Tom Murphy (DeVore) has written an article on the future of boards.ie:

Ok, just to put you guys in the picture.

The admins meet over the xmas for our annual (or biannual!) meal and chat about the future of Boards.

There is a HUGE amount in the pipeline right now. Quite a bit of fundamental change and the splitting of Hosted forums from Category forums is just the tip of that. We are restructuring a few things and some fair serious changes will come out of that. The creation of Category Mods as additional eyes and ears for the mods is another part of that.

The admins decided a few broad things but the details will come once we have talked our plans through with the Mods to see what they think. We generally dont do much without running it passed their collective eyes (ok, cloud does but like, he doesnt usually even inform the other admins )

Some basic decisions were made which are:

1. We are broadly happy with how Boards works. The changes will be to ensure it continues to work this way in the future.

2. We cannot withstand the growth we had last year again this year. If our level of growth even just repeated itself this year we’d have the busiest site in the country. Twice as busy as Ryanair.com. We havent a chance of surviving that as we are, we can hear the creaks already and by 2006 we’ll collapse under our own weight.

3. We dont want to change the basics, we need to find money from somewhere but we will not charge for the services we provide (and have provided historically). IE: we refute the Pay-To-Talk model (ala somethingawful) as being anathema to Boards history and culture. (that said dont be surprised if the Legal Highs forum is created as a subscriber only forum to protect us legally, thats a special case though).

4. The admins are not able to keep up with the demands on our time, we’ve literally reached the limits of what 5 guys can do in our spare time. This is leading to longer and longer response times to Mod requests and user support. Also its leading to requests being handled on the basis of “I have time to do A right now but not time to do B so while B is a higher priority, I’ll do A now to get it out of the way”. Hence the odd order of things getting sorted as Muck pointed out (at least I *think* it was Muck!)

5. We need to decide what we want Boards to be in the future or it will drift aimlessly. Thats going to bug a few people because any direction we take, some people will object to it. Thats life unfortunately

So, in the next 6-8 weeks some fairly serious changes will occur and I’ll keep you abreast of them here. Hopefully it will make Boards *more* like the place we all love but it needs careful handling and some trust on all sides that change will be for the better.

I know this post says lots but tells you very little but honestly I want to be able to adopt any ideas the Mods come up with and theres little point requesting their input if I’ve already announced a plan now is there!

I think you’ll find the new admin changes to be good and our cash generation plans are all non-invasive and voluntary. We are still just as opposed to popups, mail address selling and commercial sponsorship as ever and I *can* tell you now that you wont see any of that sort of nonsense. “The Broadband Forum , brought to you by Eircom” isnt an option

DeV.