Memories of vBulletin boards.ie

Kind of off topic, but I'm always puzzled by posters who post perfectly normal uncontroversial posts on uncontroversial subjects, and then immediately disappear. Has there been a massive binfire of a thread that I didn't notice?

It's even more intriguing here as this poster is talking about posts from 2005. What on earth can have gone wrong for them in the last 10 days that hasn't happened in the last 20 years?? Must have been huge!

On topic: I miss the search engine and general performance such as non flickering threads. Also, seeing who's online.

Thanks. It was before my time I think, or maybe just not in the forums I was reading. At any rate, I only learned of it some time afterwards so I’ve no idea what sort of a poster he was.

Assuming you're talking about desktop, my browser extension (see signature for links) restores the hover preview, and also allows you to choose whether you want to sticky the header, the breadcrumbs, both, or neither.

Also restores some other vBulletin-like features: uses the full width of the page, dark mode, and you can see the full list of thanks under a post.

More info here: https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058208910/boardsie-enhancement-suite-browser-extension/p1

As an 10-year ex-admin (and 15-year ex-mod), I preferred vbulletin. Some of the magic was lost in the move to vanilla.

I know it was a creaking frankenstein's monster that was pretty far removed from stock vbulletin (and impossible to maintain with limited resources). From a business perspective, I understand the move to a more stock forum experience.

But… I still miss vbulletin, warts and all. 🙂

Thanks I've just looked at those. I suppose it's impossible to avoid using a degree of hindsight, but it's noticeable that he got quite abusive quite quickly to posters. And displayed very teenage/entitled behaviour bumping up his "urgent" thread when people didn't respond within hours. Not a word of thanks to all the hundreds he said who did fill it out for him, either. Just giving out to those with "IQs below 20" who pointed out issues with it.

He doesn't exactly come across as a nice relaxed bloke. TBF that obviously doesn't make him a murderer, which is where the hindsight comes in.

There was a time when posting on this site was absolutely amazing craic, just loads of sound people having fun. The busier forums all had "chat" threads where you'd make friends. I'm still in a whatsapp group of people who met in the chat thread on one of the busiest forums on the site back then, and the atmosphere and general fun never left the group dynamic.

There were also forums where people just posted to have fun, no real purpose to those forums apart from meeting people, having fun and actually meeting in real life for pints. I'm talking about BGRH and TLL mostly. There are people alive in the world today because of those forums, and I mean literal humans who's existence was made possible because of the people who met at social events borne of those forums, couples met and got married and had kids.

There was a football team out there, wearing the boards logo winning trophies under the name of Boards.ie. A cycling club with the same logo on their lycra!! Sports clubs formed by a bunch of sound nerds from this website! Can you even imagine that happening today?

That's when boards was good, then came about a decade of weirder and weirder decisions at the top level, owners and admins both, taking the site in mad directions, clamping down on the very things that made this site an actual good place to interact in a genuine level with other people of the same mind.

It's such a pity they ruined it.