Ezboard
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 The ezboard homepage as of 2005-08-31 |
|
| URL | http://www.ezboard.com |
|---|---|
| Commercial? | Yes |
| Type of site | Bulletin Board System |
| Registration | Required for creating forums and posting; Admin optional for posting on Gold Community boards |
| Owner | ezboard, Inc. |
| Created by | Vanchau Nguyen |
| Current status of site | 7.32 |
- The correct title of this article is ezboard. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.
ezboard, Inc., based in the San Francisco, California, United States, is a provider of free and paid hosted Internet forums .
Tagline: Connecting people like you. Past headline: helping.people.connect
Contents |
[edit] Description
ezboard is a provider of free hosted message board that is considered an easy solution for webmasters and message board admins that have little to no experience running a web site. Along with having premade ezboard templated and an intuitive color picking tool, the ezboard community also supports a number of volunteers who are available to help other users customize their ezboards.
ezboard offers free and paid accounts for both boards and users. The free accounts are supported through advertisements, and have fewer features in regards to customization and board management. Paid members are called "ezSupporters", while paid message boards are referred to as "Gold boards"; both are given a wide variety of features and options. Accounts can either be local (deprecated) and tied to a specific board, or global, which can be used for posting across the entire ezboard network.
[edit] History
ezboard is a web application, created in 1998 by Vanchau Nguyen. One of the earliest user-customisable online message board providers, it quickly grew to become one of the largest.
In 2001 ezboard launched their first CSC (Community-Supported Communities) product, i.e. a paid version of ezboard without advertisements. This later split into CSC Blue and CSC Gold. CSC Blue removed intrusive advertising popups but retained advertising banners for a fixed price, while CSC Gold was 100% ad-free with extra features, but at a variable cost. It was reported that some very large ezboards paid the fixed price for CSC Blue, which ultimately proved to be an unprofitable product. ezboard announced that as of August 31, 2001 they would no longer renew CSC Blue boards. [1] With the benefit of hindsight, it is interesting to note that Google ads are currently a major source of revenue for web sites.
In 2002 ezboard introduced image hosting, which was provided by a third party and not in-house by ezboard. Various announcements followed, which showed the image hosting deal to be an unfortunate disaster. [2] [3] [4] Eventually, the parent company filed for bankruptcy, leaving ezboard to continue operation of the image hosting in-house, while developing a new hosting product in parallel. [5] A later announcement highlighted a miscommunication between ezboard staff and moderators with an admission that the image hosting service had been a bad decision. [6]
Late in 2002, ezboard version 7.0 was released. This included a number of changes to free boards, which were met with a lot of negative comments from free board admins. [7] 7.0 also included greatly enhanced user profiles and a new web site.
In December 2002, ezboard version 7.1 was released, which included the useful ezPost tool. This provided users with fast access to useful posting features, such as changing font sizes and inserting links. However, some admins were unhappy that users could now post in a variety of fonts and colours, thereby altering the look and feel of their boards. This divided feedback was very common on ezboard due to the large number of users. [8]
In 2003, ezboard version 7.2 was released. 7.2 release notes This was the last version of the core ezboard product to contain new features. After 7.2, various patches were applied to other areas of the ezboard service, such as spellcheck [9], free gold [10], meetup [11], and network performance and improvements [12].
In March 2004, Robert Labatt was appointed as ezboard's new CEO. [13] Vanchau Nguyen later chose to leave ezboard but remained on the Board of Directors. [14] It is not known exactly when Vanchau left, but it is thought to be sometime in 2004 due to replies to help forum posts on the subject. Due to the active nature of the ezboard help forums and the limit of 20 pages of posts per forum, these posts have long since been deleted.
The most recent version of ezboard - 7.32 - was released on March 14, 2005. No new releases have been announced since then. [15]
[edit] Technology
ezboard was written in Smalltalk VisualWorks 3.1 by Vanchau Nguyen with Jay O'Conner [16]. One of the surprising features from a technical point of view was its reliance on the build-in flat-file object-oriented datastore (BOSS) which together with the overall power of the Smalltalk language made the code running extremely fast and compact for the time. Later a need to move forward to a more stable RDBMS-based solution became apparent [17], though it's not known to which extent the structured storage has been modified since the earlier days.
Its creator, Vanchau Nguyen, said he had "bet his company, and his future, on Cincom Smalltalk". He also mentions ezboard's userbase, listed as having nearly 2 million registered users. [18]
One of the reasons cited by ezboard for writing the new Yuku software was due to the ezboard codebase becoming virtually unmaintainable. However, the underlying technology, Smalltalk, was also given as a limitation of the ezboard service. This is something that Cincom, the vendor of Smalltalk, denies. [19] [20]
[edit] ezboard cracked
On May 31, 2005, the Smalltalk software on ezboard was cracked, causing many boards to lose information, become inaccessible, or be completely wiped. ezboard stated that all historical post data and a significant amount of backup data was erased. Over the next month, some data that had been lost on ezboard was recovered; ezboard stating that there was some data from about 4000 non-Gold communities that had been restored. ezboard has never stated precisely what proportion of data was lost and what was restored.
At the time of the attack, ezboard stated that since 1999, "2.2 million boards have been created". It is unknown how many were active at this time, as ezboard declined to provide specific numbers. [21]
A similar incident occurred in mid 2001, while ezboard was run by Vanchau Nguyen (not its current CEO, Robert Labatt, who was in charge when the May 2005 'incident' occurred). While updating the ezboard software something went wrong, and many boards across the network lost a lot of posts. This problem was addressed straight away and in just a couple of days every single board was fully restored. During the restoral process there was no downtime and no lag. No other errors or damage occurred.
[edit] ezboard and Yuku
At DEMOfall 2005, in Huntington Beach ezboard, Inc. launched its new product, Yuku a message board application with greater JavaScript use. Some members of the ezboard community have already begun beta testing Yuku, which is due to be released during 2006. While keeping a tight lid on final details thus far, ezboard has stated that the new message board platform would allow its registered users to utilize social networking and media sharing among other features that are due to be released when the system goes live. Yuku's feature-set continues to be developed and expanded.
On March 7, 2006, ezboard's CEO stated that all ezboards would move to their new flagship product Yuku when it was ready and that they anticipate this will be in late 2006. While still in development, Yuku will give ezboard users access to both platforms (Yuku and ezboard). In the meantime, the ezboard product has been frozen in relation to bug fixing and development and ezboard message boards will at some point have to move over to the newly developed software, per the CEO's statement.
