Irish online community bulletin board website is proving a popular destination for those who want to sell a car, debate the state of the nation's broadband system or have their say on the pub smoking ban, writes Karlin Lillington
Boards.ie, the online community bulletin board website, has achieved on a shoe-string what several big, venture capital-backed commercial projects have tried and failed to do: create a vibrant and popular online discussion community.
The three-year-old website, where members can hop into discussions on everything from the pub smoking ban to pet care, gardening to computer hardware, philosophy to gay relationships, just reached its one-millionth post - and even its founder, known online only as the gruff and feisty DeVore, isn't sure why.
"We're pretty rude to people sometimes. We run it as, 'if you don't like this, then just feck off'. We call it Big Boys' Rules - people have to be fairly civil and we ban people who aren't. But if people didn't like it, they wouldn't be flocking to the site," he says.
And flock they do. According to DeVore - who in his alter ego is Tom Murphy, a self-proclaimed computer games geek who runs a Dublin Web design company - Boards.ie has around 6,000 active members (membership is free), many of whom have posted well over a thousand posts.
The site is now one of the largest in the State, with more than 2.5 million page reads every month. Members join at a fairly consistent rate of about 25 a day, and participate in more than 300 individual discussion forums. You can buy or sell a computer or a car, get advice on the Linux operating system, debate the state of the nation's broadband internet system, all from your keyboard and screen.
"Each of our boards has its own flavour. Each brings its own culture because of the crowd that goes along with it," says DeVore.
Some 300 people are on the site at any given moment and they log on at times that directly reflect the Irish working day. The first rush comes at around 9 a.m., followed by a surge at 11.30 a.m., presumably as people go on a break.
Lunchtime is busy, and then comes another surge at 3.30 p.m., again at 5.30 p.m. before people head home, and then, at 7 p.m., as the home crowd goes online. There's a "weird peak" at 12.30 a.m., "when all the online gamers stop playing and check the discussion boards before going to bed", says DeVore.
The busiest day of the week? "Tuesday lunchtime," he says, but he doesn't really know why.
In its relatively short life, Boards.ie has been the subject of tirades, gushing praise, bitter fights, and a Trinity College Masters degree. DeVore is the community's "benevolent dictator", who, with a handful of systems administrators - the all-powerful Jedi Knights who dispense summary justice in the Boards.ie universe - oversees the site.
They in turn are supported by their standing army of some 200 forum moderators, who watch the discussion "threads", or conversation topics, to make sure posters remain within reasonable bounds - although as DeVore happily admits, the admins get to decide what is reasonable, and throw people off on a regular basis.
The disgruntled exiles are welcome to post in their own special forum on Boards - called "prison". Very few do, although some vent their spleen and a couple more meekly ask to be reinstated. DeVore has been threatened - including some death threats - by people thrown off Boards.ie, but he says most threats are pretty innocuous, and there are few problems overall.
"For the amount of people we have, we have very little trouble. The door policy is just that you have to be civil. At the same time, we're not a crèche. We let people vent their anger," he says.
The more rambunctious crowds tend to congregate on the political discussions areas, and places like the soccer forum, DeVore notes. "No one has a row or a flamewar on the gardening forum," he says with a grin.
But setting aside the few members that do get overly unruly, the Boards.ie community is all about debate, argument and discussion. DeVore and the admins are passionate about encouraging real discussion.
"As a society, we don't discuss topics anymore. We get fed soundbites by politicians and the media." The closest the Republic has come to a real discussion forum in the past has been, "God love 'em - the Late Late Show," says DeVore.
But Boards.ie has made a difference - as even its fiercest critics have to admit. After the site gave a home to the discussion forum for a tiny new lobby group campaigning for affordable home broadband internet connections called Ireland Offline, the group gained immediate visibility, attracted members, drew thousands to its forum, and now has become a notable lobby group that no broadband stakeholder - from the Government to regulatory agencies to network providers - can afford to ignore.
Boards.ie recently introduced a special "commercial interaction" forum, where companies can have their own discussion boards with Boards.ie members.
At the moment, participants include computer parts and Web-hosting companies that - if tentative at first - quickly found that they could get an enthusiastic market for their offerings by making customer service something highly visible rather than hidden away.
DeVore's latest idea - after visiting the ruins of Pompeii and seeing the debating chambers, in which all members of the ancient community were encouraged to thrash out matters of importance - is to create "a mature debating forum" on Boards.ie, with teams of people prominently associated with the sides of a given public issue. Each side will post and respond several times, with the winner declared by an equally prominent judging panel.
Run as a limited company with a board and shares - but virtually no income outside of what covers - sometimes - its operating costs, Boards grew out of a discussion forum for online gaming aficionados in the Republic.
Its success probably has to do with the fact that it was built from the bottom up, in response to what members wanted, he says, and is run by moderators who do it for the love of it, not for pay. "Boards don't really work on the back of planning things," says deVore.
"Stuff just happens. We don't really want to go tinkering with something that's working."
Karlin Lillington email: karlin@indigo.ie website: www.techno-culture.com weblog: http://weblog.techno-culture.com
