ezboard
ripping off people like you

Ezboard suffered a catastrophic system wide failure, lost millions of posts and are keeping your money. How's that for service?

The Purpose of This Site

Our goal, ultimately, is simple. We want to prevent people from associating with ezboard.com and we hope that through a concentrated show of support, they will change their policies and treat their customers with respect. You can use the Quick Links to jump to any part of the story or to go directly to the resources and ways to help.

Quick Links to Categories Within This Site

• The Background
• Attack Part 1 (May 31st)
• Personal Background
• Attack Part 2 (June 1st - 7th)
• Attack Part 3 (June 8th- 15th)
• Attack Part 4 (June 16th - 22nd)
• "Economic Compensation" Or, The Straw that Broke the Camel's Back
• Links and Resources to File Consumer Complaints
• How You Can Help - Spread the Word
• Other Groups and Feedback - Share your story

The Background

ezboard.com is a company which offers hosted message board services. They make bold claims of being easy and friendly and hassle-free way of having all the perks of a message board without any of the technical know-how.

"Discover how ezboard brings you the easiest to set-up and most reliable discussion boards." (-source)

ezboard.com was founded in 1999 by Vanchau Nguyen (who left the company in early 2004.) It's current CEO, Robert Labatt (robertlabatt@ezboardcorp.com) claims they now host over 2.2 million message boards on over 200 servers out of their San Francisco offices.

Top 5 Benefits:
- Hosted service - no setting up or maintaining your own servers
- 24/7 systems monitoring and support - We watch your system while you focus on business.
- Massive bandwidth - no worries about traffic spikes
- You don't have to be a techie - browser based management.
- Low cost solution
(-source)

- Membership by Approval gives Administrators complete control over who is allowed to read and post in their community
- Weekly backups and free restores protect your board
- Administrators can create Invisible Forums - viewable only to allowed members
- Make multiple copies of a topic with Copy Topic
- Leave a Shadow (or placeholder) of any moved topic in its original forum
- Sticky Topic keeps important information at the top of the board
- Hot Topic identifies and emphasizes topics that users have found interesting
(-source)

ezboard implemented a feature called "Community Chest" which is a way of accepting donations from members to be held in trust for the purchase of premium service. Funds can sit for years if there is more in the Chest then the cost of the current Gold Subscription. Members help share the burden of the cost this way. Instead of sending money to the owner of the message board (known in ezboard lingo as "ezOp") and having to deal with credit cards and such, ezboard takes the donations directly and holds them until the funds are manually applied to a purchase. This is important to keep in mind for later. Many boards leave the Chest activated all year so that people can toss a few dollars in here and there instead of worrying about crunch time when the Gold Community is about to expire. Money in the Community Chest is not yet applied nor committed to any purchase and has not yet been used to pay for any service.

The Attack - Part 1 (May 31st)

On the night of May 30-31st 2005, ezboard claims they were victims of a malicious attack. Labatt was quoted in various news reports that approximately 9,000 boards were affected. Coincidentally, ezboard was working on a new version of their message board software at that time but have stated that the sudden and abrupt loss of data across the entire network had nothing to do with testing of this software. Message boards across the network were unavailable. A white page full of errors would result when you tried to load forums. Members could not access their information, their boards nor their accounts for the better part of a day.

When the forums would finally resolve, an announcement was posted on the Help Forums:

May 31st:
"On Tuesday May 31 ezboard's systems were the victim of a very precise and malicious internet attack. This attack resulted in the loss of a significant amount of current and historical board postings and interrupted services across all systems. I deeply apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused and am here to give you the first of several in-depth updates.

At this time most board management services have been restored and our goal is to have post/reply repaired on Wednesday . We are working to restore board data from our back-up systems. This will take some time, and complete data restoration may not be possible, but it is what we are working towards. What we know now is that the attacker deleted current board and back-up data. We are taking the fastest route to restore data, but it may take up to 48 hours to get data back to approximately 9,000 boards. A more manual method requiring upwards of seven to ten days is required to restore data to the other boards that lost data. Regrettably we may not be able to restore data to all boards that lost data."

Forum owners were advised to sit and wait. There wasn't much anyone could do anyway. Their forums still gave errors, posts were missing or corrupted, URL's failed to load. Moderators at the Help Forums could not even reply to posts due to the continuing errors. In broken, tattered manner, message board owners were advised to close their forums to new posting in the hopes of preventing overwriting of data. There was mass confusion, fear and worry. Many people's forums were completely emptied. Community Chests (which are used to collect donations from members for use of Gold service payment) were emptied of any funds. Data was sporadic and what little their was left was incomplete and damaged.

