Important News!!

Do you actually think someone is clocking in at 9am and spend all day tinkering on the website?

Boards.ie works like this, you register a url and you renew it annually for about 50 euro.

You purchase hosting, you then install the software which is a forum licence onto the hosting site, this is done by pressing a few buttons, FTP software to the host ,choosing a username and password and the software self installs.

Then you create forums etc, user classes etc, all done by using the software interface, thus isnt hard nor does it require any technical knowledge.

Once that has been done the software runs itself, the only thing you need to do is add any addons you want for the site.

After that the site literally runs itself, unless you go tinkering and break something there really isnt anymore for anyone to do other than keep an eye on moderation etc.

You can of course each year renew the licence and continue to upgrade the software which is a one click of a button type of upgrade or you can alliw the licence to not renew but continue to run the site as normal.

Any issues you can seek assistance from the forum software company who offer free support providing you renew your licence.

Any hosting issues will be supported by the hosting company.

If you honestly think domeone is clocking in Daily 9 -5 to do site fixes you are totally wrong, not to mention if they were then they should be sacked due to the number of issues the dite currently has!

In its hey day Pie under Dave Cocheran had thousands of daily visitors, even TDs posted, back then hosting was more expensive but still was done much cheaper than what boards.ie are saying they need.

Simply put you could run this site for under 1k per year, even 500 euro. The cost and the required cost of the quoted 120k per is mostly for the wage of someone.

As others have pointed out , this site could be run remotely, no need for office space.

Also lets not forget, this site is not what it used to be, how much revenue has been lost by moving to Vanilla, the loss of the useful talk to section?

Id wager traffic to this site is way down and blaming Google is a scapegoat and donations are nothing more than keeping the salaries of some going without any restructure and downsizing.

Maybe the appeal needs to be widened. dot IE limits some participation.

Politics.ie was a much smaller site then too. Let's go through what is missing:

A. Software requirements. The operating system and various versions of software like PHP and MySQL/MariaDB necessary to run the forum.

B. The storage requirements for the databases and the backups. Big databases need good storage solutions and lots more RAM when posts are being read from and written to that database by multiple users.They also need people with database expertise to design and implement them. With large websites, this isn't the kind of job for the average web developer as it requires a different skillset.

C. The estimated traffic requirements.

Without knowing these requirements, it is difficult to say that Boards.ie could be hosted on what would be a low-end dedicated server with no maintenance from the hosting company other than replacements. Managed hosting is more expensive than unmanaged hosting. It might be possible to install a version of Linux on that server. It will have to be patched and maintained. Registering a domain name (not an URL) is probably the least expensive part of the whole process. Boards.ie had a lot of very good people working on it to push vBulletin beyond its limits. That was very different to running a small site on shared hosting.

Without knowing the hosting requirements for Boards.ie, it is not really possilbe to recommend any hosting solution.

Regards…jmcc

Surely that can be cut. Some forums like football where data older than 2 years maybe 3 is pointless. Nobody is quoting that far back unless they want a argument.

I'm sure there are plenty of other forums that could chop away the old wood. How many times has a zombie thread been reopened by a new user and then quickly closed asking them to post a new thread.

Given the discussion above about web hosting, I would reckon anything in the computer/network forum is useless information older than a couple of years also.

I have no idea about what's involved or the costs of running Boards but I do know that Boards must be open to new ideas & innovation. It always feels old. People offering ideas shouldn't be seen as criticism of Boards, it should be welcome & encouraged.

So many times I have read the comment about if you don't like it, there are other forums. I think that the users are entitled to question how the site can move forward especially we have stuck with you through the disastrous times.

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