The disappearance of EZBoard

For years, EZBoard was a community that offered forums for managers that were relatively cheap and easy to maintain. Virtually anyone could sign up, design and layout a site, and invite their friends to participate. In fact, some of the largest forums on the Internet are based on EZBoard. Unfortunately, a recent system-wide hacking attack destroyed the company’s reputation and sent many managers packing. Let’s look at the venerable community and the fatal flaw that has knocked the company off its perch.

At one time, EZBoard had over 14,000 web communities. Many were started by people looking for a discussion forum on their favorite topics, while others were started by business people like myself. The reasons why companies were attracted to EZBoard were two:

1. We didn’t know enough about PHP to create and manage a site ourselves, and

2. We didn’t want to go through the expense of hosting our site on a dedicated server and instead used EZBoard’s vast bank of computers to host our communities.

It’s true that the #1 reason was a big part of why I stuck with EZBoard. Sure, I knew about vBulletin and related forums, but buying a license from them and running the site on a dedicated server was an expensive option, especially since I was managing over a dozen forums at one point! I could handle the variable charges incurred by being with EZBoard by paying my subscription fees either quarterly, semi-annually, or even annually. I doubt I have dished out more than $500-600 in any given year, so it was profitable for my business.

I should have known that EZBoard was not up to the task when its system went down for several days in the spring of 2004 after what was supposed to be a simple system-wide forums update. A few hours of downtime stretched out to several days, and forum admins were left in the dark for the entire time. More importantly, many forum members assumed the worst and peppered many administrators’ inboxes with queries. Those days were not fun; EZBoard bounced back and awarded managers credits that exceeded the number of days they were inactive. Still, if you tied in AdSense revenue, like I do, you lost a lot.

History would repeat itself on May 30, 2005, when a reported external attack by hackers brought down EZBoard entirely. Yes, the boards were still working, but most of the messages were gone and the new ones started to disappear as well. EZBoard admitted almost immediately that they were hacked and that they were working diligently to restore the affected 9,000 boards. Soon, however, news broke that much of his backup files were also hacked. Forum administrators wondered if EZBoard kept all of its files on vulnerable servers or if the attack was done internally. The messages from EZBoard management were vague “in the interest of security” so no one knew for sure.

As the days passed and forum admins realized that the restore process would only be partial and take weeks to complete, a steady stream of admins began visiting php sites to see if they could move their boards. With trepidation I visited the PHPBB2 site knowing that my skills were limited in this area. However, I soon learned that this particular program was open source, in fact free, and the Flash tutorials explained everything clearly and effectively. So in one night I set up the new site, transferred some files and started it.

The best part? In the two years since I was with EZBoard, my web hosting company had updated their site enough to host my message boards. So instead of having web pages on one server and my forums on another, I could host them collectively. Most importantly, I would no longer have to rely on EZBoard’s faulty backup plans and could back up all files myself.

I still have an EZBoard community and can keep it, for now. It is a small, but very well established where it “sits” and I lost only 4 or 5 files under attack. Two of my sites I moved to PHP and two others I decided to remove because they had slower performance. Fortunately, I had gotten rid of several smaller sites that didn’t work before. Still, I felt the pain from the EZBoard hacking incident and decided now was the time to move.

So what is the future of EZBoard? That’s hard to say. They are promising a major update that would include the ability to allow administrators to back up their own sites. That would be a very good move. However, the administrative costs with EZBoard now exceed what managers pay with many standard web hosting companies. Few sites are large enough to require a dedicated server, so many admins are likely to consider moving.

I was bitten twice by EZBoard and didn’t enjoy a third hit, so my two biggest sites are now with PHPBB2. The change took a long time, but the new board has many more advanced features compared to EZBoard. Sure, I have more administrative stuff to do, like helping AOL users who are having trouble signing up, but I’m no longer subject to EZBoard’s whims. I am glad that a major risk factor has been eliminated even with increased administrative responsibilities. You will be too if you decide to take the plunge.