These most recent changes kinda seem like they are intentionally trying to kill them off. Instead of just adding a captcha to login, votes are removed.
If I'm not mistaken, the Moderation team (not Riot; important to note that part) made the decision to disable voting on threads pretty much largely by community request. They don't have any reliable avenues for dealing with vote manipulators, so they had to take the nuclear option, so-to-speak.
They've explained (before ultimately deciding to go with it) that the community (naturally) pushed back last time voting was disabled, hence their reluctance to actually do it in response to vote manipulation.
Then we are told "the boards don't have such capabilities" even though captcha is easy to set up and costs exactly $0.
Soft Mist pointed out the cost thing, but let me pose this - and, bear in mind, I'm no programmer or anything, so take it with a grain of salt.
The Boards is a sub-site of the main League of Legends website, and consequently, the log-in on the Boards is the exact same log-in as on the main page; any given branch of the League website will all use the same log-in process as the rest. This would mean that for the Boards log-in to have a captcha system, the whole League website would have to have it.
So, just considering that factor (not even to mention the other implications for the Moderation team being able to affect the log-in functions), I really don't think it's in the cards to be able to apply captcha to Boards log-in.
Then we have the removal of notifications which obviously is going to reduce activity even further.
That, unfortunately, is a consequence of Riot's site UI update. Attysu The Poro at least has a post up with links to the notification page(s) as a temporary workaround while the Moderation team tries to get things sorted out.
Only a handful of moderators actually do anything...
I'm not trying to throw shade at the whole team but its just blatantly obvious that a handful do the lion's share of the work and others do nothing.
I'm not sure generally what you mean, since you comment on some Moderators not having posted anything in a great stretch of time (which doesn't mean they're not doing anything, by-the-by), but it's also worth pointing out this quote from Attysu The Poro in the aforementioned thread:
Most of us have stopped moderating things unless it's blatant spam until we find a way to get mod messages back. I'm personally not a fan of shadowbanning/shadowmodding even if it's not my fault that we'd have to in a sense. If you think something you had posted was moderated and can't tell, feel free to join our Discord and we can pull up your logs manually and show you.
If some of the Moderation team has recently dialed back their activity (in a Moderation sense, at least), it'd likely be due in large part to Moderation Messages not showing due to the UI update messing up Boards functionality, which results in a scenario where a Moderator could action a comment or post, but the player wouldn't be notified of the action.
Doubtless the Moderators would prefer to be able to give feedback for the players to take going forward - and, thankfully, there have been a few Moderators at least actioning comments and giving direct responses to those players in the absence of Moderation messages - but nevertheless, the UI and functionality screw-ups make things more difficult on them than need-be.
What is going on with these boards? Are they being killed off intentionally or what?
Basically just a clusterfuck of bad happenings all at once. Vote manipulators forcing the Mods to disable post voting, Riot's UI updates disrupting Boards functionality, and players - unfortunately, but not unexpectedly - pushing against them;
The Boards aren't being killed off, it's just a really rough start to the year.
