{{Infobox website | name = boards.ie | logo = Vbulletin3 logo white 2.gif | screenshot = | caption = Strapline: Now ye're talkin| url = | commercial = Yes | type = Classified discussion boards | language = English, Irish; some subforums for other languages | registration = optional; required to post | owner = Distilled Media | author = John Breslin | launch_date = 1998 (rebranded 2000) | current_status = Online | revenue = Advertising, subscriptions, commercial forums, group coupons }}Boards.ie''' is a large Internet forum in Ireland. the site had more than 360,000 members, 3,200,000 threads and 64 million posts. A wide variety of topics from entertainment (e.g. music, radio television, films) to jobs to politics to bereavement and to personal relationships are widely discussed, mostly from an Irish perspective. It also has sections ("forums") for games and puzzles. Participation in the forums only requires free registration. History 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