 | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these messages)
|
Type of site | Bulletin Board System |
|---|---|
| Owner | ezboard, Inc. |
| Created by | Vanchau Nguyen |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Required |
| Current status | Defunct |
ezboard, Inc., based in San Francisco, California, United States, was a provider of free and paid hosted Internet forums.
ezboard was a provider of a free hosted message board for use by webmasters and message board administrators who have little to no experience running a web site. Along with having premade ezboard templates and a color picking tool, the ezboard community also supports volunteers who will help other users customize their ezboards.
ezboard offered free and paid accounts for both boards and users. The free accounts were supported through advertisements, and had fewer features in regards to customization and board management. Paid members were called "ezSupporters", while paid message boards were referred to as "Gold boards". Accounts were either local (deprecated) and tied to a specific board, or global, which could be used for posting across the entire ezboard network.
ezboard is a web application, created in 1996 by Vanchau Nguyen. [1] One of the earliest user-customisable online message board providers, it quickly grew. Around its peak in 2001, it was in the top 50 most popular websites in the world. [2]
In 2001 ezboard launched their first CSC (Community-Supported Communities) product, i.e. a paid version of ezboard without advertisements. This later split into CSC Blue (officially called CSC Community) and CSC Gold (officially called CSC Gold Community). CSC Blue removed intrusive advertising popups but retained advertising banners for a fixed price, while CSC Gold was 100% ad-free with extra features, but at a variable cost. It was reported that some very large ezboards paid the fixed price for CSC Blue, which ultimately proved to be an unprofitable product. ezboard announced that as of August 31, 2001 they would no longer renew CSC Blue boards. [3]
In 2002 ezboard introduced image hosting, which was provided by a third party and not in-house by ezboard. Announcements followed, which showed the image hosting deal to be an unfortunate disaster. [4] [5] [6] Eventually, the parent company filed for bankruptcy, leaving ezboard to continue operation of the image hosting in-house, while developing a new hosting product in parallel. [7] A later announcement highlighted a miscommunication between ezboard staff and moderators with an admission that the image hosting service had been a bad decision. [8]
On October 22, 2002, ezboard version 7.0 was released. This included a number of changes to free boards, which were met with negative comments from free board administrators. [9] [10] 7.0 also included enhanced user profiles, a redesigned web site and a new-look control center.
On December 10, 2002, ezboard version 7.1 was released, which included the ezPost tool. This provided users with fast access to useful posting features, such as changing font sizes and inserting links. However, some admins were unhappy that users could now post in a variety of fonts and colors, thereby altering the look and feel of their boards. This divided feedback was very common on ezboard due to the large number of users. [11]
On March 11, 2003, ezboard version 7.2 was released. [12] This was the last version of the core ezboard product to contain new features for nearly four years. After 7.2, various patches were applied to other areas of the ezboard service, such as spellcheck, [13] free gold, [14] meetup, [15] and network performance and improvements. [16]
In January 2004, a SQL Based back-end created by Jordan Bortz began to be rolled out to all servers. This upgrade significantly enhanced performance and reliability; issues which had been significantly impacting ezboard previously.
On March 4, 2004, Robert Labatt was appointed as ezboard's new CEO. [17] Vanchau Nguyen later chose to leave ezboard but remained on the Board of Directors. [18] Vanchau left in April 2004 according to his linkedin page. [1]
On March 14, 2005, ezboard 7.32 was released. [19] This is the most recent numbered version to be released to all servers, although patches have been released since then.
On May 31, 2005, ezboard claimed they were hacked, causing many boards to lose information, become inaccessible, or be completely wiped. Ezboard indicated that it was "impossible to restore all data to all boards". Assistance was requested from the FBI and $5,000 was offered for "information that leads to the direct arrest and conviction of the hacker". [20]
On February 28, 2007, ezboard staff posted about a new version of ezboard – 7.33. [21] Although this was primarily to compile the patches made since version 7.32, several small enhancements were also mentioned - the first to the message boards since version 7.2, released on March 11, 2003. Users did not expect this move as moderators had often stated that ezboard would no longer be updated. On May 1, 2007, these changes were officially announced, although there was no mention of 7.33. [22] Therefore, the latest version of ezboard is still 7.32.
