Important News!!

Congrats on your unknown promotion to a mod where you see fit to tell me what to do.

A great example of what is wrong here.

I'm sorry it's turned this way too even though I've added to it.

I don't honestly know the thinking behind dropping the CA change into the middle of this thread to be honest.

Maybe it'll recover back to finding ways to save boards later today…

That's not a bad thing. Anyone who knows how to use X would only use the Following tab (ignore button here)

Boards can't die, I have used it everyday for 16 years (granted I'm more of a lurker) and nothing else comes close to a community as we have here.

I'll happily pay the 50 Euro and more to keep it going but I think it's obvious that we need to get away from Vanilla. If the 50e can buy time and we know there is works in progress to switch and improve things then it will have a future.

It's so Irish and unique with a wealth of topics for us it deserves funding from Government.

I too remember Trent and facekicker, the mad thing about Spurs having their own soccer category. The late late thread which was always so funny etc. - we have to save this first and secondly we have to bring it back to the good old days prior to the upgrade.

Good to know but just shows what an officious void can be filled with, a little bit of explanation goes a long way. Hopefully obvious trolling is still a no-no.

I'll take you at your word.

I still don't think it's a good idea though. Moderation needed to change but I don't think the solution was to bin the charter. It remains to be seen if a no hands approach will lead to the forum flourishing. Do you think it will? Do you think it will become a place where the casual reader will now want to participate? Honest answer.

Because fundamentally that's what the site actually needs: Traffic and engagement. Otherwise we are circling the drain, subscriptions are only life support.

Apparently there was a meltdown yesterday evening and now some won’t pay the cost of a coffee per month. Surely it’s worth that just to be able to whinge ‘not paying now!’. It sure is a lot cheaper than paying a therapist to listen to you.

Anyway, stick up the subscription option so I can fill in and forget about it…

Was going to post something of a similar vein. It is notable how a good chunk of complaints about Boards on this thread are about moderation.

Internet moderation isn't a perfect art, or science, and it is done by flawed humans, but it is considably better than none at all. The appeal of Boards over many other platforms on the Internet is that there is human-powered moderation. There have to be defined limits and those limits need to be enforced, otherwise you end up with civil discussion being drowned out by those who steal focus by obnoxious means.

In CA in particular it usually goes down to having threads discussing a contriversion topic and then having the fans of extreemist persons or nations getting increasingly frustrated to find that most posters disagree with them. Time and again we see this with Trump fans, Russia fans…hell, we even sometimes have an admirer of North Korea paying us a visit. Civility goes out the window and what had been a debate of the available information mutates into a slangingfest of brused egos.

Moderation is needed to keep a lid on things like that, and to ensure that civil discussion is possible. When the option becomes available, I will subscribe. There's not much I can do, but I'll do what I can. Boards ain't perfect, not in the slightest, but it is the best place on the web to discuss the world at large. We'll likely never see the like again.