A Bit of Personal Background

I have run two very large message boards hosted by ezboard; one was founded June 2000, the other January 2001. Between these two boards, we had almost 300,000 individual posts. Also in that time, the first board has had 4 million visits and the other 2.5 million visits. Both boards have paid in excess of $1,000 combined over the last five years. Average hosting fees are well over $100 a year. We had been paying ezboard for our hosting for as long as they'd offered the premium service. In the old days, they started off without fees but eventually moved through several forms of the paid service into the current form called "Gold Community."

The Attack - Part 2 (June 1st-7th)

Over the next several days, things continued in the same manner. There was a lot of confusion, a lot of panic and very little solid information. No one - including Moderators at the ezboard Help Forums - had any real information to give. No one could tell how long the restorals would take, how much data was actually lost, what the chances of restoral were, or when the continuing bugs and errors would be solved. The same phrases were repeated over and over again: We're working on it. We don't know anything yet. Thank you for your patience.

Day Two - June 1st:
"I would like to thank the ezboard operations staff who have been on the job since Tuesday at 5AM and continue to work hard restoring boards and modifying systems to reduce the threat of future attacks. While you may not be aware of their commitment, please believe me that they are working non-stop for you.

In addition to the hard work that these folks are doing, other members of our team are working hard on the next version of your community experience. An experience that will be vastly improved using the knowledge gained from the last five years of ezboard community and the exciting new developments in online interaction happening now.

Thank you for your patience. We will be keeping you updated every until this is resolved. At this point you should expect to see an update at Noon Pacific time each day."

Note how in the beginning how blasé Labatt is. Even mentioning how they're continuing the "exciting new development" of their new software version. Most members don't really care about the new version and much rather they spend their time trying to restore the data that is supposed to be available via "secure weekly backups". This is, after all, one of the major parts of the service they paid ezboard to perform.

Day Three - June 2nd:
"We are continuing to restore posts and are working on additional means to restore further data. At this time we do not have an ETA for the completion of the restore process. Indications are that the restoration will be completed in the next 24 to 48 hours. We appreciate your patience and recommend that you look for updates in the Help forums. Please help us to get you answers more quickly by reading the sticky topics in the Help forums before posting your question. Many times your questions will have already been answered."

Note at this point, Labatt says he expects a complete restoration in the next day or two.

Day Four - June 3rd:
"Data restoration began the day of the attack with the restoration of eight servers that we could salvage immediately. Sadly, no other intervention was successful at that time.

Since that time, we have been assembling data from three sources: the remaining historical backups of some 8,000 Gold and trial boards from early May, the current data recently written to hard drives since the attack, and data in RAM memory since the attack.

The actual restorations using this assembled data have been underway since Thursday afternoon, and are being done on a server-by-server basis. The process is automated and each server takes approximately 6 hours to restore. We can restore between 8 and 10 servers in parallel. To some of you this may seem like a long time to restore data on a single server. And it is. However, we are using an innovative process to maximize the data recovery and testing it thoroughly to make sure that (a) we don't erase the posts that have been made since the attack and (b) the data is being properly restored.

When this server-by-server process is complete, we have one final source of data that we may be able to use for restoration. With quick thinking and fast action on the part of your technical team we were able to do an emergency backup of active data. To be clear, this is by no means all the board post data, only the active data at that time. We will be restoring this data as a last step in the process."

Note at this point, Labatt decides to tell us that the backups were also destroyed. Which of course begs the question, "why were they on the same servers?" Doesn't backup inherently imply that it's in a safe and secure location separate from the live data? Searching for data that happened to be in RAM at the time does not constitute a "weekly backup" as advertised and as paid for by Gold Communities. No real numbers or statistics are given though, leaving board owners utterly in the dark as to whether or not their boards are going to be fixed.

No data has yet been restored on the network, all boards are still suffering extreme slowness, Help Forum Moderators are still advising members to refrain from posting because new posts are being plagued by bugs and often disappearing completely. The network is entirely unstable still.

Day Five - June 4th:
"In closing, we are working to get systems back to normal and believe that they will be back soon. We are fixing the security and back-up processes now and will be performing a security and back-up audit in the coming weeks. Thank you for being an ezboard user, and for reading this, and we hope that you will continue to use ezboard. Let's put our communities and our network back together, and bring the attacker to justice."

