Boards.ie
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Strapline: Now ye're talkin'
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Type of site
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Classified discussion boards |
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| Available in | English, Irish; some subforums for other languages |
| Owner | Distilled Media |
| Created by | John Breslin |
| Revenue | Advertising, subscriptions, commercial forums, group coupons |
| Website | boards.ie |
| Alexa rank |
 5,129 (April 2014[update]) |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | optional; required to post |
| Launched | 1998 (rebranded 2000) |
| Current status | Online |
Boards.ie is a large Internet forum in Ireland.
As of February 2013, the site had 613,742 accounts (this number includes banned, duplicate, inactive and closed accounts), 2,297,620 threads and more than 36 million posts. A wide variety of topics from music to politics to bereavement and to personal relationships are widely discussed, mostly from an Irish perspective. Participation in the forums only requires free registration.
In 1998, John "Cloud" Breslin created a single forum to enable discussion amongst Irish users of the id Software game Quake, 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. 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 in order to trick the system, registered the paperwork with the Irish domain registrar for boards.ie, and was granted the domain.
In 2003, boards.ie achieved one million posts to its forums.
In 2007, the boards.ie Ltd. company acquired the rights to boards.us and other domains from Breslin.
In 2008, boards.ie hired its first full-time developer. 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. Later that year in August, boards.ie saw its first shareholding investment from Daft Media Ltd.
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