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Boards.ie 2026...

Boards.ie: Odhran

Hi all

I wanted to share some excellent news with you. We've done it… After what's been a challenging few months, I am pleased to say we've secured our financial footing. The combination of our Ad Free subscription revenue, ongoing advertising income (albeit declining!), and a new partnership deal we've finalised with Vanilla …. means we now have at least 14 months of runway ahead of us.

This breathing space is exactly what we need to focus on more sustainable growth rather than firefighting, and it gives us the time and headroom to explore how we continue building our subscription base whilst hopefully identifying new revenue opportunities that make sense for the community.

It's been a tough period, there's no denying that, but this outcome is genuinely great news for Boards and for everyone who cares about this platform.

I am going to share a bit about how we build Boards.ie's future together - not just as something I'm driving, but as something the community has real involvement in. I’m hoping some of you will be interested in helping shape this, but I want to be realistic about what that looks like in practice and how we get there. This isn't something that happens overnight and I'm setting a timeline of roughly a year to see whether we can make community stewardship - or genuine community involvement in Boards' future - a reality… and the conversation starts now.

None of us want to go through another year like this one - myself and Mike particularly.

I want to give Mike proper credit here: his work throughout this pretty difficult period has been excellent, and his dedication to keeping Boards alive has been unwavering. So big thanks from me Mike. Also to a massive thanks to everyone that subscribed and continues to do so. We could not have done this without everyone weighing in behind this - and it is not just helping short term - it can keep Boards.ie alive into the future.

So, hopefully we have an opportunity to build something more sustainable and resilient together, so we're never in this position again.

Myself and Mike are going trick a treating so taking the weekend off! We will be back over the course of next week to share some more info but I thought we would end the week with a good news story! Have a lovely weekend, everyone, and thank you for your continued support.

Best wishes,
OG

PS - to-date our subs have generated €32,272.00. These funds have sat in our Stripe account until we knew our fate - I will be drawing them down next week and 100% of proceeds will go towards paying for a year in advance of platform hosting fees.

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BusGuy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124247986#Comment_124247986

Google's AI got so bad that countless YouTube videos are mocking the AI.

Rick_

So when will the forums be reverting to standard Vanilla? Or has that happened already?

Barrett

Well done. That's very good news.

JayRoc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124350086#Comment_124350086

smacl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124351065#Comment_124351065

Spam bot most likely

JayRoc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124351120#Comment_124351120

With 106 posts? That's what drew my attention

smacl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124351207#Comment_124351207

Fair point, I was thinking of posts like this one which are first posts https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124284195/#Comment_124284195

dulpit

Just a question for boards staff as we're now more than quarter through 2026. What's happening with clean vanilla? Any plans to drive engagement on the site? Or are we still in a death spiral?

Related to this, how are you expecting engagement to increase when the homepage is clogged up with so many stickies from across forums? The first thing you see when you log in is announcing a new forum and the second post is also announcing the same forum. Make it make sense?

The ads are rubbish, but I get that ads are needed. But on desktop they take up way too much space, I don't see how that will attract a single new user.

Any updates @Boards.ie: Mike or @Boards.ie: Odhran ?

fritzelly

After recently reading a thread about AI slop on boards and then this ^^^^^

corkie

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124412187#Comment_124412187

Maybe you could put in context how you are associating AI slop with the desire to have themed forums?

I thought it was a good idea?

JayRoc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124412238#Comment_124412238

Are you pretending to not notice the quoted post (along with loads of others today) that was clearly written by Chat GPT?

HeidiHeidi

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124412238#Comment_124412238

A repeat re-reg posting AI slop was banned for about the fifth time today, and that post was deleted - that's what Fritzelly's post refers to

corkie

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124412272#Comment_124412272

That explains it I thought was referring to @CasNiRas post! Didn't see the deleted post?

HeidiHeidi

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124412291#Comment_124412291

It's a complete pain that posts just get deleted with no explanation - often leads to completely pointless circular arguments about who said what 🙄

Big Bag of Chips

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124412312#Comment_124412312

When we ban a rereg we "delete all content".

Having to go through whatever threads and forums they have posted in and explain that their posts have been removed would be time consuming and a pain in the hole.

Most people are fairly tuned in at this stage to who the reregs/trolls/bots are. Best thing to do is ignore. Don't react, reply, respond. Then when their posts inevitably get deleted it's not going to make much of a difference to the thread.

JayRoc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124412291#Comment_124412291

My apologies!

[Deleted User]

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124382314#Comment_124382314

Technically it should be feasible to theme each category, I don't know the ins and outs of the software but I'm sure it supports CSS. It's a good idea and one I'd be on board with. The only problem is manpower, it's another layer of maintenance and depending on who controls what it may be a non-runner.

corkie

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124417443#Comment_124417443

Interesting you have mentioned that I have been experimenting with themes in my extension. The black in the top board is an oversight/bug that needs patching (clashing code between theme engine and main script)!

And an optional colour shift on the extension itself when loaded.

As a mod you should be able to activate full features of my extension if you desire. Would be interesting to know if I wired it in correctly for mods and admin succesfully?

[Deleted User]

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124417516#Comment_124417516

Which extension is this? I'm currently using the Boardsie Enhancement Suite but don't see anything relating to themes. On a FireFox based browser.

Edit: found the extension, trying it now but still no theme options…
Edit Edit: I think only Admins would have the ability to make changes where the extension can make theme changes, mods generally don't have any access to the Vanilla CP.

corkie

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124418049#Comment_124418049

You found it? Did you manually install from this thread or the store?

Store version still doesn't have the theme engine version yet, still making improvements on it. Sorry!

« Manual install should have this icon for the extension.

If you have the latest manual install get to the extension icon dropdown and click on options to apply two specific forum themes. It is over complicated to build specific themes, so my plans is refactor it and have pre set styles been applied on forums of choosing.

[Deleted User]

Cool that works, is this on github?

corkie

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124418967#Comment_124418967

Not yet on github. I had plans when I simplified the theme engine to post it up.
As it started as member only extension, I was reluctant to put the code public. (Zips have full source code?)
Change in implementation of it to more widely available and membership activation for certain features instead of the whole extension.

Where you able to activate the membership features as a mod?

P.Walnuts

Is anyone else having really poor connectivity, especially on mobile?

Getting timed out ....aot

sligeach

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/124427878#Comment_124427878

Yep. I'm getting all sorts of errors. I mentioned it elsewhere. It's been going on since yesterday at some point, at least. Constantly having to refresh pages, gateway timed out errors, edit posts function failing, taking a minute to post or get into a thread, adding links or photos failing. I had problems posting these photos.