Note here, again, Labatt is optimistic that they will be back to normal soon and continues to thank members for their patience. What else are we going to do? Our boards are still ground zero.

Day Six - June 5th:
"The automated board restoration is continuing. Approximately 1/2 of the boards are restored to the fullest extent possible, 1/4 are being restored now and 1/4 have yet to be restored. We started with the low numbered servers and are working toward the higher numbered servers. You should know that boards are being restored on a server-by-server basis. We don't actually restore a 'board' but rather we restore a server. Many servers are being restored in parallel and your server will go through several restoration processes, several times with data arriving from five different sources."

Note again the optimism that the restoral is moving along at a good clip and things are returning slowly to normal. Most members and board owners disagree and have yet to see any improvement on their boards and on the ezboard network.

Day Seven - June 6th:
"We are taking stock of all aspects of the attack and restore processes this morning and we have a board of directors meeting this afternoon to discuss the attack, the restoration process and our next steps.

How successful are the restorations?
We don't know yet. The data that is restored will not be evenly distributed across all boards. Some boards will get all their data restored and some will not get any data back. We will not know exactly which boards will get all, some or none of their data back until the five restoration phases are completed on all servers/boards. We would love to send you a list of which boards are getting what data restored, but it is not information that can be generated at this time."

Note here that Labatt decides to toss out briefly that some boards aren't going to get back any data whatsoever. This again begs the question what about the backups we paid you for? How were they so easily deleted as well?

Day Eight - June 7th:
"Can we start posting in our old forums again?
Based on everything we know at this point, we believe that it is safe to post in forums created before the attack again. However, we continue to test, and research any reports that indicate otherwise. Based on that research, the answer may change."

Note Labatt's utter non-answer here. He says that yes you can begin to post again on your boards (despite not having yet seen any data restoration) but then he says that they're actually not sure and that they might later change their minds. Many people who did use their forums during this "restoration" process lost the posts made during the three weeks of downtime. They succumbed to continuing bugs, errors and rampant deletions which made many members question if there was a Trojan left behind from the attack. (A question ezboard would not even remotely comment on.)

Things aren't going well for ezboard at this point. Needless to say, members are tired of being told to be patient; tired of being told that ezboard doesn't know the state of affairs on their own servers; tired of continuing errors and problems; tired in general of being pandered to and tired of the contradictory information given to them by ezboard, ezboard's CEO and the ezboard Help Forum Moderators.

The Attack - Part 3 (June 8th-15th)

Day Nine - June 8th:
"What don't we know at this point?
We don't know how long the five phased recovery process will take. Different servers restore at different rates and there is no pattern to the time it takes.

We don't know if we will find more data that can be restored. But we are looking for it."

Note that every day, they've been posting the exact same questions and answers over and over again. No real new information. No idea what's truly going on. And clearly no idea what they're doing. They continually admit as much.

Day Ten - June 9th:
"I'm pleased to announce that almost all servers have completed the first three steps of the restoral process, and we plan to start the final two steps on a server-by-server basis later today. Based on our testing, we expect boards that were active at the time of the attack to see a significant amount of data restored during these final two steps.

We anticipate that the final two restoral steps will take a total of seven to ten days to be completed. Individual servers will be restored throughout that time. This means that you will see your board/server restoral sometime within that period. We are in the process of acquiring additional servers in an effort to accelerate this process."

...

"When you said 'we expect boards that were active at the time of the attack to see a significant amount of data restored during these final two steps', what did you mean by 'active at the time of the attack'?

'Active at the time of the attack' means that members were actively posting and reading. While we cannot determine how much data will be retrieved for a given level of posting and reading activity, we can tell you that the more active a board was (therefore more of its data was in RAM) the more data will likely be restored. The flip side of this is that an archive board that was not active at that time would not have much or any data in RAM and therefore would likely not be as likely to have data restored."

Note again, Labatt proudly posting on how well things are coming along. They're not. Note also how on day nine, he says it'll be another seven to ten days for restoral completion. You'll recall on June 2nd (Day Three), he gave a 24-48 hour estimation. Clearly, this is a much longer process then initially presented. This kind of thing doesn't win ezboard any friends. Members are very fed up with the conflicting information and the continued requests to be patient.

