Important News!!

Been here for well over 20 years in total, have been a subscriber for years too. Clarification: I'm on my 2nd user name. Always loved it, never been in the 'inner circle', part of the 'in-crowd', but it's been a part of my life and a nice and interesting one at that.

But it's just not the same anymore. Not so much vanilla, always been more of a desktop/laptop user and it's not sooo different on those devices imo.

its more the site has changed. First AH and such were nerfed. Maybe boards wanted to be more mature. Maybe that had commercial background. I dont know but taking the infantile and feckless side away changed boards. It became a bit boring.

Then - I guess it probably started like with so many things that have gone tits up with covid - CA and politics became polarised and confrontational and boards moderation started to take sides if you like. They will deny it and they do deny it but they did/do. Some opinions are more 'wanted' than others and some pretty awful stuff is happening to which boards turns a blind eye to. And you get booted out for having an opinion. And boards became even more boring.

So I dont know whether I'd pay again. It's just not that a big a thing to me anymore. It'll be a sad day for sure if it shuts down but if thats the way it will go then what can you do. All good things must come to an end as they say.

If this announcement had come 10 months ago I'd have been in with a payment, no problem. I'm not a heavy poster in the 14 years here with only about 1,200 since the vanilla change, but I do check-in and read the site every day, because I like it and like and respect a lot of the contributors here

Would I pay now?, well no frankly - The changes to the site that can happen with choices made by the top brass just makes it too risky. After months of not been allowed to comment on the issues we were experiencing, we eventually got our chance in a feedback thread. All these issues (moderation in particular) were shouted from the rooftops and were duly ignored

There was a truly shocking 'Take it or leave it' attitude displayed so blaming Google on the lack of visitors is a bit of a cop out tbh - This graph of traffic analytics coincides with a change of modding at the start of the year and also with a new radio forum charter in Feb - Anyone got a graph of the radio forum figures?

Personally, I have spent 4 months this year in a self-inflicted 'read only, non-contributory mode' as a personal, silent protest of the way the site was going, and also not knowing what comment would be sanctioned and what wouldn't - and going by the above graph, I wasn't alone. When in my last post on June 9th, I tried to bring the gravity of the situation to light, I got a one point warning for my trouble

I just checked there and a thread I follow in CA that is normally really busy has had 4 posts today

The place was working fine when Beasty was knocking about

As can be seen mine could do with a refresh.

Id go for a white version too.

20 euro per t-shirt to save Boards!

The site never recovered from the horrendous vanilla move. An important part of that wasn't just the downtime, it was the horrific user experience of the vanilla platform. It took weeks and months to get the site back into a workable, useful format after it came back up.

TBH, that should have been a sign that the move was a fundamental mistake. It's not as if vanilla is the only forum architecture available.

Paying a subscription might be worth it, but not if the result is going back to standard vanilla host.

Facebook has a really good Irish ev and solar owners group. A lot of those here are also there.