Boards News - October 2016

Hello everyone,

This is the first in a series of monthly updates (think Q's News, Boards Digest, etc) to let you know what's happening, what's being worked on, and to highlight some things that you may not have heard about.

To start off, we'd like to highlight the great work of our community. Santa Strike Force has been a force for good for more than ten years, "anonymously buying and distributing cool stuff for kids to hospitals and care-centres." Yesterday, DeVore highlighted a segment on Sunday AM covering the engineers in ITT who produce hands for children. Santa Strike Force completely paid for one of the machines that you see in the segment; incredible stuff!

We've got something for the expert bargain hunters (and the lazier among us who capitalise on the bargains found by others). We're running a series of competitions throughout October in the Bargain Alerts forum, rewarding the poster who finds the best bargain each week with a €50 One4All voucher.

There have been some great bargains posted so far, but the runaway winner in the first week was Stonebabies' advice on the best way to do Lapland on a budget. There are still three more vouchers to be given away, so be sure to keep your eyes peeled for a steal or head on over to the Bargain Alerts forum to take advantage of those found by others!

One incoming change is the removal of the Closed Account tagline. This is something that many of you have been asking for and should hopefully make for a more pleasant browsing experience for current users, while ensuring that newcomers aren't put off should they stumble upon a thread of former users. There is a Feedback thread (http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057657559) to discuss the change.

Another big change in recent weeks is how Forum Requests are being handled. While you still need to have logged three months on Boards.ie and fifty posts under your belt (as a barometer for getting to grips with the Boards.ie community), a forum can now be approved in a week should it garner enough support. A big thanks to the Admins for getting this rolling.

The first to benefit from this change (and basically the drive for it) is the new Forum Games forum, which houses the online game of Werewolf (http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=1770). For the unaware, this is a secret identity game in which villagers try to find and lynch the werewolves among them using abilities at their disposal, while hoping they survive the night. The fourth game will get underway in a week and is looking for participants (all are welcome), so there's never been a better time to check out what the whole thing is about. There will be some fantastic games full of trickery, deception, and deduction to follow over the coming weeks and months, I'm sure!

After a short break, we have a new AMA (Ask Me Anything) over in the dedicated AMA forum. This time around, a litigation solicitor fielded your questions on a range of topics, including what they'd change about the law, the best part of their job, and fraudulent cases. You can see the full AMA right here.

In technical news, some users (those on the Vodafone network) were blocked from accessing Boards on their mobile. This issue has been resolved and we'd like to thank everyone for their patience.

One issue that hasn't been sorted as yet is a redirect loop error, which informs users to clear cookies - unfortunately this doesn't solve the problem. This has been linked to Chrome and we are tweaking some things to try to counteract it, but you can get around it by either using a different browser or Chrome's Incognito Mode.

Finally, we'd like to congratulate fergal.b, the moderator of the Sailing & Boating forum, who is now royalty. He was recently crowned Ireland's King of DIY with this project that he built from the ground up! Not one to rest on his laurels, he is also working on restoring a cruiser, salvaged from a riverbed, to its former glory and making it wheelchair-friendly. You can read frequent updates here.

If you've anything that you'd like to highlight (meetups/events/achievements in a forum, for example), or anything that you'd like to see covered in future updates, please get in touch.

These are a few of our favourite things:

• Put your hands together for the Santa Strike Force
• One poster will never forget how Would You Rather is supposed to work
• Get to know the difference between straw and hay (and all your other farming questions answered)
• Exploring the 'Sad Selfie' phenomenon
• "The Facebook's" introduction to Trinity College (referenced on Twitter this week - always an amusing trip down memory lane)