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If Boards goes

mrsnrub2.0

Looking at the funding that's still required, it looks more than likely that Boards will cease to be, sadly.

I don't post much to this weather forum, but I read and use this weather forum on a daily basis. It would be sad to lose it. Are there any alternatives in place should it go? Could an Irish weather forum on Reddit be setup?

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cot-mad

I’m not really a contributor at all, but I peruse the weather forum and threads every day. I just love this community and would be very sorry to see boards go. Please let us quieter members know if/when ye decide to move to new pastures!

(Payday this week and I’ll subscribe then)

Comhrá

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123798483#Comment_123798483

@waterfaerie, many thanks for the confirmation I wasn't hallucinating after all!

Also @Docarch, thanks for confirming it was none of the weather mods who deleted my post. I had never suspected they did anyway, as they are all very fair and restrained in their moderating style.

Just to say, this is, imho, the best, friendliest and most civilised forum on Boards with great camaraderie among the members.

Whatever happens, I hope it is able to migrate to a good location and that the regulars port over with it. It would be a shame if it all evaporated after so many years of shared knowledge, expertise and entertainment. Fingers crossed.

waterfaerie

I saw your post yesterday Comhrá, so you're not going crazy!

I really want boards to survive as much as anyone and I think I've been very vocal about that. It's absolutely the logical first choice and I think most people would agree. I feel a lot of people are disheartened simply because they don't think it's looking possible. Too many have already given up. If everyone thinks the worst, then it's likely to happen. On the other hand, if everyone is just willing to try, our numbers will quickly add up to the required amount. It's only €6 for a monthly subscription. I still think we can do it and am hoping there are enough people who are just leaving it until the last minute. If anyone is waiting or on the fence, I would suggest doing it soon so it encourages others.

At the same time, it would be completely naive of us to not come up with a plan B while there is still time for us to discuss it, especially given the lack of engagement and reassurance from the management. Gubu wouldn't be my first choice due to the anti-boards attitude on it, but it's just downright censorship to not allow us to discuss all of our options given the situation. I don't think there is any risk of the weather forum members defecting to there or anywhere else unless there is a definite announcement of boards' closure.

Thanks Docarch for confirming it wasn't weather mods deleting.

DOCARCH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123798054#Comment_123798054

Me too. Anyway, just to reiterate, none of the wether mods deleted. Maybe the overlords!!!

Comhrá

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123798041#Comment_123798041

Well I'm mystified. I can't recall the exact time I posted but it was gone last night.

Anyway, not a major issue in the scheme of things. Maybe a glitch or whatever so I'll give the benefit of the doubt. It had received one or two 'thanks' prior to disappearing.

DOCARCH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123798018#Comment_123798018

Did not see your post yesterday? I don't think any mod here deleted your post?

Comhrá

I posted here yesterday that I liked GUBU with the exception of the small fonts used.

My post was deleted sometime yesterday evening.

Does mentioning GUBU on Boards warrant having posts deleted now? I did support the funding campaign but if I'm having my posts with a reference to GUBU deleted for some reason, then in the event Boards survives, I'd have to reconsider being a paying supporter in the future.

acequion

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123795686#Comment_123795686

I agree. And I don't want to lose boards and will be happy to do my bit. However, the amount of bullying and ganging up on posters that has gone on here won't help things. A lot of people whose contributions would now be valuable in saving the site have already bailed I'd say. Bullying and hostility really does bite back.

Posy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123795686#Comment_123795686

I donated to boards without hesitation. I'm a long term member and the amount of information alone I've gotten from this place is worth every penny.

Any poster here is more than welcome by Loughc and myself over on the new Christmas Boards site, but it's worth bearing in mind that it is first and foremost a festive forum, and although a couple of weather threads would be great, it would never be the site's primary focus.