Yuku was the successor to ezboard. It has been alpha/beta software since it was first unveiled at DEMOfall 2005. [23] On January 9, 2008, it was confirmed that Yuku was "coming out of beta", although a date has not been set. [24]
As of January 8, 2008, it has been confirmed that all ezboard communities would be moving to Yuku. However, board owners can ask for a delay in the migration process. [25]
As of January 15, 2008, the ezboard home page redirects to a Yuku Welcome page. A link allows users to log into ezboard. [26]
ezboard switched all its boards to Yuku.[ when? ]
On September 8, 2011, Yuku was acquired by CrowdGather, Inc. [27] The acquisition included all legacy ezboard domains. [28]
ezboard was written in Smalltalk VisualWorks 3.1 by Vanchau Nguyen with Jay O'Connor. [29] There was no database used on the back-end, but instead a built-in flat-file object-oriented datastore (BOSS) which together with the overall power of the Smalltalk language made the code fast and compact for the time.
ezboard used a flat file system consisting of binary objects. It had no relational database. Attempts were made to migrate the database to a traditional RDBMS but attempts failed because they were too slow. ezboard was an early form of a NoSQL style database as the objects were essentially JSON type data (key-value pairs). The flat files were stored in deep nested directory structures [30]
Ezboard's creator, Vanchau Nguyen, said he had "bet his company, and his future, on Cincom Smalltalk". He also mentions ezboard's userbase, listed as having nearly 20 million registered users. [31]
Kep C. Kepler was the 1st CIO and director of technology.
Smalltalk is a purely object oriented programming language (OOP) that was originally created in the 1970s for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, but later found use in business. It was created at Xerox PARC by Learning Research Group (LRG) scientists, including Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg, Ted Kaehler, Diana Merry, and Scott Wallace.
LiveJournal, stylised as LiVEJOURNAL, is a Russian-owned social networking service where users can keep a blog, journal, or diary. American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, American blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick.
GeoCities, later Yahoo! GeoCities, was a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish websites for free and to browse user-created websites by their theme or interest, active from 1994 to 2009. GeoCities was started in November 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner, and was named Beverly Hills Internet briefly before being renamed GeoCities. On January 28, 1999, it was acquired by Yahoo!, at which time it was reportedly the third-most visited website on the World Wide Web.
ProBoards is a free, remotely hosted message board service that facilitates online discussions by allowing people to create their own online communities. ProBoards was founded by California-based technology entrepreneur Patrick Clinger, who developed the ProBoards software to empower online community creation
Open Diary is an online diary community, an early example of social networking software. It was founded on October 20, 1998. Open Diary went offline on February 7, 2014, but was re-launched on January 26, 2018. The site was owned and operated by Bruce Ableson and Susan Ableson, known on the Open Diary website by the title of their diaries, The DiaryMaster and The DiaryMistress. Ableson has described Open Diary as "the first web site that brought online diary writers together into a community."
IMDb is an online database of information related to films, television series, podcasts, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and personal biographies, plot summaries, trivia, ratings, and fan and critical reviews. IMDb began as a fan-operated movie database on the Usenet group "rec.arts.movies" in 1990, and moved to the Web in 1993. Since 1998, it has been owned and operated by IMDb.com, Inc., a subsidiary of Amazon.
ImageShack is a subscription-based image hosting website headquartered at Los Gatos, California.
AmigaOS 4 is a line of Amiga operating systems which runs on PowerPC microprocessors. It is mainly based on AmigaOS 3.1 source code developed by Commodore, and partially on version 3.9 developed by Haage & Partner. "The Final Update" was released on 24 December 2006 after five years of development by the Belgian company Hyperion Entertainment under license from Amiga, Inc. for AmigaOne registered users.
Yuku was an upgraded version of ezboard, Inc.'s internet forums. Yuku described itself as "Message Boards 2.0". This tagline was most likely derived from the Web 2.0 features of Yuku message boards, such as tags and RSS.
