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

As always Wibbs, you sum up the position nicely.

I haven't been on in days but decided to have a quick look today to see if anything had improved or what the current state of the site is. From reading the last 5/6 pages of this thread and a quick browse (I say quick, but the site seems ridiculously slow still!), it seems very little!

To be honest, I don't care at this stage. I miss have this as my "go to" site for Irish discussion and the topics I used to watch and contribute to here, but this site is no longer fit for that purpose and I have no desire to play beta tester for months while Mark (who has been apparently saddled with the job) tries to untangle the mess Odhran (or whoever!) has made for him and the rest of us - assuming he sticks around that long of course!

Hopefully the "other site" continues to grow because I don't see Boards coming back from this - it's what? 3 weeks now and basic functions are still broken, inconsistent between mobile and desktop or just not there at all!

Oh!!

Well, that was kinda what I was hoping for when I posted here, I suppose....

Now, if anyone from the sports Olympics thread could perform a similar service if they see this, I'd be very grateful (as would a lot of others, I suspect!)

I read a bit further back and found Ohran's post where he actually engaged with some of the more repeated feedback and posted a very revealing point... this was all about cost reduction.

Despite the talk about how unstable and hard to maintain the old site was, the bottom line is that they just couldn't afford to maintain/host it is my take. Vanilla is a much cut down, hosted version that we all have to live with if "boards.ie" is to continue.

Not a good sign and I had no idea that things were apparently so bad financially that they've jumped to this unfit-for-purpose platform, and compounded by the loss of goodwill and posting from the users generally since the changeover.

I also still wonder what'll happen when Vanilla change/update the core software at some point - will all the efforts by Mark and co break, given the amount of customisation that seems to be going on? If so that'll only hasten the decline.

Put these things together and I think the closure of this site seems inevitable in the near future :( There's no money, the platform isn't suitable for the requirement, and the users have had enough.

Oh, so this site can’t even resemble the ‘new site’ because of 20 years of data? I’m not sure how that works could you explain it? Serious question.

The bigger issue is that Vanilla seems to have sold this as a platform that could be easily adjusted to look and act like the old Boards. The realisation that is can't and won't is new, so there's either been a colossal oversell on Vanilla's part or misunderstanding on Boards part.

Given the scramble to adjust features I'd guess it's the former and I have huge sympathy for Niamh and Mark trying to deal with all the issues and complaints.

Thanks for this workable I suppose but much preferred the old way they did it.

Also it has a number beside my Bookmarks too which I think is new. I thought once I went into one of my bookmarks it might decrease the number by 1 as this would be the way the old boards worked but not looking likely.

Definitely not spending anywhere near the same amount of time on boards as I used to, is that the general consensus among users?

That's just dressing up a grievance against some mods as a privacy concern.

What do you think some mods would do with your email if they could see it? Spend all their free time signing you up to newsletters and dodgy sites?

The site is still fundamentally unusable for me. The two primary methods I used to navigate about the five or six forums I would have tended to use

"My Forums" and the dropdown menus... are still broken. I do not know how anyone can use it without either of these.

Further I see the b.ie people fixing what they say are other issues ... I must be crazy but if its not fixing these kind of things I really do wonder what people think is important.

I would love to see the stats on the number of posts pre- and post- changeover.

As I've previously stated, my Boards usage has plummeted these past weeks.

I've given up on the mobile sites. It's multiple more taps to get where I want. I haven't used it in many days.

With the weekend & the bank holiday, I've not been on my work laptop so have not checked Boards.ie since I logged off from work on Friday. I'm only on it now because I happen to be on my personal laptop to check out some other bits.

Even while I'm on it, I've skipped over all the posts in this thread from this weekend in this thread. I'm also only clicking into a handful of threads compared to normal.

This changeover has really reduced my enjoyment of this site.