timers and the uber contributors. Instead they have taken the path of least resistance of cancel culture, many a good contributor has been run out of town.

I was banned for 3 months and my admin privileges removed due to a complaint from a fairly new user that I had publicly called him trouble maker after looking at his ban and infraction history. I had been on boards since 2004. That vocal user has since been lifetime site banned for racist abuse. Was it worth it for boards to plicate that fellow and make a pariah out of me? I watch on with glee at this latest farce, its the kind of poor decision making and lack of leadership I have come to expect. Moderating and administrating take a wisdom and light touch that the young crew dont understand, and the CEO obviously thinks that boards.ie users are morons that can be bluffed by technobabble.

Rant over.

Wibbs · 31-07-2021 06:43PM

I was banned for 3 months and my admin privileges removed due to a complaint from a fairly new user that I had publicly called him trouble maker after looking at his ban and infraction history. I had been on boards since 2004. That vocal user has since been lifetime site banned for racist abuse. Was it worth it for boards to plicate that fellow and make a pariah out of me?

I hear you, but DeVore would have banned you for that too even in the golden days. He was always of the privacy of users was sacrosanct angle, especially if that was seen to be abused by mods(or other members PMs) and a fair number got demodded and/or banned for that sorta thing. It's less about placation(even of knobends) and more about keeping a consistent standard. Things like PMs and mod stuff are no go areas not to be used beyond their private purpose. IMHO this goes triple for long term members who should know the score more than a newbie. The only DRP I ever had was someone being a bit of a dick and rules lawyering and an admin/cmod backing them. I didn't agree, but it is what it is and looking back it was his only recourse really.

I agree re VB running and hosting, but old Boards was so patched over the years it was barely VB any more. A very different animal and why it used to fart out 503 or whatever errors on the regular. It needed a full time hand on deck. A new platform that isn't patched to feck that doesn't require that will cost less. Never mind that VB itself is no longer supported as an entity. Since 2013 IIRC? XenForo again IIRC is the new version of that sorta thing.

Fitz II · 31-07-2021 07:44PM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117688390#Comment_117688390

Cant delete the bit I dont want to address another crap feature of new boards on a quote. But the bit about wanting a unpatched platofrm certainly doesnt seem to be working out. Its hard to imagine that if boards was in financial distress to the point where a week long shutdown and new platform was a necessity, that with the current I would guess 75% decrease in traffic, that it will be around in 6 months.

Time maybe for you to consider a dedicated watchf forum wibbs?

Wibbs · 31-07-2021 08:18PM

Unlike the admins Fitz 😉 I'm not on a power trip, too light of touch too I've been told... Might be a plan though. The forum layout is still very popular among watch guys. Well as you've rightly pointed out yourself it's mostly middle aged guys in the hobby and they generally prefer both the familiar and the forum format itself. There's a growing younger demogrpahic too of course, but they're more found on the 'Gram and Reddit, even Arsebook.

Funny enough though I'm also a middle aged oulfella now, back in the early days of watch groups online in the 90's it was still mostly middle aged guys and I was one of the few enfant terribles 😂 That's in the vintage realm mind you, though even on the Timezone forums it was again mostly older guys even in the current market stuff. Going even further back to the 80's and early 90's on trips to the UK and watch sellers there I was very much the odd one out being a youngfella. Though the guys I met(and later those online) who were older and knew their sh1t were very helpful to the newbie and gave great advice and steered me well, including a couple of dealers. One chap in London who must have been in his 60's put me off buying a more expensive watch he was selling and pointing me to a better and cheaper one he wasn't. I ended up buying my 1916 Longines Trench from him as he told me it was one of the lowest mileage ones that passed through his hands and 30 years later he wasn't wrong. The damn thing's one of the most accurate and reliable watch I've ever had.

Actually FItz your journey through the luxury current watch collecting area has been informative and you've been quick with your advice to people considering the same journey. EG avoiding buying the budget watch when you really want the more expensive one and stuff like that. Fair play. Learning from native guides like you was what saved me from bad purchases and you're paying it forward with the newbies in your area. Ditto for your 'Tube channel with the very novel "who should buy this". I've tried to do similar with the vintage stuff here where I try to give values and what is or isn't a good buy for someone reading. IMHO too many watch commentators don't do this, though so many are newbies themselves with deep pockets and shallow brains, or well dressed embryos reading brand adverts.

Experience counts, because it's usually earned from monumental fcukups as well as triumphs. Or maybe that's just me... It's not just age either. If I were looking to buy a 1960's Seiko I'd be wearing out my keyboard and his patience PMing our own Irishplayer and he's a youngfella. Well compared to us anyway... I steered him pretty well on his 1930's pilots watch so I'd be extracting my pound of flesh there. 😁

blue5000 · 01-08-2021 09:43AM

I don't have much to add to the above conversation, except that if we want boards to survive the users simply have to keep using it. Some of us on another forum have started a whatsap group. Is that an option here if this place goes titsup?

Cyclingtourist · 01-08-2021 09:48AM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117690014#Comment_117690014

What's a whatsap?

blue5000 · 01-08-2021 10:03AM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117690030#Comment_117690030

That green knob on an iphone that looks like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp Sorry forgot the second 'p'

Wibbs · 01-08-2021 10:06AM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117690014#Comment_117690014

Whatsapp is OK, but like arsebook it's more a show and tell platform. I've seen that with a couple of car forums that went that route. They went from large archives of great information as well as show and tell, to here's a pic of my car/pics of what I'm selling. Plus arsebook or whatsapp aren't searchable. They're an instant hit type platform. For subjects like this IMHO anyway forums are still better. Plus as noted above most watch collectors are middle aged farts like myself and they tend to prefer the forum layout.

Cyclingtourist · 01-08-2021 10:17AM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117690094#Comment_117690094

But my phone isn't an iphone.

blue5000 · 01-08-2021 10:23AM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117690169#Comment_117690169

I partly guessed when you asked alright. You are still using the 'burner' Nokia? I got some funny looks the last time I used mine in Kildare village😲

Wibbs · 01-08-2021 10:48AM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117690222#Comment_117690222

Clearly you look like a drug dealer B. 🤣

Fitz II · 01-08-2021 10:49AM

CT answers the phone "Ahoyhoy"

I agree Wibbs a conventional forum is the best for information and as a respoitory. FB and whats app are more "News" platforms where previous posts disappear into the ether. However a Whatapp or a FB might be a good idea. I would be keen to contribute but not administer if anyone else wants to set one up.

James Bond Junior · 01-08-2021 03:15PM

Pop me in a whatsapp if it starts. I'm on another here and it is very good.

micks_address · 03-08-2021 09:46AM

hi folks,

question on buying a watch from the uk (wales) privately. In terms of import duty - if you buy a watch worth say 1k and the seller marks down to the value on postage to 100 pounds. What do anpost charge? Will they just take the value marked on the package and apply import to that value or will they open the package and try and come up with a 'market' value for the watch and charge on that? I know when buying from ebay before via addresspal in the US ive been asked to produce the ebay invoice - but this would be for a private purchase with no invoice involved. I do realize there's a risk of marking down the value of the watch in the case it gets lost on the way the claim could only be for the marked value.

Cheers,

Mick

Cienciano · 03-08-2021 10:14PM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117690014#Comment_117690014

About 3 years ago all the PES players stopped using boards because of the limits on functionality and use discord which is 100 times better. Now there's loads on it and it's far easier to organise things.

Cyclingtourist · 04-08-2021 06:36AM

^^What's PES?

Who Watches the Watchmen (Our Chit Chat Thread)

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