Important News!!

Not really, Reddit isn't the same layout at all.

dont forget face kicker 😂

Just realised that I'm not far off being registered on here for a quarter of century!

I've got so much from here that it saddens me this site might not survive. The folk in all forums who have helped and assisted me both on threads and by PM have been amazing. I'm not sure you'd get this level of interaction and advice in many other places.

It might be cool to rubbish this site, but in reality it's a great resource and a great place to spend some time engaging/reading with the thoughts and opinions of others mostly from this island on a variety of subjects.

I frequent another Irish site that has a donation fund. Anytime I feel I've got some help that saved me some time/hassle/money I throw a few quid into the pot. Admin should seriously look at donations too. Like charities who only want monthly subscriptions they ignore a lot of money just to chase a regular drip feed.

In my opinion, feck trying to keep the “old” boards look and feel. The most important thing is keeping the forum alive. Feck all the customisations made over the last few decades, keep it simple and easy to upgrade.

A migration to something like discourse and then self host it might be a little painful at the start but once it’s done it’ll save a fortune surely. There’s no harm having a new fresh look and feel for 2025 either.

The 3rd paragraph was the killer for me. I used to love being able to disagree and debate with people here, mostly respectfully. Over time I feel like a bit of an American attitude was adopted where if you don't agree with the majority then you're a bad person who should be warned or banned. I don't feel like I changed my writing style a huge amount but I went from going 5+ years and 5000 posts on my first account without a warning to something like 10 warnings and a ban in the end on this one. I could be wrong but I feel like the place changed not me. There are so many people who gave their time and energy providing value to the site, helping others, sharing knowledge or advice, who were pushed out over time over minor mistakes and annoyances.

It was fantastic when you could debate with or against Christians in Christianity. They seemed to enjoy it too. I'll never forget JC, who I probably couldn't disagree more with, and they would always be there for a through reasoned debate, they and the road runner avatar still pop into my head now and again and I wonder how they are getting on. That's when it started to go downhill, Christianity was changed to be a safe space for Christians and any religious debate had to be taken to Atheism and Agnosticism where there were virtually no Christians killing off debate. The LGBT forum was fantastic around the marriage referendum but then that became the second sign things were going downhill when they introduced a rule where you weren't allowed disagree with a particular mod and eventually any LGBT person again killing off any debate. From then on the whole place was on a path to be a lot more personality and hive mind based where disagreeing in a discussion was enough to get a warning or ban. So what's the point anymore. That's what killed it for me. If I could actually discuss things with people I'd still be here daily.

Nobody who's under 25 is going to use boards.

I visit the site on a very regular basis, most days in fact and post very occasionally. There is some good wisdom to be found around the place. Since the change over to Vanila, I certainly felt a disconnect.

I will happily subscribe in the hope it can stay the course and maybe some I.T. glitches can be ironed out to make it a better experience.

How do we subscribe?

For whatever reason, I am unable to "Thanks!" the first post (only) in any thread. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, I've been here for 15 years, I did step away for a couple of years which is when the "Vanilla" thing happened, so I missed that. It has been a great resource for me. I used only use Ireland Offline and then the Broadband forum, which is an absolute gold mine of useful information. I then started to check out all the other great forums.

I will chip in on a monthly basis, but if it becomes difficult to use or starts to go too quiet, I'll need to reconsider.

From wiki.

• The site is majority owned by Distilled Media Ltd[9][10] with a minority stake held by some of the original company founders, who delegate administrative and editorial control over the site to hundreds of unpaid moderators.[11][12]

Currently, Tom Murphy is operating as acting managing director after the departure of the previous managing director, Gerry Shanahan, in February 2009.[5] There are over 1,350 forums, public and private.

It is operated by Boards.ie Limited, an Irish Commercial Company, more specifically in the same headquarters of Daft.ie (DAFT MEDIA LIMITED), in Golden Lane, Dublin 8, both of which are owned by the Distilled Media Group.[13] Boards.ie Limited is considered a small company, since its balance sheet total does not exceed 4.4million euro, and is registered as a commercial company involved in "computer and related activities.

The fallon brothers jumped ship a couple of years ago.

Hundreds of unpaid mods ? lol.

If the Distilled Media are interested in keeping the site solely as a source of revenue and looking for investors, subscribers then why not hold an event some place where distilled media can meet boards.ie members to discuss the future of boards, I mean , other than taking our money, what plan do they have to change the site ? to fix the modding , people who are environmental activists becoming mods of environmental and EV threads where their bias favours those who agree with the agenda ? that's one of thousands of examples but you get where I'm coming from .

Rather than delete comments they don't agree with or their buddies why not create a boards.ie where only behaviour is modded not speech ?

What have distilled media got planned to save the site ? because it appears to me to be at the end and I suppose as a member since 2007 I would not like to see it go, This is my 2nd account after closing my original account a 2 years ago or so.

I suppose can't just blame the modding but times have changed and more and more people , especially the younger folk only engage on platforms like tiktok where they're not actively engaging in proper conversation rather replying to comments on videos and flicking endlessly from video to video, Facebook is dead, I only know one person these days that uses it, I only briefly had an account but that was closed years ago.

Before Distilled Media look for my money I need to know what the plan to save the site is because taking money is only going to keep the lights on so long.

white list then… sounds like boards' fate is in our hands.

I look at a couple of sports threads almost every day. I'm happy to pay €50