The Boards.ie Subscription

No irony at all in it Syd. We are the product, be it as posters who create the content that occasionally pops up when someone googles an obscure topic that someone here has opined on. Or as the captive audience for the advertising.

Weird that you don't grasp that? That the squeeze the users option to pay the bills, only became an option when we as a product weren't generating enough income via Ad clicks.

The current iteration of boards is coasting upon decades of goodwill earned under a different ownership structure (s).

It's effort to continue as a business with a running cost of €140k a year? Is doomed. Indeed I'd posit that any attempt to survive as a business at all, when it seeks to be reliant upon a subscription model to cover costs of that extent? For a product that has since the introduction of Vanilla, noticeably declined, and with the announced reversion to pure vanilla will decline further. Is similarly doomed.

Websites need traffic, message boards need users. The strategy outlined to date, such as it is? Will reduce traffic, will reduce users and will kill any new sign ups for anything more than one off questions.

I use Boards using Brave browser and never see any Ads.

Just to update on the no auto cancel method for my sub. Odhran e-mailed earlier & cancelled the recurring payment,on his end.

Thanks for doing, will be still donating just through PayPal this time.

Can we do that?? My username has been in caps forever, ive thought it looked rude for years and wanted to make it not caps, but dont know how 😅

....also struggling to remember what email I signed up with so I can actually subscribe, as it was so long ago!

Easy as that?? Bah, my apologies 🙂

Not in a position to subscribe, but here’s my 2 cents worth:

The new ads are annoying. Will it prompt existing users to subscribe? Maybe yes for a small %.
The big problem I see is that new visitors to the site will see that ads and move on, so the original subscribers will carry the cost indefinitely.

I’m my opinion this advertising model will reduce existing use to paid subscribers only, and push frequent users (non subscribers) to other sites.

This will result in less posters & less valuable content.

That’s all. 😀

Did we get an answer regarding the renewal process ? Is it auto-nenewal or you are given a choice to pay again when the next fee is due ?

Just use Brave browser, no Ads and it's free👍