And, oh ho...what is this? Suddenly, all those warnings given by the Help Forum Moderators to shut down your board, not allow new posts and preserve your data from being overwritten suddenly comes into glaring focus. That was the wrong information. Because of this, many boards failed to get any restoration at all. Boards took the information given to them seriously. They were desperate for ways they could help. When you're sliding off a cliff, you listen to the people who are supposed to be the experts; you believe their technical advice because they are speaking on behalf of ezboard and you assume they know more about the internal structure of the servers then you do.

Day Eleven- June 10th:
"All servers have now completed the first three steps of the restoral process, and have started the final two steps on a server-by-server basis. We continue to anticipate that the final two restoral steps will take a total of seven to ten days to be completed. Individual servers will be restored throughout that time. This means that you will see your board/server restoral sometime within that period. We are installing additional servers to accelerate the restoral process."

Note the lack of actual updated information. Along with each post, Labatt took to simply copying and pasting the exact information from the day before. So each day had identical Questions and Answers. Not much of a help to thousands of owners and members desperate for any real, substantial information.

Day Twelve- June 11th:
"The restoral process continues, with additional servers brought online yesterday to accelerate the process. Please remember that in order to return content to the boards as soon as possible, the restoral process will bring topics back out of chronological order. After we have recovered all data from the process, we will then do a final resort of topics to re-establish chronological order."

This was the extent of "new" information in the update. Again, the identical post from the previous days was simply copied and pasted into the announcement.

Day Thirteen- June 12th:
Dear ezboard Family,

Let me start today's update by telling you that the information published yesterday remains accurate - for quick reference, I have attached the Q&A from previous day's update to the bottom of this message.

The restoral process continues. Please remember that in order to return content to the boards as soon as possible, the restoral process will bring topics back out of chronological order. After we have recovered all data from the process, we will then do a final resort of topics to re-establish chronological order.

If you have a question please continue to carefully read the balance of this update. Should your question still not be answered after reading this update and you don't think that our customer service team or help forums can answer your question then please feel free to e-mail me at the address below.

Thank you again for your patience and understanding.

Look familiar? In fact, it's word-for-word the entire post from June 11th. Way to keep us updated.

Day Fourteen- June 13th:
"Why are you cutting and pasting material from update to update?
You should know that, if there are no changes and we are progressing as planned and as indicated the day before, then there is nothing to update other than we are on track. We do provide changed updates when there are changes from the plans that we messaged to you in a previous message. In a way, a cut and paste update is good news.

What is the status of the restoral process?
The final two steps of the restoral process continue across the network. Please remember that in order to return content to the boards as soon as possible, the restoral process will bring topics back out of chronological order. After we have recovered all data from the process, we will then do a final resort of topics to re-establish chronological order."

Guess Labatt finally realized that ezboard members aren't stupid and can tell a complete copy-and-paste. Gee, who'd think that after TWO WEEKS, people might be a little bit anxious to get a real update with real and helpful information? I should also note at this point that they claim a "hardware failure" took out one of their servers ("p087") and even further data was lost on that board. They claim that it was in no way a result of the same attack. Members aren't quite buying anything said by ezboard any more - and with good reason.

Day Fifteen- June 14th:
"The good news is that we have nothing new to report today - the final two steps of the restoral process are happening across the network, and we expect to be on schedule for completion over the weekend. It is important to understand that at this point there is no such thing as a completely restored server - even the servers farthest along in the process require some additional work. On a related subject, we are continuing to work on recovering p087 data from this weekend's hard drive problem."

Labatt seems to have a different interpretation of "good news" then the rest of us. For him, no update is good news. For members across the network, no update and no visible signs of restoral are actually bad news. We're still waiting for something to actually happen; not just promises that it eventually will.

Day Sixteen- June 15th:
"The restoral process continues on schedule. Four of five steps are nearly complete across the network; the final step will reload all restored data. We still expect all steps to be completed through the weekend. At that point, we will then go to work on restoring all community financial data, addressing Gold Community credits and other financial questions, and sharing our plans for current system improvements and beta testing of the new product."

Same story, different day. And look what makes a re-appearance? Mention of the new version of the software! Wow. Um, Labatt? No one gives a flying crap about the new version, they just want their data back.

