We all know about ezboard’s notoriously poor backup regime that led to them losing a year’s worth of posts on a number of their boards when they claimed a hacker (who, despite the FBI being brought in - allegedly - doesn’t appear to have been identified) had managed to somehow lose all current posts and then hop networks to delete the backups that Gold Communities like ours were paying for. Not what you’d call a backup in any meaningful sense of the word…

And of course, around the time ezboard lost all those messages – around 70,000 on our ezboard, I’d guess – Robert Labatt, ezboard Inc.’s then CEO sought to put a positive spin on things by telling us about “the new community engine”, by which we can only assume he was referring to Yuku (although at that time they hadn’t decided on the name of their new product presumably to disassociate themselves from the ezboard name).

So I was intrigued by this post on the now-archived Devloper Forum at Yuku (http://developer.yuku.com/topic/100968/t/Backups.html)

“We were paying so to have backups.
In 2005, thanks to hackers, we lost a few hundreds of valuable posts. Now this is the past.
What can we expect with Yuku ? What is the situation now ? Will we be able to make our own backups ? Where do we stand ?
We just can’t afford to live the same situation as in 2005″

Now those are the sorts of questions that got me banned from ezboard when they refused to answer them. The “make our own backups” part echoes what Robert Labatt was saying about board Admins. being able to make their own, offline backups – something which has been quietly ignored since.

A tad worrying, given their history…

So I’m sure the user who posted the question was suitably calmed by the response from a Yuku devloper:

“Lesson learned. We have better strategies now we take nightly backups as well.”

Wow! Let’s hope they don’t have them within the range of any alleged hackers, eh?