ezboard

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ezboard
The ezboard homepage as of August 31, 2005
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	7.32

ezboard, Inc., based in San Francisco, California, United States, is a provider of free and paid hosted Internet forums.

Contents 1 Description 2 ezboard and Yuku 3 ezboard history 4 Technology 5 ezboard cracked 6 References 7 External links

[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] ezboard and Yuku

Main article: Yuku

Yuku is the new version of ezboard. ^[1] It has been alpha/beta software since it was first unveiled at DEMOfall 2005 ^[2]. On January 9, 2008, it was confirmed that Yuku is "coming out of beta", although a date has not been set. ^[3]

As of January 8, 2008, it has been confirmed that all ezboard communities will be moving to Yuku. However, board owners can ask for a delay in the migration process. ^[4]

As of January 15, 2008, the ezboard home page is now redirecting to a Yuku Welcome page. A link allows users to login to ezboard.

[edit] ezboard 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, if not, the largest. At its peak, it was a highly ranked Alexa site, but its Alexa ranking has been in steady decline since 2003, ranking at 717 on April 24, 2007.

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. ^[5] 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. ^{[6] [7] [8]} 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. ^[9] A later announcement highlighted a miscommunication between ezboard staff and moderators with an admission that the image hosting service had been a bad decision. ^[10]

On October 22, 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. ^{[11] [12]} 7.0 also included enhanced user profiles, a redesigned web site and a new-look control center.

On December 10, 2002, ezboard version 7.1 was released, which included the 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 colors, thereby altering the look and feel of their boards. This divided feedback was very common on ezboard due to the large number of users. ^[13]

On March 11, 2003, ezboard version 7.2 was released. ^[14] This was the last version of the core ezboard product to contain new features for nearly four years. After 7.2, various patches were applied to other areas of the ezboard service, such as spellcheck ^[15], free gold ^[16], meetup ^[17], and network performance and improvements ^[18].

On March 4, 2004, Robert Labatt was appointed as ezboard's new CEO. ^[19] Vanchau Nguyen later chose to leave ezboard but remained on the Board of Directors. ^[20] 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.

On March 14, 2005, ezboard 7.32 was released. ^[21] This is the most recent numbered version to be released to all servers, although patches have been released since then.

On February 28, 2007, ezboard staff posted about a new version of ezboard - 7.33. ^[22] Although this was primarily to compile the patches made since version 7.32, several small enhancements were also mentioned - the first to the message boards since version 7.2, released in March 11, 2003. Users did not expect this move as moderators had often stated that ezboard would no longer be updated. On May 1, 2007, these changes were officially announced, although there was no mention of 7.33. ^[23] Therefore, the latest version of ezboard is still 7.32.

[edit] Technology

ezboard was written in Smalltalk VisualWorks 3.1 by Vanchau Nguyen with Jay O'Conner ^[24]. Originally, there was no database used on the back-end, but instead a 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 ^[25]. In 2003, a mySQL based database backend and Smalltalk interface code was created by Jordan Bortz. It was completed in 2003 and went online in 2004, solving the message corruption problem and significantly boosting performance.

Ezboard's 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. ^[26]

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. ^{[27] [28]}

[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^[29] 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. ^[30] ezboard has never stated precisely what proportion of data was lost and what was restored.

On June 3, 2005, CEO Robert Labatt stated that "I can tell you that we have suspects, we have evidence and we are working with the FBI. I can also tell you that we will be working to have the attacker punished to the full extent of the law." This story was picked up by the technical press. ^[31]

On August 30, 2007, ezboard, Inc. confirmed that two years after getting the FBI involved, offering a $5000 reward and despite having evidence, "the hacker remained uncaught". ^[32]

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. ^[33]

A similar incident occurred in mid 2001, while ezboard was run by Vanchau Nguyen. An error occurred during a scheduled update, which resulted in a widespread loss of data and forums across the ezboard network. This problem was quickly addressed by Vanchau and his staff, who admitted that the fault was their own and they were doing all they could to undo the damage. Within a week, almost all boards had been completely restored, with little to no further errors, lag or downtime, save for minor inconveniences such as posts appearing out of order in various forums.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• ezboard Home Page
• Yuku Home Page