The Attack - Part 4 (June 16th-22st)

Our story thus far: For well over two weeks now, the entire ezboard has been sitting around, waiting for any sign of actual data recovery from their May 31st "attack." Thousands of boards have been totally crippled by this, many having lost every scrap of data on their sites. Many others have had massive data corruption so that thread after thread is filled with "(This post is missing and can not be restored)" where the post should be. No one has heard a single bit of information on the status of the funds that are still missing from their Community Chest. And bugs and errors are still rampant across the network. New posts created after the attack disappear and we are getting hollow promises from ezboard's CEO, Robert Labatt that things are improving. His estimates of restoral time initially started with 24-48 hours, was expanded to seven - ten days and then added another seven to ten days after that. Still, we wait. There's nothing else we can do. Many of us have long since started other boards and groups off of ezboard's network to remain in touch with our members.

Day Seventeen- June 16th:
"I have good news today.

We can see light at the end of the restoration tunnel. The work we are doing now is delivering great results with many boards getting significant amounts of data back and more to come.

Please don't panic if your particular board has not seen data restored in the last day. Unfortunately it is taking time for the restoration process to propagate throughout to all servers in our systems. Set your expectations to seeing data by Monday. Please hold off on asking CS or me to clarify things about your board until next week. This will allow us to focus on getting your data back faster.

While we are on a positive note, in the last 24 hours we have located an additional pocket of data that we will work to restore. Restoring this data will commence next week after the current restoration processes are completed. You can consider this a sixth restoration process. You may be asking why we just found this data now, and the truth is that we have been running additional tests on old and new equipment and during one of these tests we located additional data. I can't tell you more about this now and please do not ask for more information. We will tell you what we know when we can. Stay tuned here for information."

This was a Thursday. Labatt was now promising that over the weekend we'd start seeing recovery. He also continued to assure us that even if we had not yet received any restoral, that there was still hope. Additionally, he also mentions (vaguely) that more data has been found, implying that data recovery has been successful. Nothing in these overly PR messages indicates just how many people are not getting data back yet - or ever.

It should be also noted that Labatt stopped including his email address from this point forward. And despite having previously mentioned that he was available for contact and that he was personally responding to all emails, he did not. I sent him an email on June 4th and never received a reply. Disgruntled posters on the Help Forum said they had experienced the same problem. No replies, no acknowledgement.

Day Eighteen- June 17th:
"We continue to work through the last steps of the restoral process across the network, and have reports of a great many boards getting significant amounts of data back. There is more to come, as we have also begun restoring the newly located additional pocket of data.

Again, please don't panic if your particular board has not seen data restored in the last day. It is taking time for the restoration process to propagate throughout to all servers in our systems.

We continue to test the back-up and restore process and remain optimistic that you will experience much faster restores. More on this after we have the process nailed down and in production.

Thank you again for your patience and we hope that our daily communications and open dialogue have helped you and all ezboard users to better understand what we are doing to get ezboard back to normal."

Several parts of this are worth noting. First off, he again assures members that despite a lack of any personal level of contact, despite any specific information and despite not having received any data restoral yet, that things are still going well.

Additionally, he actually tries to suggest that his vague, contradictory and useless posts have been not only informative and helpful, but he comes across as having sacrificed by spending his precious time on us "little people" and gracing us with his presence each day. Remember, most days, these so-called "updates" have been nothing but copying and pasting of previous days announcements and have failed to actually address any specific concerns.

Day Nineteen- June 18th:
"No additional news today - we continue through the last steps of the restoral process across the network, including restoring the newly located additional pocket of data.

The restoration process continues to propagate throughout all servers in our system. Your particular board may not have seen data restored as yet."

Again, more of the same. And yet further assurances that everything is alright, even if you haven't had any change in your board in almost three weeks.

Day Twenty- June 19th:
"We continue through the last steps of the restoral process across the network, including restoring the newly located additional pocket of data. Once again, the restoration process continues to propagate throughout all servers in our system. Your particular board may not have seen data restored as yet.

We will provide a full and detailed report on network status tomorrow, including information on next steps following completion of the restoral process."

More of the same. Don't worry, we're still working on it, we found more data, we'll give you more information tomorrow.

Day Twenty-One- June 20th:
"After nearly three weeks of night and day work by your tech staff here at ezboard, we can tell you that by end of day today all content/threads/posts/data that is available to be restored will have been restored.

We are truly sorry for any content that is missing and while our words will not bring back that content, please be assured that we have changed our systems and implemented new technology to ensure that Gold Board content is backed up. For security reasons we are not divulging the changes we have implemented."

