The board has been on the slide for more than a decade. 2009 was the pinnacle. Mucksavages, etc.
Year on year since there have been fewer new threads, fewer posts, and fewer sign-ups. The slide is probably terminal, and the board might have gone already if it wasn't for the fact that so many boys have been here 15+ years and almost have a sense of duty to keep the flag flying.
The decline is mostly due to the rise of social media. There now exists bigger, shinier platforms on which you can offer your two cents to the world. Twitter, in particular, killed the Latest Score thread, which was a healthy contributor to post counts and a big reason to log on in the early days. Other discussion boards like boards.ie and politics.ie have suffered in similar ways.
Another reasons for the decline is administrative neglect. There has been no effort to modernise this place from something that looks like a relic of the dial-up days, and there has been a noticeable drop off in active moderation over the last few years.
This is all a pity. You'd like to think that there is still a place for discussion boards in the internet ecosystem of today - places that allow for more detailed, nuanced chat than you get on Twitter/ FB/ etc. And despite the boredom of the Dub dominance era, there's still plenty worthy of proper discussion in the GAA world.
But you really need to work on keeping the house tidy for it to remain healthy and attractive, and it seems that the boy with the keys to the forum has more important real life stuff to be getting on with these days. Which is fair enough. But it's still a shame that a few more active moderators couldn't have been recruited over the years.
More active moderation retains the insightful and entertaining posters that have drifted away in recent years, no doubt tired of what the place has become.
More active moderation cuts off the reemergence of creepy f**kers like Seaney, stalking the board in pursuit of weird feuds no one else cares about.
More active moderation cleans up duplicate threads - like the three separate COVID threads in the general section all chatting about the same thing, or the 5+ 'Dublin's money is ruining the GAA' threads in the GAA section.
More active moderation gives the couple of lads name checked by the OP a time-out every once in a while, both for their own mental health, and also to stop the repeated filibustering of threads into oblivion.
But it's probably already too late. Without some very timely intervention this'll just be a place where an increasingly small handful of boys shout the same stuff at each other day after day after day until there's no one else left. Or until the board admin pulls the plug. Might not be far away from that the way it's going.
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