Now Ye're Talking |
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| URL | boards.ie |
|---|---|
| Commercial? | Yes |
| Type of site | Classified discussion boards |
| Registration | optional; required to post |
| Available language(s) | English, Irish; some subforums for other languages |
| Owner | Daft Media Limited, Tom Murphy, Gerry Shanahan |
| Created by | John Breslin |
| Launched | 1998 (rebranded 2000) |
| Revenue | Advertising, subscriptions, commercial forums, group coupons |
| Current status | Online |
boards.ie is an Internet forum based in Ireland. It is considered one of the largest indigenous Irish websites online.[1] As of July 2010, the site has 365,000 registered accounts, more than 1,300,000 threads and more than 20 million posts. A wide variety of topics from music to politics are discussed, mostly from (but not limited to) an Irish perspective.
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In 1998, John "Cloud" Breslin created a single forum to enable discussion amongst Irish users of the id Software game Quake,[2] while he was a postgraduate student at the National University of Ireland, Galway. This forum was part of the Irish Games Network's quake.ie site, and utilized "Matt's WWWBoard" software. The site gained in popularity until the size of its threads exceeded the capacity of the software. Breslin came into contact with Tom Murphy, who had been administrating a Quake-related forum called Quakapalooza, utilizing Murphy's ASP software. Some non-gaming related forums were added to the service, and the retitled "Cloud Boards" began using the Ultimate Bulletin Board software.[3] Murphy proposed a more general (not just Quake-related) forum, dedicated to general Irish issues in 1999, and considered the name boards.ie to be a more useful and desired domain.
In 2000, Cloud Boards was then rebranded for a more general audience. Limitations in what organizations could register prevented private individuals from registering vanity or custom domains. Breslin had previously been unsuccessful in registering the domain cloud.ie with the Irish domain registry. Murphy entered a bet with Breslin that he could successfully register a domain for a rebranded web forum. Murphy renamed his company Spin Solutions to Boards for a day, registered the paperwork with the Irish domain registrar for boards.ie, and was granted the domain.[4]
In 2003, boards.ie achieved one million posts to its forums.[5]
In 2007, the boards.ie Ltd. company acquired the rights to boards.us and other domains from Breslin.[6]
In 2008, boards.ie hired its first full-time developer.[2] For the 10th anniversary of boards.ie's first historic post, the complete data set of its discussions with semantic markup (see SIOC) was made available to researchers, and a competition looking for interesting creations based on this data was launched.[7] Later that year in August, boards.ie saw its first shareholding investment from Daft Media Ltd.[8]
On January 21, 2010 at 11:20 GMT, boards.ie director Tom Murphy took the site offline after an attack on the forums's database.[9] The attack originated from a source outside of Ireland.[10][11] A portion of the database, including usernames, encrypted passwords and email addresses were accessed.[10][11] The site advised all users who used the same password on other websites to change it there too.[9]
The site is majority owned by Daft Media Ltd[12][13] with a minority stake held by some of the original company founders, who delegate administrative and editorial control over the site to hundreds of unpaid moderators.[14] Currently, Tom Murphy is operating as acting Managing Director after the departure of the previous Managing Director, Gerry Shanahan, in February 2009.[5] There are over 1,350 forums, public and private.
A new forum can be proposed by anyone, but requires a certain amount of support from other members. Most users do not pay any usage fees, although subscription is offered with benefits such as custom avatars and a change of username, amongst other features.
The boards.ie site has expanded into a number of other countries including boards.org.uk (United Kingdom), boards.us (United States), boards.jp (Japan), boards.com.cn (China), and boards.co.nz (New Zealand). Sites associated with classified advertising (adverts.ie) and group coupons (boardsdeals.ie) have also been established.
boards.ie was awarded a Zeddy Award [15] in 2001. (The Zeddy Awards have since been discontinued.) It also won a Golden Spider Award in the same year.[16]
For his contribution to Irish society, Tom Murphy was awarded a Net Visionary Award by the Irish Internet Association in 2004 in the "Social Contribution" category.[17]
John Breslin was awarded Net Visionary Awards by the Irish Internet Association in 2005 [18] and 2006.[19]
boards.ie won two awards in the Irish Web Awards 2008, "Best Website in Ireland" and "Best Discussion Forum". It also won "Best Social Networking and Community Website" in the Golden Spider Awards 2008.