If you’ve ever read this, you’ll know that one of the main issues I had with ezboard, Inc. was that despite us paying for a Gold Community that promised that “weekly backups and free restores protect your board” they never did protect our board, so that all the money in our Community Chest had been effectively paying just to have the adverts removed. Of course, given that many of us had paid for ezSupporter to keep the Gold renewal costs down, this was a moot point.

At the time when ezboard, Inc. lost a year’s data from our ezboard, we had around $566 in our Community Chest. If I recall correctly, one member of our board managed to have their small donation credited to a different board after we made the decision that ezboard losing our data was the final straw in terms of staying there, so we launched our own self-hosted vBulletin board in June 2005.

Despite ezboard having failed to live up to their side of the bargain, they refused to refund the unspent Community Chest balance to us, so we decided that we would just close all the discussion threads and simply renew its Gold Community status every October until all the Community Chest balance had been spent, rather than letting it lapse and have them display adverts that might gain them new revenue. With the ezboard discussion threads closed and with our self-hosted board going from strength to strength, the number of page views fell to the extent that our annual renewals have been the minimum $54 and we renewed in October 2005 and October 2006.

Now, you do the maths: I reckon that c.$566 – (2x $54) = ~$450, so that’s what we should have left in our Community Chest balance.

According to ezboard, Inc., however, the remaining balance we have is zero!

So not only does ezboard, Inc. refuse to refund us the money, but they now tell us there’s no money to spend anyway!

The ‘owner’ or “ezOp” of the board has opened a support ticket with ezboard two days ago as ezboard prefer keeping their activities and mistakes out of public view, saying:

“Where is my ezboard money?

I had over $500 after the last renewal was done, the balance now shows £0

Has someone stolen the money?

Please reply as soon as possible!”

We’ll see…