Not so ezboard

Ezboard is the host of the two message boards I belong to, Looking Good and Hamster Time (links to the left). They host thousands of message boards, some paid and some free. Mine happen to be paid boards.

Sometime on the 31st of May, they were apparently hacked, and the majority of boards lost all of their data. There is some sketchy information being bandied about by the company about all of their backups being erased by this hacker, and there is a significant concern about their ability to restore information.

I'm really saddened because the Hamster Time archives, which represent a significant portion of my last three summers, have been completely decimated. I'm sad to say that I'm not holding too much hope about them being restored at all.

The whole situation is really quite bizarre, and if the company isn't able to restore the missing data, I don't see them surviving financially. Paid boards pay for the promise of weekly backup, and it seems odd that the company is running into so much difficulty with the restoration. These difficulties would certainly lend credence to the suggestion that ezboard did not, in fact, back up the data in an offsite location, which in turn means they made false promises to paying customers. The legal and financial ramifications seem stupendous to me, should this be the case.

As sad as the whole situation is, reading through their support forums is really quite entertaining. On the one hand are the gold members, who quite rightly, are less than thrilled that a product they've paid for has proven so defective, and on the other hand are those people praising the company for all of their work and "restoration" efforts. (I use quotations because no boards have actually been restored.) There are plenty of conspiracy theories abounding, about the hacker being an insider, or the company blaming some sort of a technical glitch on a so-called hacker. There is also speculation that the hacker was the recently departed founder of the company, who is said to have been pushed out of the company. Then you have the non-paying customers getting indignant because the company has only alluded to the repair efforts they're making towards the paying customers, because, well, the company trying to cover it's own legal and financial ass is clearly, y'know, an indication on its part that the content of non-paying boards is inferior.

I've developed a rather morbid, rubbernecking curiosity about the entire debacle. I can't wait to see how it plays out.

UPDATE:

Ezboard was able to restore all of our recap and show related discussion threads, but none of the general discussion threads. While it's unfortunate we lost those threads, I'd rather lose the 1000 or so posts we lost than the 37,000 posts we got back.

Yay!

Posted by raptorgirl at June 2, 2005 06:44 PM