And as quick as that, it's suddenly not so peachy any more. He goes on to self-flattery, including quotes from alleged ezboard members thanking them for their hard work on what little bit they got back. He even includes a bad Star Trek joke that another member allegedly submitted to him. Brushed aside, in all that ego and self-importance was the death knoll to thousands of boards. Oh, you hadn't gotten any data back? Well, sorry, you're not going to. I don't care what I said in the past (as recently as yesterday), it's all over and done with.

At this point, hundreds of members posted panicked messages on the Help Forum. Surely, they cried, this can't be it, can it? What happened to those "weekly backups" that we paid for? What happened to backups which were initially said to exist from May 9th, 2005? Where did my data go? How can I get it back? What now?

Day Twenty-Two- June 21th:
"Our update today has one important change from yesterday. We have decided to undertake one more global forum and topic reload tonight. Following that reload, all content/threads/posts/data that can be brought restored will have been restored."

It should be noted that while he said they'd try one more thing the next day, if they did or did not does not matter. Anyone who had not yet gotten anything back didn't from this last-ditch effort. My guess is that they simply said they'd try one last thing in order to appease the thousands of angry members who had waited three weeks for nothing.

Day Twenty-Three- June 22nd:
"The final forum and topic reload is continuing to run. Following that reload, all content/threads/posts/data that can be restored will have been restored.
...

We still expect to announce plans for compensation to ezboard Gold communities, and answer other economic questions, this week. Until after those announcements have been made, we will not be responding to emails or posts with compensation questions or demands related to particular communities."

Take away people's work, years of posts, art, poetry, discussions, thoughts, hopes, fears, dreams, games, humor and lives. Take their money and give them useless promises. Say you'll do one thing and then instead do nothing. Ruin their communities and break their spirit. Then tell them you're still thinking about some sort of compensation for their loss. Weeks of waiting and all for nothing.

"Economic Compensation"
Or, The Straw That Broke the Camel's Back (June 23rd)

And this is where we come today. And this is why this page was founded. The sheer level of arrogance and absurdity and quite frankly bullshit of Labatt's announcement is why I realized I had to let people know exactly how terrible they are and why you need to boycott their services. This is the entire entry for the day. It is so horrific that it deserves to be read all the way through. This is what we're told after many of us losing everything.

Day Twenty-Four- June 23nd:
Hello everyone,

Throughout the past few weeks we have been thinking about compensation for the effects of the vicious attack made on all of us. In our review we considered many factors including: how many of the services we provide were impacted, how those services were impacted, and the final outcome of the attack. Through this review we have determined that save for a few hours, all of ezboard's services were available to users in the last three weeks. Communities were able to post and read as normal. What were not available were the historical posts. Other than the continuity of a thread's train of thought, the disappearance of historical content did not affect the delivery of services.

With the above in mind, we have tried to balance a number of competing demands: the impact of the data loss and the agreements made between the site and our users in the Terms of Use everyone has agreed to, to name two. Based on this review our conclusions are:

1. Every current Gold Community, and every Gold Community subscription that lapsed since the attack, will receive six weeks of additional subscription credit.
2. Refunds will not be provided for paid subscriptions or unused Community Chest contributions
3. Unused Community Chest contributions may be transferred by the contributor to other ezboard communities, or used for ezSupporter subscriptions.
4. All credits will be applied at the conclusion of the payment data restoration, which we expect to take between 1 and 2 weeks
5. We will consider individual requests for special consideration, and will provide you with a special e-mail address to submit your requests at the conclusion of the payment data restoration. Requests submitted through other means (CS or e-mailing me or other staff directly) will not be responded to.

How did we get to our decision? We have based this policy on three principles. The first is the agreement we have with our users about our responsibility for services. This is clearly defined in the Terms of Use (www.ezboard.com/content/view/40 ) that you agreed to when you registered, and again when you ordered subscription services and or made a payment to a Community Chest. The Terms of Use read

- You understand and agree that the Service is provided "AS-IS" and that ezboard assumes no responsibility or liability for, among other things, (1) any service outages or interruptions (2) the unavailability of particular boards, features or services, (3) the inability to access the Service, (4) the failure or inability to post materials to the Service, (4) the deletion of materials posted to the Service or (5) the failure to store materials posted to the service. (see paragraph 3)
Ezboard makes no warranty that ...(ii) the service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free. (see paragraph 14)

Under the TOU we provide an "as is" service, and you and we have agreed specifically that we are not responsible for the outcome of the attack.

