Important News!!

These ads remind me of what the phone companies do when they release a new phone model, all of a sudden the battery life of your current phone gets worse, in the hope this pain will prompt you to upgrade to their latest model.

Might be successful with Apple when you're in that eco system, but if often backfires too and you lose customers for life.

Have the new ads changes broken opening up a thread and being shown the first unread comment?

Now every thread I open goes to the last comment and I've to scroll back up

Hate is a strong word and thrown around here a lot, i would say dislike would be a better description. This is why i change the site with a userscript myself because i can and because i do see issues but could also be the ocd or just the coder in me to do it. My point been it's not fixed and doesn't even seem like they even try to. Seems like they can't, won't or pretend to be able to use the software and while it's managed, that doesn't mean they can't make small changes to help usability, hell a userscript just changes the CSS or Javscript of a a page which any staff member could do via the dashboard, like if i can make subtle changes with zero access to the sites server or dashboard, then why can't they with full access?

AI overview is not a "algorithm change", and AI overview still has multiple links to the sources of said search query, which is clear on most searches it actually shows up on. I just tested 5 queries on google.ie and just did searches for says "boards donald trump" or "boards important news", all of which did not show AI overview at all. Now this doesn't mean that it doesn't happen and google could do a better job of showing the links like below example searching how to create a website in ireland.

Now while AI Overview seems to be focused on generative questions like these, most searches on content already on boards does not show AI Overview. However if the content falls under googles search criteria, it would show in the AI Overview if the content was relevant to the search however most content these days on here does not.

While there are some who spend their waking hour on here debating the sanity of donald trump or what should happen in gaza, or why Irish people speak English, it just isn't content that would garner search credibility, especially with todays generation. While SEO is a major thing in todays web, the content really needs to formulated better than it is on here, with broken links fixed and content better accessible.

To comment on the VPS i mentioned, that was a relatively high range VPS provided by a Irish company, that would also offer expansion if needed or you could use a cloud based DB alongside with the VPS and get all the benefits of that with active backups and disaster recovery, but the main point was more so the cost, it's doesn't cost 100,000 - 120,000 euro a year to host boards. The site itself could be run on a raspberry pi, but would it run good? not a chance, but the site and database are two different things.

Finding an exact example isn't easy. Basically you need to browse. And if an ad is opened when you load the page, then it jumps straight to the newest post.

And I'd say you're finding far more in my post than was actually there.

Depends what you want a substitute for i guess. If you want a conversation, then sure, I agree with you. But if you just want to find out new information or the answer to a specific question (which is what i want from a forum) then it is far superior, as you get the hughest voted answer straight at the top.

Nothing at all wrong with what you are looking for, and im not saying one is objectively better than the other, but we just want different things out of a message board.