Important News!!

For all their faults and foibles I'd still rather be moderated by actual human beings. Maybe I'm a luddite, but it seems a bit grim and dystopian to be moderated by AI.

And in terms of cost saving - sure the mods are already doing it for free!

They aren’t going to share their business plan or their numbers or their obligations. As open and engaged as Cloud and DeVore used to be - they wouldn’t share that stuff either.

I don’t expect people would like some of the answers to the questions asked, also. Cash was invested into boards.ie as a business. This is not a charitable endeavour, it isn’t controlled by original founders with a passion for it and it needs to do more than survive. It needs to make money.

If anyone really thinks old style Internet Forums are good business propositions in 2025, well.

Moving back to a standard version of vanilla with no customisations will reduce costs, reduce bespoke issues, reduce support time. Migrating again to another platform would require planning, effort, technical resource. It would come at the risk of losing another large slice of an ever smaller pie of users, and no move is going to generate new sign ups en masse. Those days are gone.

Of course, moving back to standard vanilla will piss off some regular users - but they’ve probably weighed that up and the sums make sense.

Deleting history, culling posts, starting again reduces the “value” that was bought and paid for. Doesn’t seem likely to be an acceptable idea.

‘Turning over to the community’ won’t repay investors. It can always be sold for user data, etc as a final exit plan.

I understand the likes of @o1s1n saying just pay the €6 and see, and hope it keeps going. I think that’s a normal and understandable desire if you love the place and get utility from it. For some people, none of the above will matter. Let’s just put the head down and hope it can keep going. The remaining regular user base are clearly very resilient to bugs, oddities of vanilla, etc.

the move to Vanilla was nothing short of the most disastrous thing to ever happen to the site. The current layout is too hard to navigate . Not to mention the two weeks the site was offline during the transition. As well as that you have the changed attitude of mods who are so terrified of a legal case being taken they shut down anything that poses any risk

I think it’s too late now, the change to Vanilla should never had happened. You don’t fix what’s not broken.

I'd also be up for a potential back up site if things here don't go well. Who are the main forum providing services these days? For all the active users that are around now the basic forum would do. You'd realistically only carry over places like After Hours, Bargain Alerts etc

Hell even a bargainalerts.ie would do 🤣