ezboard.com

I was with Ezboard as a user, and then as a board administrator for nearly five years.
In that time, it hasn't always been smooth, plain sailing but what has been noticeable in the past 18 months to 2 years is the lack of improvement from Ezboard.
Further to that, the hack in May meant all the boards I was involved in, either as a visitor or Admin, lost pretty well everything.
We had conflicting reports on how to deal with the incident, which ultimately meant we lost more data. We had little or no advice coming out from Ezboard on how to manage the situation, but worst of all, having paid for Gold Boards, obviously no industry standard back ups to protect our data.
This is now coupled with the fact we had increasing numbers of bugs and server maintenance alerts.
Adding to this, ADMISSION from more than one moderator on the help forums that the existing bugs were NOT going to be tackled any further, and basically as users we had to just get on with it.
We also had time scales for works to be done that missed the targets not just slightly, but by huge amounts, leaving boards running poorly for ages.
Finally we had enough - and moved all our boards onto 2 different systems.
One system is PHPBB based for the gold boards, the other with InvisionFree - both have proved to be excellent choices, with only a couple of slight minor hiccups which were resolved in hours.
The difference for us and our users has been enormous.
Faster, more realiable, back ups securely done (and on PHP we do it ourselves almost on a daily basis on the most busy board) and none of the increasingly annoying bugs that cause the users to lose patience.
Of the boards we ran, and the number we visited - it was a total of 14.
Not one now remains on the Ezboard network. 9 were gold boards, and the last one has just moved as its gold ran out.
All have moved for similar reasons.
Lack of trust in Ezboard to deliver a realiable service.
Lack of customer training in the help forums.
Lack of understanding on the customer requirements.
Most of all...... Lack of belief they can deliver what they keep trying to promise.
If you are looking to use a board, look very hard at alternatives before entrusting your board to Ezboard because believe it or not, there are plenty out there.

Forget about visiting ezboard unless you have a reliable pop-up blocker and you don't mind looking at about a million ugly ads on the forum you happen to visit. Forum administrators can remove these advertisements by paying a fee, but most do not. Most people who run quality message boards will not be using a third-party service like ezboard, but there *are* a few high-traffic, quality boards in there. You just have to look hard for them in order to eliminate the chaff.

ezboard is the coolest message board chain on the web up to date! It's a must see!

A sinister site filled with small enticements to lure the unsuspecting into the seedy world of online gambling. There is an overabundance of personal information often in salacious detail by members who seem to live on the internet, banner advertisements which members receive a commission for player losses, with posts filled with pictures of bunnies and kittens, "LOL"'s, "XOXOX"'s, and the like merely sugarcoating a sordid, and in some cases illegal activity.

Great site, lots of usefull info, and a good group of freindly eager to help users. Good place to hangout, drop posts and chill.

I,ll make this short. I had a 2 year problem with my truck. And thanks to the help of this forum. Problem solved

this has got to be the WORST!

a note: most of the negative reviews listed here are bases on ONE individual message board they visited. They may have had a negative experience at the one board they visited. (mean people, foul mouths, etc) They are not actually reviewing the message board system or its features.

I'm another disgruntled board administrator (although we've now moved our discussion board to another, more robust, flexible and faster solution). Mr. Labatt states that they "restored almost all the data that was affected" but other than one or two of the larger boards, I've yet to see that reflected in fact on all the boards I moderated or visited: perhaps Mr Labatt would state specific numbers rather than nebulous statements? The day after the alleged hack took place, we still had our board intact as far as we could tell. By the next day thanks to ezboard's efforts we had lost over a year's messages, some 70,000. These were never restored, despite our paying for Gold status to have weekly backups. The alleged hacker somehow managed to delete those as they were not secure, offsite backups, it seems... Mr Labatt then set a number of completely inaccurate forecasts for when data would be restored, when topics would be sorted properly, etc. and none of these targets was met. When some users complained or asked for information and assurances, they were banned from the ezboard "help" forums, myself included. Our members had had enough of "server maintenance alerts", features not working (like the spell checker which is now disabled completely), bugs that ezboard have stated will not be fixed, promised features never materialising, general slowness, etc. so we asked for repayment of the sums our members had invested in our "Community Chest" but not yet spent.
ezboard then hid behind their Terms of Use by saying the 'service' was provided "as is" and throughout the weeks when they were messing us about, the 'service' had been available and all we had lost was a year's worth of messages and solutions but that was all just "historical data". I think Mr Labatt forgot what a message board system is all about... Oh and no, we couldn't have any of the $566 in unspent funds returned to our members as the money was now ezboard's.
Since the alleged hack took place, no real information has been made forthcoming to ezOps and Admins to reassure us that proper backups are in place. The next release of ezboard that was promised and being worked on when we were seeking our boards' restoration is still in alpha stage according to the "Help" forum moderators - slightly different from the spin Mr Labatt placed on it. Our old board is still unrestored, unsorted, prone to bugs and outages and dead slow. Our new vBulletin board is going for strength to strength with more features, better speed and security and at a cheaper cost too.
Finally, the most telling statement Mr Labatt makes is this one: "We have also hired professional advertising staff to improve the ezboard experience..."
This is where it is clear he doesn't understand the genre and that it's all about revenue for ezboard: a message board's "experience" is the messages themselves, not the adverts displayed on the system.

MLM refuge camp, foul mouths, foul tempers, laid-off employees being mean and nasty about members who have seen the light!