Second, we should all remember that the ezboard service is comprised of many elements, which have been consistently provided over time. Those elements include the service and its attributes (posting, reading, customization etc.), hosting and bandwidth, use and maintenance of the application, provision of customer service. And yes, preparation of backups. Those services were, and are, being provided. The hacker was able to damage one aspect of the service - the deployment of backups -- but that does not take away from what we have provided, and continue to provide, for our users and communities.

Third, in the TOU there is a very clear and consistent policy on all funds paid for our subscription programs:

- Any fees due or paid by you under the CSC program are non-refundable in part or in whole (see paragraph 9)

Regardless of whether they are in Community Chest or a subscription, all funds paid to ezboard have only one use - to pay for ezboard services. We intend to provide the services of your choice for the money you've paid. If your community has a positive Community Chest balance, that balance may be used to purchase ezboard services only. The attack does not change our long-standing policy of not providing refunds. This was agreed to by every user each time a service order was placed or payment made.

We realize that for some of you this is not the answer you are seeking. Please keep in mind that the hacker has done damage to everyone in the ezboard universe: the communities, admins, users, and the company. We are all sharing that pain.

We believe that we are making a fair and significant effort to compensate for that damage.

We are moving ahead, to a new beginning. The first step has been the completion of the board restoral process. The next step is the release of a new community engine. We invite you to try it out and we will send invitations in the coming weeks. You should know that the new community engine has solved many of the issues that you have experienced on ezboard in the last year. It is faster, more reliable, offers automated back-up to your home computer, fast restorals, the features you love and new features you'll want like RSS, blogging and more.

We appreciate your patience and support through this difficult period and look forward to your continued support.

Sincerely,

Robert Labatt
CEO

Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, you did in fact read that correctly. Not only does Labatt utterly belittle the enormity of the attack and the loss of data, he blatantly lies and states that the downtime was really only a matter of a few hours. You'll remember that not only were thousands of boards plagued with errors and bugs for weeks after the initial attack, but that ezboard Help Forum Moderators continually advised members and owners that they should not post on their boards, then that they could but there were still errors, then that they could but they were not sure if it was stable or not. Even Labatt's own updates stated they did not know if it was safe to post or not.

Additionally, you'll note the extremely rude and cold manner of his post. Prior to this, for three weeks, he began each announcement with the greeting, "Greetings ezboard Family." Labatt's idea of family clearly isn't inline with what I'd consider family. One does not treat family with such utter and biting disrespect. Several hundred posts immediately sprang up on the ezboard Help Forum by rightfully irate members condemning Labatt for his arrogance and downright rude tone. This more then anything enraged thousands of ezboard members.

Labatt coldly with the mood of one who's forced to talk down to the "little people" reminds us of only half of the TOU. Ezboard's policy is one of "we don't have to provide the service you paid for but you are being held to the agreement." Labatt does not understand the two-way street of this agreement. He does not recognize that ezboard utterly failed to deliver services as paid for. That they were negligent in their security. That they mislead and in some cases, outright lied to members on the status of the situation as well as the reality of the damage done. In short, they took your money and then laughed at you.

Keep in mind that money in the Community Chest has not yet been spent; it's money in holding for future purchases. For them to deny to refund unused money is nothing short of criminal. Also keep in mind the change in tone from earlier updates:

June 3rd:
Will you be providing Credits for Gold Boards?
Yes we plan to provide credits. We need to understand the scope of the data restoration before we decide on the amount of the credit. I would anticipate further news on credits to be available in the next week.

June 21st:
With the restore process completed, we are now turning our attention to the reinstatement of lapsed Gold Community subscriptions and Community Chest funds. The reinstatement of subscriptions and Community Chest funds will take at least a week or two. We will have determined plans for compensation to ezboard Gold communities this week.

June 22nd (one day before the nasty we're not giving you any refunds announcement):
We still expect to announce plans for compensation to ezboard Gold communities, and answer other economic questions, this week. Until after those announcements have been made, we will not be responding to emails or posts with compensation questions or demands related to particular communities.

Nothing within the previous entries indicated that they had completely made up their mind to completely steal your money. Labatt's posts were bland but genial with positive, upbeat tone that things were working out well and that they'd be working to not only restore the data, but restore our faith in ezboard and move forward together into a bigger, better future.

Links and Resources
How to File Consumer Complaints

Make yourself heard! Companies like this only get away with theft and horrible business practices when no one speaks up. If you stay silent, they will keep on abusing people with their lies and their negligence. Stand up and be heard.

