The Evolution of boards.ie

The Evolution of boards.ie John Breslin Co-Founder boards.ie Ltd.

Past: Who Are We?
A group of like-minded individuals who realised that we could provide a self-sufficient website for various Irish communities to discuss and interact on various topics
Complementary skills , but at least two people share the necessary skills
We’ve done our best to evolve the site based on community feedback and feature requests…
So far, it’s all been part-time 

Past: History of the Boardsverse
1998 - 1 forum - 1 member (me!) - Began life on the Irish Games Network
2000 - 20 forums - 1,500 members – New branding and boards.ie Ltd. formed
w/ DeVore, regi, Vexorg, tr1n1ty … ecksor
…
2007 - 680 forums - 115k members – >7M posts - 5TB transfer per month

Past: Boards Recognition
Lots of recognition from the Irish web community and various media sources:
Awards such as a Golden Spider (2001), a Zeddy (2001), three Net Visionaries (2004, 2005, 2006)
Articles in magazines and books (French’s “dot ie”)
Radio interviews on Today FM, references on RTÉ Radio 1’s “The Business”, and forum posts read out by Pat Kenny on “Today with PK”
But we’ve never advertised – word of mouth, weblinks, Google searches lead to boards.ie

Past: In the Press
2006-2007 = busiest press year yet…
… for various reasons!

Past-Present: User Growth

Past-Present: Post Growth

Past-Present: Thread Growth

Past-Present: Forum Growth

Past-Present: Topic Evolution Post count as of 1999-02-12 = 8095 Posts from 1998-02-12 to 1999-02-12 = +8095

Past-Present: Topic Trends

Past-Present: Topic/Post Growth

Present: August 2007 Stats
1,554,695 Visits
757,398 Absolute Unique Visitors
10,668,185 Page Views
6.86 Average Page Views
00:08:34 Time on Site
43.65% Bounce Rate
41.18% New Visits

Present: Where From?

Present: Boards Sections
Discussion forums ranging from:
… David Hasselhoff and Wanderly Wagon to Irish Skeptics and Conspiracy Theories (crazy people)!
… but also normal stuff like Computers, For Sale, Games, Humour, Motors, Personal Issues, Politics, Soccer, Television, and even News / Media 
Podcasts on current affairs, ents and tech
Community-edited wiki on boards.ie culture
Couple of hundred blogs and albums
Classified ads subsite ( www.adverts.ie )

Boards Beers
Hallowe'en Fancy Dress Party
Local Beers
Dublin Beers
Boards Awards
Gathering Cards
People make images that they can produce in certain situations (trolling, flaming, etc.)
Present: Boards Culture

Present: Boards Revenue
Subscribers to services:
e-mail, extra forums, photo albums, custom pictures, etc.
Banner advertising:
image adverts from Sales Online and text adverts from Google Adsense
Commercial interaction forums:
companies allow the boards.ie user base to comment on their products or services

Present: Boards Infrastructure
Load Balancer: Dual 733 MHz P3, 2 GB RAM, 130 GB HD
Web 1: Dell 860, Xeon 3050, 1 GB RAM, 2 x 80 GB HDs, RAID 1
DB 1: Dell 2850, Dual 2.8 GHz Xeon, 3 GB RAM, 3 x 73 GB SCSI HDs
DB 2 (Inactive) : Dell 2850, Dual 2.8 GHz Xeon, 3 GB RAM, 3 x 73 GB SCSI HDs
File Storage: 1 TB (8 x 160 GB SATA HDs)
Subsites: HP DL380 G4, Dual 3.2 GHz Xeon, 2 GB RAM, 3 x 73 GB SCSI HDs
Repository: Lower Spec, 768 MB RAM, 30 GB HD
Forthcoming DB: 2 x Quad Core Xeon (8 Processor Cores), 16 GB RAM, 4 x 146 GB HDs, RAID 1+0

Future: social.ie
A social network for Ireland
Using the same userbase as boards.ie
Blogs
Buddies
Groups
Events
Images

Future: social.ie (2)

Future: More Boards

Questions and Answers
?

http://www.boards.ie	1559
http://boards.ie	274
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http://usenet.boards.ie	1
http://www-srv-4.boards.ie	1
http://www.pie.boards.ie	1
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http://www.e-presentations.us	1

The Evolution of boards.ie

by John Breslin

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