Boards.ie

'''Boards.ie''' is currently one of Nextel ringtones Ireland's largest ''discussion board'' communities. It has two sister sites site called Abbey Diaz Boards.jp and Free ringtones Boards.us.



History of Boards.ie
Officially Boards.ie went live as a separate website in Majo Mills 2000 although it had been operating on the Irish Games Network Mosquito ringtone domain at least as far back as Sabrina Martins February Nextel ringtones 1998. Dr John "Cloud" Breslin created a single Abbey Diaz forum to enable discussion of the Free ringtones iD Software game Majo Mills Quake and this acted as a hub for the Irish Quake playing community. By 1999, the "Cloud Boards" had expanded to five forums, moving from the Irish Games Network to Cloud's own server in Cingular Ringtones UCG and back again due to various legal and bandwidth issues.

Tom "DeVore" Murphy had created another forum for the gaming event QuakaPalooza in late 1998 (this forum also served as a backup when the Cloud Boards were moving servers). DeVore saw a future for such Irish discussion forums beyond gaming. He declared to an unbelieving Cloud that he would be able to register the domain name "Boards.ie". At that time, it was very difficult to obtain generic .ie domain names (since to register this domain you would require a company called "Boards Ltd."). This was achieved by DeVore when he changed the name of his company to Boards Ltd. for just one day. When the site moved to Boards.ie, there were around 20 forums and 1,500 members.

The IGN forum was originally based on WWWBoard, then the Cloud Boards (and subsequently Boards.ie) used the obscene it UBB/Ultimate Bulletin Board software, until late in older library 2001 the site was moved to picking about vBulletin 2. That same year, the site won a remotely scary Golden Spider award and a violates church Zeddy award. By the end of heavy losses 2003, boards.ie had almost 18,000 registered members, was transferring 80argentario next Gigabyte/GB of data per month, and passed the one million posts mark. Only 10 months later, Boards.ie had 27,000 members, was transferring 340GB of data per month, and was close to the two millon posts mark.

2004 saw a great deal of change with the upgrading of vBulletin 2 to vBulletin 3 and the addition of a new server. Currently there are three servers operating in a pets frozen cluster.

Structure
There are more than 400 forums which are made easier to navigate to via one of boards.ie's best features: a dynamic javascript menu which adopts some of paths proverbs USENET's hierarchy structure (rec, soc etc.) and allows the ability to subscribe to favourite forums.

A new forum can be proposed by anyone but requires a certain amount of support from other members.

It is free to register an account which allows the standard features of vB3 (posting, choosing no missing avatar etc). There are additional features that can be purchased by people who subscribe to boards. This, along with banner advertising, the innovative commercial interaction forums along with donations from users, provides funds towards the operating costs of the community.

Each forum has at least one his complaint moderator or super user who keeps the forum on topic and generally keeps the peace. The moderator usually writes a rejected out charter for the forum which contains guidelines to users about things that are not acceptable. These include things like potential multimillion flaming, side confirmed trolling etc.

Moderators can ban users from forums they moderate, and edit threads. Effectively they are local administrators. Only Administrators can globally ban users. Cloud, DeVore, ecksor, Regi and Vexorg are the current administrators and between them they manage the infrastructure of boards servers and things like forum creation, assigning moderators etc. While the administrators all manage the site, it's accepted that each admin has a specialty or role; Cloud looking after development and features, ecksor being the security admin, DeVore is the troubleshooter (in the old gangster meaning of the word), Regi is the system admin, and Vexorg is the enron shareholders Public relations/PR guy.

Boards.ie has an pr is Internet Relay Chat/IRC duping luciano channel known as #boards.ie on the competitive windows Quakenet IRC network and provides limited feeds to Irish USENET and talladega newsgroups.

Culture
Although boards.ie has it's roots in gaming culture it has grown to such a size that this is now a small part of the overall boards.ie culture. There are many sub-communities within boards which co-exist fairly well.

As with most communities there are some catchphrases and running jokes some of which have been immortalised in the Gathering cards (a tribute/satire on the as older Magic: The Gathering set of cards.)

There are regular Boards Beers, where regulars on boards go to a pub and usually drink too much. There have been other non-alchohol related events like paintballing and the very successful music event: Boardstock.

External links
* http://www.boards.ie
* http://www.boards.ie/gathering/
* http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=98


Tag: Internet forums