Blue's WordPress Blog

It seems Robert Labatt is taking to heart what I’m writing here and that I’ve upset him. He’s made another couple of updates to his WordPress CEO Blog.

He writes:

“ezboard services are running in top form as well, with no recent downtime.”

Now I know that ezboard has been carefully deleting sticky topics noting server downtime in the ezboard Help [sic] Forums but if you read their Server Status Forum you’ll see that despite those deletions there are still a number of reports of servers being down. So either the ezboard customers are lying or mistaken or Labatt is.

Then Labatt seems to finally realise that it’s no good for him to make promises his minions can’t keep and that people like me will continue to point out when they again fail to meet their deadlines:

“Because I get nastygrams every time I give out a date on when something is going to be done I am only going to say that this is the order for the development of new stuff that we are working in on Yuku.  I expect most of it to be done this summer…but we’ll see.”

Hmm. In other words “the dates I’ve given you in order to encourage you to soldier on with ezboard throughout the spring were all pie in the sky. I don’t have a clue when we’ll manage to get Yuku working properly enough for you to begin migrating your ezboards across”. Pathetic really.

He goes on:

“I’ve been reading and occasionally posting on boards where folks are saying “I am worried”, “let’s consider moving off ezboard”, “those guys never get anything right” etc.  In response to those posts I’d like to say, you don’t have to do anything today.  Don’t panic.  You will have plenty of notice when there are major changes to ezboard.  And for the “they’ll never get it done” folks, can I remind you of the 100% uptime in the last 9 months and the near flawless account importing from ezboard to Yuku.”

I’d hazard a guess that the only ones panicking at the moment are ezboard! And maybe they should try posting in the Server Status Forum to tell their customers they’re all wrong about servers being down: they must be wrong, surely, if ezboard have had 100% uptime?

And that “near flawless” account importing? ezboard must have a different definition of “flawless” to mine. ezMish was boasting how she’d sorted 100 account migration support tickets in one day. 25,000 account migrations so far out of 14,000,000? Good grief… A 2% failure rate on that is 280,000 failures, with Mushy working 100 a day, it’ll only take 7½ years for her to clear them

But wait a minute! Labatt says that they’re “getting things done, reliably and responsibly” and they’ve tested the account migrations before they rolled it out. Except it clearly isn’t reliable!

Oh dearie me!

So ezboard calculates the charges it will make for its boards on the basis of its webstats. There’s no way for a board owner to check those page views or daily visits: you have to take everything ezboard tells you on trust.

Apparently, the Big White Taxi Service ezboard were having problems with the server being down having just renewed their Gold Community Status. I had a closer look.

Turns out they’ve just paid $526 for a year’s renewal. That’s £289. My hosting for a vBulletin board is £126 for a year.

Money for old rope…

Then I looked a bit further to make a proper comparison. Their board stats:
Founded: July 18, 2002
Daily Posts: 74
Total Posts: 86891
Daily Visits: 6199
Total Visits: 5558836

Ours?
Moved: July 1, 2005
Daily Posts: (ave.) 225
Posts today: 280 and climbing…
Total Posts: 81,759
Daily Visits: 1,600

Now, what stands out for me are:

1. We’re averaging three times as many daily posts as they are;
2. We’ve got nearly as many posts in one year as they have in four years; and
3. How is it that our ‘proper’ webstats show a quarter of their daily visits and yet we get three times as many posts?

Maybe their board just has a lot of readers? I can’t really see that as being the case.

Whatever the case, may be, ezboard isn’t a cheap option.

You know, one of things that keeps popping up in my mind when I think of the ezboard “hacking” incident – aka the Great ezBoard Disaster of 2005 – and the authentication hack noted here is a question.

If your basic, common or garden ex-ezboard user can find out that a hack has taken place and trace the source of that hack, why can’t ezboard, Inc. combined with the technical skills and expertise of the FBI manage to do likewise after more than a year?