There’s a very interesting thread going on over in the ezboard Help [sic] Forums.

ezboard has tweaked the settings on all boards - free or Gold - so the regular, non-ezSupporter members no longer have the option to increase the number of posts they see per page in a discussion thread.

“No big deal”, I hear you say.

Well actually it is: this affects all non-ezSupporters looking at free or Gold boards. So if your members decide to pay $20 into your community chest to fund your Gold board, they’ll have to load two pages every time they want to read a thread with more than 25 posts in it. And because they’re not ezSupporters, that means that their enforced post view setting will mean more page views per thread and let’s not forget how ezboard claims to calculate their charges for Gold boards: that’s right! Page views…

So at a stroke the costs of maintaining a Gold board on ezboard have suddenly gone up as has ezboard’s revenues.

And if your user would rather view more posts, they have to buy ezSupporter … which means more revenues for ezboard.

But what about the free boards? Surely that’s not a problem? Well it is given that they display adverts on the pages and of course the more page views that are generated by ezboard, the more adverts can be displayed and hence the more revenue that is generated for ezboard.

No wonder they chose not to make this a global announcement! They probably didn’t want the users or the advertisers to find out.

But of course, all of this is secondary to the real reason - apparently - that this was done. ezboard has been producing a load of error messages supposedly because they can’t handle the search engines spidering the ezboard servers now ezboard has made the post URLs search engine friendly. So that would be (yet another) problem of their own making…

The official party line is:

“This change was put out today. It is intended to reduce the number of 502 bad gateway errors reported on some boards and make sure that the ads are displayed in the correct places.”

Except when disgruntled users challenged this, they were met with this:

“I’m asking you to drop this subject in this forum, please. You have made known your opinions regarding it and that’s enough. “

Typical ezboard customer service [sic].

So are ezboard, Inc. trying to be helpful after they realised their systems can’t cope or are they just using that as an excuse to try to generate more revenue? You decide…