Boards.ie working?

Its working fine for me.
In fact, Ive noticed a dramatic improvement over the last day or so.
 
I really wish it could go back to the day when it was a fully functioning message board with a proper search facility, a 'new posts' tab - and the ability to keep try of messages posted...
 
I cant understand wht they hav'nt upgraded thier vBulletin software.
Still running 3-5-5 while the lates version is 3-6-5 with much more features,
 
I don't really know that much about boards.ie, but I assume that it has a similar model to Askaboutmoney, except that it is much bigger.

A few people who have full-time jobs provide this great site free of charge in their own time.

They get occasional thanks from people who appreciate what they are doing.

But they have to waste a good part of their time administering the site and dealing with problem posters who feel that they have som God given right to post any sort of rubbish.

Askaboutmoney paid vBulletin to upgrade us to the latest version. The upgrade did not work. Unusually, the vBulletin people were not helpful in sorting out the problems. ClubMan and MugsGame spent a good part of their spare time over the last weekend recovering the situation.

As I say, I don't know much about boards.ie, but has everyone who has bemoaned their service here, made a generous donation to the running costs of boards.ie?

Brendan
 
Brendan said:
As I say, I don't know much about boards.ie, but has everyone who has bemoaned their service here, made a generous donation to the running costs of boards.ie?Brendan
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Point taken. I havn't and I used to use it heavily. However, I did suggest at one stage (when they first had to drop the 'search' facility - that they should provide this to people who paid (and I was quite prepared to do this) and still leave the forum open to all. They felt that they wanted it to be all inclusive - given that if they started charging fees, boards would no longer be boards. That was an admirable stance to take. However, 18 months later and it is even difficult just to surf now...let alone search or check new posts.
 
The move from hosting 365 doesn't seem to have helped much....
I am familir with running sites & I really can't see where thier problems stem from. In the grand sceme of things boards.ie is not that big of a site.
There are much bigger forums out there running much more efficiently.
As for the money end.. If a site is getting the hits boards.ie get & they can't make enough to keep it running smoothly they is something wrong.
 
Boards does make revenues (enough to buy servers, etc) and has never really 'paid' for it's hosting. It is a big site, but there are a great many bigger, even in Ireland. The main problems are a heavily hacked vbulletin install, which is nigh on impossible to maintain/upgrade with standard software, as well as basic infrastructure problems.
 
I dont think there aree any hacks on there that should cause major problems...
The lack of features at this stage is a big let down..
No new posts search etc..
 
boskonay said:
Boards does make revenues (enough to buy servers, etc) and has never really 'paid' for it's hosting. It is a big site, but there are a great many bigger, even in Ireland. The main problems are a heavily hacked vbulletin install, which is nigh on impossible to maintain/upgrade with standard software, as well as basic infrastructure problems.
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Our vBulletin install is not heavily hacked; in fact I've made a one-line hack to do a style change for one of our subsites. We have plugins which are easily upgraded.

The main reasons we haven't upgraded to vB 3.6 (currently we run 3.5) is that the upgrade script for vBulletin will take several hours to perform an alter statement on one of our 6 million row tables.

I'd love to see an accurate list of the big sites in Ireland. Maybe H365 can provide. From Alexa, we're ranked #40 in terms of sites accessed from Ireland. In terms of the actual Irish sites there, we're at #8 (behind Daft, Eircom, AIB, RTE, CarZone, Aer Lingus and FAS). If there's some better list, please let us know.

I'd also like to refute your infrastructure statement. I can say more if pushed - I've refrained from doing so .

Colm, I cannot reply to your comments impartially, especially as you are from "BoardsIE.com". Imitation is the highest form of cybersquattery :)
 
Hey Cloud!

Welcome to AAM :)

I stand correct on the hack, altho it was always my understanding that the various bits and bobs integrated were a major factor in the speed of updates.

On the infrastructure, perhaps you could share the current model with us, as, when we provided the colo, there were recognised infra problems (most notablly the servers (number and capability).

365 hosted Boards for nigh on 4 years entirely out of the goodness of our hearts, including providing free kit, servers on loan, etc, etc. We've no interest in 'attacking' boards, so please don't take it as such - our only priority is ensuring that the move to digiweb (which was stated to us as entirely for regi proximity) was not seen as moving to a 'better' provider.

I think it fair that after such support, we are entitled to correct any inaccurate information that moving to digiweb somehow 'improved' the experience.
 
BTW, saying there are bigger sites - I don't think anyone would or could dispute that! Even in terms of message boards, there are at least 142 bigger sites. See big-boards.com for more details.

boards.ie is currently ranked at 8049 in the world's sites. Compare that with some others like Ireland.com (15123) and Ryanair.com (1852) and I think we're doing pretty good.
 
Since you asked, the move to Digiweb did improve the performance even before we introduced any new servers. I've refrained from saying this until now but your repeated insistence that nothing better could happen from moving to another hosting provider has finally prompted this response (I was happy to ignore it until now). (You are right that the move was envisioned to be one that would benefit from Dan's position in Digiweb, and TBH we didn't expect the speed issue to be resolved in this way, as we did think it was an infrastructure / "problem on our server" issue.)

I would have thought that the page rank H365 would have enjoyed from a link on every one of our pages would have been more than "out of the goodness of [y]our hearts" - it sounds like we were merely there on sufferance :( We also had a contra banner advertising agreement which you neglected to mention.

Currently we are running on four web servers and one database server. I don't have the exact stats to hand but we'll be documenting this soon on our site.

Thanks!

John.
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John, with all due respect, even though the servers may have been the same, the switches, loadbalancers and rest of the architecture changed. Any perceived speed increase would have been as a result of that, or, simply perceived. All other things being equal, the architecture digiweb have and ours are almost completely identical. You'll remember we even offered to provide a NetApp SAN and servers to rebuild the boards architecture before you left.

The banner contra - well, I've refrained from mentioning a click thru of a fraction of a percent, we never perceived 'value' from that other than branding. (and it wasnt running for most of the 4 years). We sign business up through word of mouth referral, not page rank.

365 and boards enjoyed a good relationship, it would be a shame to sully those 4 years now for petty 'points scoring' on a third party public forum.
 
Boards is a great site, no doubt. As a long time user of boards and now adverts, its poor performance, outages, bugs and lack of features means it is probably the most frustrating site I've ever used. Perhaps the O2 site is more frustrating I can't decide. Perhaps the performance has improved slightly over the last few weeks, I'm not sure. At least its mostly up these days. The other various problems remain however. However IMO you can't be too critical of a site that basically free and run by volunteers. Or its only fair, at least any [SIZE=-1]criticsim [/SIZE]should be in that context. I think you have to be appreciative of the works thats gone into it.

Besides when its not working you can wander off and find other sites like this one, or turn off the computer and go out into the real world. No really.
 
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