Can boards.ie be fixed?

I had been a mod on there for a number of years in a busy enough but mostly unremarkable part of the site . It had a pretty clear set of it's own rules in line with the wider charter so it was easy to be consistent with moderation and in line with other mods (helped that we routinely contacted each other)

However,.elsewhere that wasn't the case and it was becoming increasingly inconsistent and often nonsensical.

As a mod I was able to see the replies to reports I made due to the new platform they moved to being not that good. I didn't realise at first and thought it was just a reply to me in thread and replied. Quickly got told otherwise and told to drop it. However, I could see the general hand waving away of some really disgusting, downright racist and really wild revisionist takes on history by some high profile mods and admins was a real turning point for me.

It saw me pick fights with a few of them on the state of moderation. A number of high profile trolls were continually allowed return. People being deliberately provocative and a few close to deliberate defamation allowed to continue too.

A giant feedback thread saw some sweeping changes to moderation, but none of the stuff I raised was addressed still and lots, most of the changes were not from the thread at all and nobody was pleased really.

Final problem was one particular admin has treated the place like a personal fiefdom in my opinion for the last 12-18 months, making up rules on a whim so they could use them to ban people on the spot and just posting in a way that it they were an ordinary member would see them warned.

This is all on top of the site being a broken mess since the migration too.

There'll be a lot dismissing this as another crank annoyed at someone over there for perceived bias, but I genuinely thought that the site was being dragged into the mire and annoyed at the response. Sweep it under the rug and get rid of the person trying to highlight it
 
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ClubMan said:
a Google "site:boards.ie" search
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In my opinion theres very little worth searching anymore. Old content is obsolete. Very little of quality information in recent years. So if you do get results they'll all be old.

A lot of recent content is a lot of bickering that goes around in circles between the same handful of posters. If you put a few of them on ignore, 80% of a thread disappears. makes you realise how few are active any more. The amount of information to noise is very low. The reporting is broken. So it goes unchecked.

I only dip into a handful of forums now and then but they are very quiet. The few really busy threads are usually best avoided.
 
LeopoldGloom said:
I had been a mod on there for a number of years in a busy enough but mostly unremarkable part of the site . It had a pretty clear set of it's own rules in line with the wider charter so it was easy to be consistent with moderation and in line with other mods (helped that we routinely contacted each other)
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So is the solution for boards to split the forum into "information" and "chat" ?

Have strict posting guidelines on the information section because it's genuinely useful.

And then let the chat do what they want. We have the Depths for chat. I rarely visit it. It does not appear on the New Posts. If people let off Steam in one of the other forums, it can be moved to the Depths.

I am always amazed at how people can get really worked up on fairly factual forums like tax or investment. It must be much worse in the Current Affairs forum on Boards.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
If that happens, then it's very difficult to solve
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That might have been badly typed. It was not that the mods/admins are writing the revisionist stuff, that they are accepting it as part of a discussion forum/debate when it's stuff that is factually wrong and has been widely discredited.

Now I firmly believe we all have a duty to fight this sort of deliberate spreading of misinformation and misinformation and when you can back up what you're highlighting someone should take it seriously.


Now it's a big enough site, and it has a handful of nuisance reporters who report thousands upon thousands of posts that might be about a minor transgression so a lot gets bogged down there too
 
LeopoldGloom said:
Final problem was one particular admin has treated the place like a personal fiefdom in my opinion for the last 12-18 months, making up rules on a whim so they could use them to ban people on the spot and just posting in a way that it they were an ordinary member would see them warned.
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I haven’t been on boards in years so I have no idea who this mod is.

But a general rule is that any mod who has the time and energy to spend their life on a forum can eventually dominate it. Most posters just couldn’t be bothered and will go away and do something else.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
So is the solution for boards to split the forum into "information" and "chat" ?
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I don't think it can be fixed. They don't have the tools and they appear not to want to.

Brendan Burgess said:
I am always amazed at how people can get really worked up on fairly factual forums like tax or investment. It must be much worse in the Current Affairs forum on Boards.
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I think its attracts a more combatant user base.
 
There are plenty of places for politics, current affairs, conspiracy theories, abuse etc. online.

Why not just ban them from boards? If the boards posters want to continue the discussions, let them set up their own forum.

Of course, it would not be boards and it would be a much smaller site, but it would be much easier to administer and moderate.

Do people want to pay €50 a year to promote conspiracy theories? I suspect not. But they probably would pay to get a useful site.

Are all the forums infected? For example, are the various sports forums full of abuse and do they require moderation?

If you banned such abuse from the discussion forums on sports and music, would it kill off these forums?
 
What are the forums which would be most missed by reasonable users?

These are the ones I have heard mentioned usually in the context of being worth the €50 annual sub on their own.

Bargain alerts.
The Weather Forum
 
Brendan Burgess said:
Are all the forums infected? For example, are the various sports forums full of abuse and do they require moderation?

If you banned such abuse from the discussion forums on sports and music, would it kill off these forums?
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Brendan Burgess said:
What are the forums which would be most missed by reasonable users?
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Personally I never found much in the way of abuse on the sports threads although some of them do go off down rabbit holes at times.
For me, I use Boards for Sports, Travel (although I find TripAdvisor threads generally better for that but you do get some nuggets on Boards as well), Film/TV, Reading/Books. I found the Bargain Alerts had very little to offer in recent years so normally these days I tend to mainly stick to my bookmarks there.
So for me, your suggestion would have merit Brendan as I always found any current affairs thread on Boards was as much of a cesspit as Twitter.
 
Problem imho is that they will need critical mass to survive; some of the once popular threads are now in the doldrums so people will stop visiting them even more . There are other threads that are on fire - such as the Joe Duffy liveline threads. Posters were literally giving blow by blow account of the programme.
It is too broad-reaching and there are many other more specialised sites.
I did use it alot in the past so I will pay the €50.
I used to use Rollercoaster, but the site was changed about 10 years ago and became quite unusable.
I liked Propertypin in its day
 
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