The State of boards.ie #2

I'm not sure if it's scale David as from month to month there aren't any flatlines... But I'll try and get some more interesting views for my BarCamp Galway talk on the evolution of boards.ie...

[...] (I had a nice big rant typed up to this thread but lost it last week. Now I feel sufficiently energised after the weekend to type most of what I can remember again...) I think to say that boards.ie is offline nearly every day is a slight bit of an overstatement, don't you think - "dreams and reality", Dougal? True, boards.ie has been down three or four times in the past month to six weeks, mainly due to a dodgy RAID controller that we have identified on our attachments file share server, which we are currently getting a replacement for. Also, if Blogger can go down and Skype for a few days, maybe you can cut us a break - it happens to us all! I don't think we've ever been that reticent about our income. Of course, you can go the CRO route to get more, but as Dan said, before now it was just for fun (and for the community); now we've moved from a "fluffy" fun community to an oft-quoted service, and it's due to that (and also because it is in the past year that we've begun to make enough money to actually hire someone full-time) that we need to look beyond our part-time input and get a body (possibly two people) to work for boards.ie full-time. Maybe that'll give a hint as to how much we are making We currently run on a load balancer, four web nodes, a file attachments / avatars server, and database backend (currently on one, but will be expanding to two DB nodes). Our other subsites (not linked to the boards.ie DB) run on a seperate "porked-up" server. As regards stats, have a look at my recent blog post showing the growth curve of boards.ie since we launched. boards.ie has 111350 registered users (38898 have been active in the last six months), and 6931221 posts on 596763 threads (85823 active in the last six months) in 671 forums. We do over 10 million page views a month, from 1.5 million visits. Average time on site is 15 minutes ... The great thing about the Interweb is that there is this "law of the two eyeballs": if you don't like it, go look somewhere else. Most users of boards.ie are lurkers, non-registered accounts searching for information. I think they find it a very useful resource, and then you've got the people who actually post the information on that resource, many of whom get on fine with other users and moderators on the sites, and some of whom do not. I am not sure of the exact stats of posters to readers for message boards (some stats say that only 0.16% of users posts to Web 2.0 sites). Let's say that it's 10% who post as opposed to read, and then you've probably got 1 in 50 who have a beef with a moderator^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdictator on the site - it's that small disgruntled number that you'll always hear from (when have you last heard good news on the TV - it's always the bad stuff you get). I am a case in point. I've never posted on here, but now that I've detected a bit of negative backstabbing going on, I've felt the urge to speak up and complain here rather than make some positive comment about how great this site is (although I must admit I only happen on here when there's a complaint about boards.ie, sorry). We do have a wonderful team of moderators, but of course power corrupts and amongst hundreds of people, a few can sometimes lose the plot. But I think the admins and super moderators try and be fair arbitrators in such cases. If you've a problem, just contact us. So, to conclude, we're not actually offline every day, we're not perfect at moderating, we're not millionaires just yet, we're constantly trying to improve, and we're still growing almost exponentially. We've been providing a home for all types of Irish communities for nearly 10 years, and I hope we will continue to do so. /me re-enters stealth mode [...]