Goodbye to 2021 - a message from the Boards team

2021, what a year. We all bade a not-very-fond farewell to 2020 hoping for better things in 2021 but I’m not sure it was a whole lot better. Before going on, I say this every year because it is true every year…Christmas time can be hard for some people and especially if/when we cannot see loved ones. If you are finding things difficult and need some extra help and support around this time, then there is a list of helplines and emails here which you can access. 

Last year, Mark and I compiled a list of things that had happened on the site or real life events that were talked about extensively on the site to add to a round up of the year passed. Mark wrote it up for us all and it was a great way to look back over the year. You can read the 2020 round up here. It’s hard to believe some of those things only happened last year to be honest! 

This year, I have struggled to write the round up. A lot has happened. At the start of the year we were working on migrating to a new forum. For various reasons it was pushed out more than once but in July we finally took the site offline to facilitate the move. Not everything went to plan to say the least and we are still picking up some of the pieces. The migration however was necessary to get us off vBulletin and onto a more robust platform. You can read more about the move in the various threads in the Feedback forum. 

Much earlier in the year in March, we added two new forums which seem to be going quite well. Give them a visit if they are of any interest to you:

• 3D Printing
• Childfree by Choice

In August we had a huge shock when our lovely colleague Mark died very suddenly in his sleep. After over a year of working from home and seeing each other only on video calls, it is still hard to believe that he’s not just ‘offline’. The Boards team had been due to meet up on a Thursday so we could wish Mark well as he’d decided to move on to pursue other goals. Sadly I spent that Thursday driving to his funeral in Limerick instead. He had a beautiful send off and lots of Boardsies expressed some lovely thoughts about him in this RIP thread.

We are so grateful to those of you who have stuck with us through the migration, who went off and came back and to our new members as well. We couldn't run the site without our volunteer mods, cmods and admins so a very heartful and huge thank you goes out to you guys in particular. Thank you to everyone for your wonderful contributions, your kindness, helpfulness and generosity to fellow members and your support, feedback and patience throughout the year - let's have more of the same next year. We hope to have lots of new work done on the site in 2022 to keep improving the Boards experience.

Everyone deserves some time off so be patient over the next couple of weeks as mods, cmods, admin and staff take some time away to spend with friends, family and pets.

I think that is all I have to say to wave off 2021. Happy Christmas to those who celebrate it and enjoy the break if you'll be lucky enough to have one.

I can't believe I managed a whole update without mentioning Covid! Been there, done that 4 weeks ago and I hope you all manage to avoid it or get a very mild dose. Stay safe everyone.

All the very best,

Niamh & all on the Boards.ie team 💙