Where will we go if Boards finishes?

Discount? Puzzled.

I don't know how any of you think a discord makes any sense for a board.

All the discords I'm in make me think it would never work, and I'd hate it being tried.

I am in a few discords and it works well

Some will like it and others won’t it’s much like Apple and Android, it’s hard to get something everyone will agree on

If someone is actually going to run an off Boards web forum.. just be prepared how much annoying overhead you will have to deal with.

I strongly suggest having closed membership, because if it is open, expect a never ending amount of spam bots you need to deal with.
If you do closed membership, that becomes its own overhead.
Your forum WILL be constantly crawled by aggressive AI bots that could put you over whatever usage plan you've paid for. Be aware that if you allow video uploads, for some reason, you will require users provide full ID verification to access the site (as of today).
You will be personally responsible for the safe storage of the data of your users and can be fined if that data leaks.
There will be constant attempts to hack your forum to get aforementioned data, or just post spam / scams.
You will have to deal with drama and moderate users in unpopular ways (and you might be liable if someone posts libel or hate speech).
Users will frequently lock themselves out of their accounts or have other issues accessing the site you will have to provide tech support for.
If you run Google ads you will frequently get ones that pretend to be the login form for your site, cause people to go off to somewhere entirely different, and trick them into signing up for something which they will then blame on you.

Hopefully after all that, people will usually thank you for your efforts, so after hearing all that if you do want to take one for the team, you'll probably get a warm fuzzy feeling out of it at the end.

source: I'm the admin on a moderately popular Irish web forum for over 15 years.

Hi,

So i'm the guy who is building stardeals. I did not decide to build it as a replacement for boards.ie. My personal opinion is that the internet needs sites like boards.ie (especially in these AI times where sources of information will become less and less transparent).

I actually decided to build the site as i am taking some time off between jobs (i have been in a pretty intense run of jobs for the last 7 years (hence promotionalcodes.ie becoming horribly outdated).

I've put up a landing page to avoid the "ghost town" situation. I.e. if i just put the site live there are very few deals on there then the first few people won't stick around. The only thing i will do with the emails on the waiting list is to email when the site is ready.

The site is similar to hotukdeals (but focused on Ireland). So it has the usual deal posting, and up/down votes. For it to have any chance of working it will need an active community. I also want to "reward" people who contribute to the site. Hence the points/badge system i put in place. At the moment you can earn points for sharing deals, voting, commenting and reporting deals. These points will then be redeemable for amazon vouchers. As this is something i am running myself on a pretty limited budget i need to make sure i get the balance right here. I want it to be as generous as possible without the site bankrupting me.

The site will also
* Let you post local deals (by county)
* Subscribe to categories or stores
* It has an amazon uk vs amazon ie price checker to quickly see if one option is cheaper than the other
* Badges to help support local irish businesses.

I'm currently on holiday so development has slowed right down, but i do have a preview link that i can share if anyone is interested. (just send me a DM)

I'd be more positive about what you're up to. I lived in Oz for over a decade and saved a fortune using ozbargain.com.au.

It does most of what you are striving for, and some. There is a very active community on the site and since it's been going for nearly 20 years they have come across most of the pitfalls and have created detailed guidelines to keep any potential abuse of the website or deals in check. The rules around deal up/down voting are also tried and tested.

Of course with any online community with rules there will always be a small % of users who feel mistreated but the vast majority are very helpful and reminded me alot of bargain alerts crew But I have always thought the platform of Ozbargains was streets ahead, in turn this allowed for more community engagement/growth. Again the caveat being that Oz has 5 times the population of Ireland so maybe it's easier to get your community up and going over there.

If you are looking to set up something similar for Ireland it would be well worth reading through the Ozbargain wiki. I know the developers were openly collaborating with the hotdealsuk team a while back as they didn't see it as a conflict of interest since the sites would never compete with each other. Maybe try contact them and see where it takes you, there is probably more on that collaboration in the Ozbargain forums somewhere.

Best of luck with it.

Speak for yourself. this forum has cost me a fortune buying bargains!! 🤣

jaysus the ads version of boards is pretty relentless and hardcore now , cash flow issue stopping me signing up , hmmm

I think the "best" place to go is here. At least some effort should be put into seeing what options might be available if the current owners are unable to keep the lights on. Despite all the "issues" with the back end software, its still a platform layout that generally works well.