Boards.ie could be "forced to shut down"

Well it's plain that google and other search engines are serving up AI summaries of scraped content in response to search queries, and fewer links to the original content. The traffic is not being redirected to content producing sites, squeezing advertising revenue. In effect, Google is killing the businesses that allowed it to trawl and index their sites in return for search engine optimisation. A betrayal of the highest order, but business is business, Joe.
 
I was disappointed to read about this. It would be a big loss to the Irish community in general, if it were to close down.

On askaboutmoney, we have never prioritised growth as we don't look for ad revenue. So we are free to close down discussions or ban subjects completely without being worried about losing traffic.

I was not even aware that the Google changes had hit traffic.

Some years ago we were always on the first page if you searched for mortgages, trackers or deposit rates. Now we are hardly noticed by Google. I assume that is because the likes of bonkers and ccpc are spending a lot of money with Google.

Brendan
 
Brendan Burgess said:
On askaboutmoney, we have never prioritised growth as we don't look for ad revenue. So we are free to close down discussions or ban subjects completely without being worried about losing traffic.
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I've always wondered how AAM is funded? Can you enlighten us Brendan? It is a great service, and although it is text-based there still must be costs for servers, domain names etc. Thanks for all your hard work.
 
Fortune said:
They never really recovered from the site going down for a week or so when they were switching to Vanilla.
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And ironically that was done to save costs. Had they pushed the "we need subs to survive model" with the larger user base on the old platform, which was overall a better experience for users, they likely would have gotten the funds they needed.
 
outofmymind said:
I've always wondered how AAM is funded?
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I pay for it myself and am happy to do so. At one stage we had a whip-around and it caused more hassle than it was worth. People felt that if they donated money, they should not be moderated! ( I have seen the same today on the boards.ie thread "If we pay you €6 a month, will that mean that you won't moderate us?")

Technical support: $1450 = €1,200
Hosting £1308 = €1500
Xenforo annual license and support $86 = €73 (There was an initial purchase price)
Anti-spam and other add-ons : c.€200

Total annual running costs: <€3,000

Please don't start posting "You can get free hosting on xyz website and sure I will give you a hand with the technical support". It's working well and professional support and hosting is cheaper than volunteers!
 
Yes, we had a cheaper option, but I think it began to creak so we upgraded to Argon.

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If boards.ie closes and they migrate en masse to Askaboutmoney, we might have to upgrade. :)



Nimbus scales up gradually to this top level:

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I don't know how big boards.ie is. They went for a Cloud Computing solution a few years ago because it was cheaper than a dedicated server.
 
There is a thread on Boards with details of the 'monthly active recipients of our service'.
An "active recipient" is defined by the DSA as any natural or legal person who has actually engaged with the service, such as by viewing content, during the specified period.

Here is an example month.

Unregistered means people without accounts who looked at some content.


DateRegisteredUnregisteredTotal
01/09/2024 - 01/10/202419,630673,393693,023

www.boards.ie

Boards.ie: Average Monthly Active Recipients

In line with our commitment to transparency and regulatory compliance, Boards.ie will now publish statistics on the average number of monthly active recipients of our service within the European Union every six months.
www.boards.ie www.boards.ie
 
Interesting, but weird. For every registered active recipient , there were 30 unregistered!

How would the total of 700,000 translate into page views? Presumably most registered active recipients view multiple pages?
 
Brendan Burgess said:
For every registered active recipient , there were 30 unregistered!

How would the total of 700,000 translate into page views? Presumably most registered active recipients view multiple pages?
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Yes I found that surprising. I wonder if some of that is AI scraping \ bot activity.

Yes, the active users could have hundreds of page views a day.

Interestingly, the thread linked in the OP about trying to save the site was created 2 days ago and has 59,000 views so far.
You would imagine it should be one of the most active threads on the site.
 
The use of scraping and AI actually answers a question I had (I was questioning my own sanity to be honest). I noticed that recently my ability to google effectively seemed to disappear. The term "insh*tification" was coined. But it makes sense now, that the result I was getting were out of kilter with what I used to get, and seemed to lean much more on sponsored content. Also search words sometimes bore only passing resemblance to what actually appeared. This all points to an AI engine.

Boards also mention that a lot of smaller forums don't let AI scrape or access themselves, as sometimes it requires you to actually click into the site and create a user account to actually access the rich information. This new development will reduce the AD income on these sites and make them unviable.

Apologies if this takes the thread too off-topic.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
If boards.ie closes and they migrate en masse to Askaboutmoney, we might have to upgrade.
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When the boards.ie people frequented AAM many moons ago it required a lot more moderating. Lots more text speak, expletives etc. :)

It would be sad if Boards was to go as I recall watching a Nationwide programme on RTE years ago where I think they mentioned about having employees and they appeared to have a social club side of things where many couples had met.
 
Sue Ellen said:
When the boards.ie people frequented AAM many moons ago it required a lot more moderating. Lots more text speak, expletives etc. :)
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I don't remember that? Are you confusing it with the PropertyPin?

A lot of people like our strict moderation but a lot more don't like it and much prefer boards.ie . And that is fine. I often refer people to boards when they complain about the moderation here. I don't see us as competitors.
 
OK, I sort of remember those characters. But why would you describe them as boards.ie people?

A lot of posters post on both sites. And that is fine.

I hope that boards.ie survives. But if it doesn't and people post here, they are very welcome as long as they post within the Posting Guidelines.

We are not going to introduce new categories

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