Unless there's snow, which is fierce exciting to us Christmas folk. 😁

[Deleted User]

I imagine MT to be like Gandalf or Dumbledore in real life (I mean that in the nicest possible way). What a man 😄

M.T. Cranium

Loughc, you have a viable platform available as you mentioned, and the link to it can be seen so I took the liberty of dropping in there and joining up.

I will ask around on this weather forum to see if we can get a committee together to discuss possible steps going forward. It may be that a consensus will agree that your location is a good option, or it may be otherwise. Wherever we might go if necessary remains to be determined. But I would say we are going to go somewhere if boards ceases to exist.

A committee would probably need to do the following:

(1) ensure that all content deemed important to preserve was in fact preserved

(2) determine where the surviving weather forum community would gather and by what date

(3) assess whether there might be any other boards discussion groups to invite along if they themselves wanted to come along and didn't have their own plans (I gave as one example the Interesting Maps thread on After Hours).

Once a committee chooses a new location then all other questions can be solved at that new location.

I will wait about a week, see what people post here and elsewhere, and then determine if I need to do anything or whether the moderators here have the situation in hand, which would be the best way to proceed (if that confuses a reader, what I mean is, moderators should start up this committee of which I speak, and they should be in charge, I would drop back to a servant of the committee role and quite enthusiastically for that matter).

I will definitely preserve the core of the contest threads (the log of annual results published every December, I don't think there is much value in preserving monthly contest threads, beyond the annual scoring for 2025).

Any contest people reading this, take note, if Boards just suddenly were to vanish from the internet, at that point in time, look for me over on the loughc site, make a note of it and pop in there … at the very least we can complete the 2025 contest there. I am posting as Peter O'Donnell rather than as M.T. Cranium, I think that username will go to the same ultimate end point as Boards.ie.

Rebelbrowser

yeah, donated having gotten 16 great years out of this forum alone but no idea what is happening

Loughc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123795686#Comment_123795686

Same. But I understand the frustrations and hesitations as to why people don’t. A lack of communication to keep us in the loop is very telling.

Cluedo Monopoly

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123795528#Comment_123795528

I am fine with that. We're trying to save the site and it was worth the donation. I wish more people would do so too.

Neowise

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123795572#Comment_123795572

if you just go to the subscribe page, you can see that they have been very transparent, no refunds.

It’s hard to miss the no refunds paragraph.

Calibos

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123793972#Comment_123793972

I got McBurned on a €2500 Kickstarter recently and am loath to ever hand over any money online again without guarantees of refunds (Outside of regular online purchases with Visa protections)

Would a GoFundMe have been a better idea? Don't those make the process of refunds easy if funding goal fails? ie. Secure funding for a year that way giving people the confidence to donate, giving yourself a year to show viability and give people more confidence in subscribing which removes the need for GoFundMe’s thereafter.

ednwireland

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123795528#Comment_123795528

I certainly wouldn't be expecting any refunds

Loughc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123795365#Comment_123795365

That’s not going to happen. I imagine all money donated has already been spent.

esposito

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123793972#Comment_123793972

Yes that would be nice for us who donated to get a refund if/when boards closes.

DOCARCH

Good point on achive threads! Not sure what (if anything) can be done about those.

sryanbruen

The main reason for me to keep Boards around is not mainly the discussions (which is obviously a great thing but not the primary factor) but all the archive built up of old reports that can prove to be very useful in studying a weather event of the past which in the distant future events like Beast from the East and 2010 will be as old as the likes of 1982 are to us now.

This was even more of a reason before Boards made the move to Vanilla in July 2021 when a lot of the old threads still had the charts and images intact, not all of them but many of them especially if they used the attachment feature on old Boards instead of using external sites like Imgur or Photobucket which could easily be deleted any time by the private user or in the case of model charts would generate automatically to the most recent if you embedded a link than uploading the chart directly. At the time I gave feedback to the admins on if there was any chance that the attachments in the old Boards would be embedded into the posts as with the new Boards, we lost them altogether. Nope, they're gone forever as far as we can see which is a massive shame. It will be even more of a shame when all the reports and threads are gone.