GameFAQs is a video gaming website that hosts guides and other resources, as well as an active message board forum. It was created in November 1995 by Jeff Veasey and has been owned by Fandom, Inc. since October 2022. Allen "SBAllen" Tyner was lead Admin for twenty years until stepping down on October 18, 2023. The site is currently run by Community Manager "DToast" and Contributor Lead "ZoopSoul".
Lala was an online music store created by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Bill Nguyen. The service allowed members to legally create online shareable "playlists" of their own uploaded music which could play full length songs for other registered Lala members, purchase MP3s, stream music on a one-time basis or as inexpensively purchased "web songs," buy new CDs from the Lala store, leave blurbs on other members' pages, and participate in the community forums. Lala contracted with major labels and offered a large catalog of albums to stream or purchase. Their home page claimed over 8 million licensed songs available.
Trisquel is a computer operating system, a Linux distribution, derived from another distribution, Ubuntu. The project aims for a fully free software system without proprietary software or firmware and uses a version of Ubuntu's modified kernel, with the non-free code removed. Trisquel relies on user donations. Its logo is a triskelion, a Celtic symbol. Trisquel is listed by the Free Software Foundation as a distribution that contains only free software.
Wikia Search was a short-lived free and open-source web search engine launched by Wikia, a for-profit wiki-hosting company founded by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. Wikia Search followed other experiments by Wikia into search engine technology and officially launched as a "public alpha" on January 7, 2008. The roll-out version of the search interface was widely criticized by reviewers in mainstream media.
Panoramio was a geo-located tagging, photo sharing mashup active between 2005 and 2016. Photos uploaded to the site were accessible as a layer in Google Earth and Google Maps. The site's goal was to allow Google Earth users to learn more about a given area by viewing the photos that other users had taken at that location. Panoramio was acquired by Google in 2007. In 2009 the website was among the 1000 most popular websites worldwide.
Netscape Navigator 9 is a discontinued web browser that was produced by the Netscape Communications division of parent AOL, first announced on January 23, 2007. It was the ninth major release of the Netscape line of browsers. After AOL outsourced the development of Netscape Browser 8 to Mercurial Communications in 2004, Netscape Navigator 9 marked the first Netscape browser to be produced in-house since the Netscape 7 suite. It also saw the return of the classic Navigator name, which was previously used during Netscape's heyday between versions 1.0 and 4.08 in the 1990s. Netscape Navigator 9 is based on Mozilla Firefox 2.0.
Microsoft OneDrive is a file-hosting service operated by Microsoft. First released as SkyDrive in August 2007, it allows registered users to store, share, back-up and synchronize their files. OneDrive also works as the storage backend of the web version of Microsoft 365 / Office. OneDrive offers 5 Gigabytes of storage space free of charge, with 100 GB, 1 TB, and 6 TB storage options available, either separately or with Microsoft 365 subscriptions.
Qmodem was an MS-DOS shareware telecommunications program and terminal emulator. Qmodem was widely used to access bulletin boards in the 1980s and was well respected in the Bulletin Board System (BBS) community. Qmodem was also known as Qmodem SST and Qmodem Pro.
Niconico, Inc. is a Japanese video sharing service based in Tokyo, Japan. "Niconico" or "nikoniko" is the Japanese ideophone for smiling. As of 2021, Niconico is the 34th most-visited website in Japan, according to Alexa Internet.
EZGenerator is a web design program created by Image-Line. The program is intended to be accessible to users with no experience in code such as HTML or CSS, and displays results in a WYSIWYG manner. EZGenerator is available for Windows operating systems. As of February 21, 2017, EZGenerator is no longer being developed, nor is it available to download unless done by an existing customer through their personal licenses page.
SparkNotes, originally part of a website called The Spark, is a company started by Harvard students Sam Yagan, Max Krohn, Chris Coyne, and Eli Bolotin in 1999 that originally provided study guides for literature, poetry, history, film, and philosophy. Later on, SparkNotes expanded to provide study guides for a number of other subjects, including biology, chemistry, economics, health, math, physics, and sociology. Until 2022, when SparkNotes Plus, a paid service, released, SparkNotes did not charge users to use any of its resources. SparkNotes receives revenue from advertisements.