Direct
Ezboard, Inc.
also known as: Ezboard.com
564 Market Street Suite 705
San Francisco, CA 94104
Phone Number: (415) 773-0400

Executive Management Team
Robert Labatt, CEO (robertlabatt@ezboardcorp.com)
Steve DeMello, VP Operations
Ceco Gakovic, CTO (ceco@ezboardcorp.com)

Board of Directors
Sean Foote
Jess Rifkind
Kathy Levinson
Ed Dailey

Advisors
Jim Cashel
James Currier
Vanchau Nguyen

BBB
Better Business Bureau - San Francisco, Oakland and Northern Coastal California
http://www.sanmateo.bbb.org/complaint.html

The Internet Crime Complaint Center
(partnership between FBI and the NW3C)
http://www.ic3.gov/

Federal Trade Commission
https://rn.ftc.gov/pls/dod/wsolcq$.startup?Z_ORG_CODE=PU01

U.S. Attorney's Office-11th Floor
Northern District of California
450 Golden Gate, Avenue, Box 36055
San Francisco, CA 94102
Telephone: (415) 436-7200
Fax: (415) 436-7235

The guy in charge is Kevin Ryan.

News Media
San Francisco Chronicle
901 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Tel: 415-777-1111
http://www.sfchron.com/
http://www.sfgate.com/
chronfeedback@sfchronicle.com

If you want to raise a new issue or view in Open Forum, please contact Op-Ed Editor John Sullivan. 650 or fewer words is the going length (about two pages), double-spaced, in 12-point type. With rare exception, we won't run a writer's work more than once every six months. There are lots of voices out there and we'd like to hear as many as possible.

E-mail is best. Send to forum@sfchronicle.com and put "For Open Forum" in the subject line. (Please paste the text into the e-mail; do not send attachments, our virus-detecting software will delete e-mail with attachments.)

Fax to (415) 543-7708.

Or send by regular post to:

Open Forum
901 Mission St.
San Francisco, CA 94103

San Francisco Business Times
275 Battery St.
Suite 940
San Francisco, CA 94111
Phone: 415-989-2522
Fax: 415-398-2494
Email: sanfrancisco@bizjournals.com
http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/

News or Press Releases: http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/aboutus/edit_services.html
Letter to the Editor: http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/aboutus/edit_services.html

San Francisco Examiner
Editorial:
450 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94105
http://www.examiner.com/San_Francisco
Staff Contact List: http://www.examiner.com/Contact_Us.html#sfexaminer

Letters to the Editor - sfeditor@examiner.com

Mercury News
http://www.mercurynews.com/
Feedback form: http://www.mercurynews.com/contactus/
Send letters to the editor to letters@mercurynews.com

Silicon Valley News
http://www.svdaily.com/
Editor: Joseph Shieh - svdaily@hotmail.com
 

How You Can Help - Spread the Word!

 

Take a banner. Post it on your site, journal, blog, forum - anywhere. Tell people about this site. Warn them about throwing their money away at a company that doesn't care about your or your data. Keep them from letting ezboard steal their money.
You are welcome to host the banners from this site if you do not have a photo storage of your own. Simply copy and paste the code wherever you want to share the button.

Whatever you do, DON'T GIVE EZBOARD ANY FURTHER MONEY.
Tell them you're leaving - and why. It's really easy to go somewhere else. Trust me. For less then you paid ezboard, you can have your own domain with a pre-installed forum built right in. Your members can have email addresses, file storage, image galleries and more - and you'll never, ever worry about your costs going up. Ezboardsucks.net uses and personally recommends Dreamhost. They'll even give you a domain name for free. Check them out and see how much more you'll get and how much better you'll be treated.


Tell them ezsucks sent you!

Other Groups, Feedback and Share Your Story!

The real tragedy of this entire experience is that years of hard work, millions of posts, thousands of boards and members were effected by this. It wasn't isolated and it wasn't just one board. Tens of thousands of people lost everything. Ezboard not only doesn't care, they're keeping your money to boot. Share your story where you won't be censored, where ezboard won't close or delete your words and where they can't stop you from speaking the truth.

Ezboard Critics Forums
www.ezboardsucks.net/forum (archive only)
Ezboard Disasters Forum

Contact us:
webmaster: info@ezboardsucks.net
author: ezboardsucks@gmail.com