In 1998, John "Cloud" Breslin created a single forum to enable discussion amongst Irish users of the id Software game Quake,[2] 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.

Murphy entered a bet with Breslin that he could successfully register a domain for a rebranded web forum.

[7] Later that year in August, boards.ie saw its first shareholding investment from Daft Media Ltd.[8] The site is majority owned by Distilled Media Ltd[9][10] with a minority stake held by some of the original company founders, who delegate administrative and editorial control over the site to hundreds of unpaid moderators.

[15] However, its latest accounts show it had accumulated losses of €445,000 and rising, dropping more than €100,000 in those 12 months alone.

Most users do not pay any usage fees, although subscription is offered with benefits such as custom avatars and a change of username, amongst other features.

On January 21, 2010, at 11:20 GMT, boards.ie director Tom Murphy took the site offline after an attack on the forum's database.

[18][19] A portion of the database, including usernames, encrypted passwords and email addresses were accessed.