ezboard’s CEO has stated that - contrary to what its customers were being told by its Customer Services [sic]/Help [sic] Forum staff - all ezboards will have to move to Yuku when it’s “ready for prime time” (a curious expression that, especially for a supposedly market leading message board company).

The message from the ezboard CEO - whose wife is CFO at the venture capitalist that supported it a few years ago - is here:
http://www.ezboard.com/component/option,com_mamblog/Itemid,55/task,show/action,user/id,69/ and/or aliased here:
http://www.ezboard.com/labatt.blog

Except that that very important announcement wasn’t actually announced! ezboard has a system whereby important news used to be propagated as a “Global Announcement”, so that the ezOps who operate ezboard boards would see them when they visited their boards and be able to choose whether or not to show all the message board visitors. It wasn’t even announced in the help forums, but slipped in by one of their staff in one of their minor forums. See for yourself - take a look here and see if you can find anything:
http://p080.ezboard.com/fezboardimportantannouncements

That contains such earth-shattering things as suggesting that ezboard users upgrade their browsers. Woohoo!

And yet, when it comes to its customers being forced to change their message boards or communities from one platform to another, it chooses to keep this quiet from the vast majority of its users, most of whom will never even look at the help [sic] forums or the main ezboard web site. Why?

Maybe it’s to ensure that ezboard, Inc. continues to gain an income stream from its ezSupporter feature? ezboard operates its free boards on the basis of advertising revenue. Knowing that people don’t like advertisements all over the place, they presently offer two ways to for users and board ‘owners’ to operate ad-free:

  • Gold Communities, where the board operators pay to have the adverts removed and are charged on the basis of (unverifable by the ezOps) page views; and
  • ezSupporter where the user pays for a subscription and doesn’t see adverts on any ezboard.

In the latter case, visits by ezSupporters to Gold Communities are claimed to be deducted from the overall page views when ezboard calculates how much the annual or six-monthly cost will be so it’s always been the case that Gold Community ezOps are urged either to activate their Community Chest (members can make payments to ezboard that can then be used to fund the Gold status for that board and nothing else, so they cannot be paid out to the ezOps if the boards move away from ezboard) or to solicit their members to subscribe as individuals to ezSupporter.

But if you read Labatt’s blog entry, he says that in order to remain ad-free, existing ezboard Gold Communities “will need to have a minimum of 6 months left on their subscription when they move”. So tough luck if you renew your Gold subscription and then have the move over to Yuku foist upon you the following week, for instance, as you’ll lose that benefit (and one that isn’t exactly cheap for a busy board).

Likewise, if you renew for a year’s ezSupporter and the boards you visit transfer or are transferred over to Yuku, you’ll then see adverts on them because the ezSupporter programme isn’t being carried over to Yuku.

Cynical? Maybe, but then ezboard promised Gold Communities weekly backups as part of our paid subscription and yet when push came to shove and 70,000 or so messages on our ezboard alone were lost (according to ezboard’s average stats. for it) the backups weren’t available. A year’s messages and threads gone. ezboard’s answer to criticism (apart from banning those critical of them) was that the service was provided “as-is”, so tough: they were only transitory messages anyway.

Oh and one of their support/customer service [sic] staff has posted a message saying that she thought it “hilarious” that people who’d been saying that ezboard wasn’t working properly - it isn’t, by ezboard’s own admission - were now complaining that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. I’m sure it’s “hilarious” that people don’t like change - one reason why people stay with ezboard - or that they’re not impressed by a new system that may well cost them more, will serve ads. at them and presently at least causes regular browser crashes and is slow as swimming in treacle.