]}
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! Commercial?
| Yes
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! Ownership
|
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! Type of site
| Bulletin Board System
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! Registration
| Required
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! Owner
| ezboard, Inc.
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! Created by
| Vanchau Nguyen
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! Launched
|
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! Current status of site
|
|}
ezboard, Inc., based in the San Francisco, California, United States, is the largest provider of free hosted Internet forums.
Tagline: Connecting people like you.
Past headline: helping.people.connect
ezboard offers free and paid accounts for both boards and users. The free accounts are supported through advertisements, and have fewer features in regards to customization and board management. Paid members are called "ezSupporters", while paid message boards are referred to as "Gold boards"; both are given a wide variety of features and options. Accounts can either be local (deprecated) and tied to a specific board, or global, which can be used for posting across the entire ezboard network.
Considered an easy message board solution for webmasters or message board admins with little experience of running a web site and general coding, ezboard supports a volunteer community that helps its users, some of them quite proficient with message board customization.
On May 31, 2005, ezboard was cracked, causing many boards to lose information, become inaccessible, or be completely wiped. ezboard stated that [all historical post data and a significant amount] of backup data was erased. Over the next month, some data that had been lost on ezboard was recovered; [ezboard stating] that there was some data from about 4000 non-Gold communities that had been restored. ezboard has never stated precisely what proportion of data was lost and what was restored.
At [DEMOfall 2005], in Huntington Beach [ezboard, Inc. launched] its new product, Yuku a message board application with greater JavaScript use. Some members of the ezboard community have already begun beta testing Yuku, which is due to be released during 2006. While keeping a tight lid on final details thus far, ezboard has stated that the new message board platform would allow its registered users to utilize social networking and media sharing among other features that are due to be released when the system goes live. Yuku's feature-set continues to be developed and expanded.
On March 7, 2006, [ezboard's CEO stated] that all ezboards would move to their new flagship product Yuku when it was ready and that they anticipate this will be in late 2006. While still in development, Yuku will give ezboard users access to both platforms (Yuku and ezboard). In the meantime, the ezboard product has been frozen in relation to bug fixing and development and ezboard message boards will at some point have to move over to the newly developed software, per the CEO's statement.
Notable Staff Members
Rob Labatt - Current CEO
Ceco Gakovic - Director of Development and Systems