I saved some of the stuff onto my drive before it all went. Had I known it was to be all gone, I'd have saved a lot more. For example, this scene of Tinahely (Co. Wicklow) posted by user donothoponpop on 27th November 2010 is one of my favourite images I've ever seen posted on this forum. For a good amount of time, I had this as my Netweather profile picture as I loved it that much - now I have another from Rathmines on the following day 28th November that I love even more and aspire to take a similar pic someday!

Tinahely, Co. Wicklow on November 27th (2) (Boards.ie user donothoponpop).JPG

Loughc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123794303#Comment_123794303

100% the build up was epic! The excitement of a major snow event on here will never be replicated. The F5 button took some damage in the day haha

nacho libre

They haven't even reached 30 percent of their desired amount. It's not looking good, alright. I will miss this place if it goes, especially during snowy weather- sure half the fun was the build up to an event as much as the event itself coming to pass.

pauldry

I doubt those who have donated will get their money back. The users on boards make it what it is so I think if it . goes kaput we will adapt and go some place else. Its only the internet not an actual major company like penneys. If that shut I think Ireland would have to relocate its population.

[Deleted User]

Yeah the writing is on the wall really, I have no interest in subscribing (essentially donating) as I have zero confidence in the management of Boards to be honest and transparent about running the place. I hope if it does fail that everyone who donated gets their money back.

Thunder87

The way I see it is if a private company needs to beg it's customers for ongoing donations then it's just not viable, a small percentage of the user base might be willing to give them money but that percentage will slowly dwindle over time until one day the lights go out.

A shame as I've been using boards for the best part of 20 years but it is what it is, forums have just fallen out of popularity over the years. I don't see why a fairly bare bones forum has so many overheads that it's unviable but I guess there's history and reasons for it

I used netweather years ago and it was grand but lacked any critical mass of Irish users so never really took off. There was also Snowbie's IWN site that had a good community but that slowly faded away as well

Loughc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123792668#Comment_123792668

Completely agree. The legacy and user base this place has will never be replicated in 2025.

However it doesn’t look good. They are about €70k off target and don’t forget this is an annual cost problem not an one off. Unless a private benefactor comes and bails them out we need to find a new home.

Hopefully there’ll be plenty of notice given to allow that transition to happen.

fits

The best option is to do our best to keep this place going imo. I’ve been through forum shutdowns before for an interest of mine and it wasn’t the same at all afterwards even with most users moving to another site.

PixelCrafter

An Irish forum would be ideal, but it might make more sense to go with a big platform like Reddit. If this goes into some obscure forum it will lose a lot of public interest. I know that some or the storm threads and snow threads can be a bit tedious, but the reports and information that flies up on this forum is both fascinating and invaluable as a resource.

I think visibility is quite important for that reason.

waterfaerie

I don't feel particularly qualified to weigh in with an opinion on where to go as I don't post very often. I am, however, a daily reader of boards and in particular the weather forum.

I appreciate all that's done here from M.T. Cranium to all of the resident weather enthusiasts and experts here and all of the other posters. Thanks so much to all of you. This is one of the main special corners of the internet I will feel lost without if boards goes.

I'm not ready to give up on boards and I think we should be doing everything we can to keep it going. It would be such a monumental loss. In the event that the worst happens, I would really prefer to keep things in an Irish forum if a suitable one exists or comes to be. I just don't know if it would feel the same on a UK site. Especially during extreme weather events, the sense of local community is what gets us through them.

Another aspect of this is the fragmentation of the overall boards community into separate niche forums, which I feel would be so sad. It would be great if we could get some sort of sitewide consensus on a plan B. I'm not sure how easy that would be to achieve but I think it's something worth thinking about.

Whatever is decided by the majority of regulars here about where to go, I will follow and support you there, but I just thought I'd share my thoughts.

And please let's try not to give up hope just yet!