Folks, I feel your pain.
I wanted to let everyone here read a letter I posted to the EZBoard help forum. Hopefully they will be able to make my decision for me regarding whether we stay here or get roots somewhere else.
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Dear EZBoard,
When CSC was announced, I was interested in subscribing for my board so I could get rid of the banner ads. I was not even aware of the popups at the time.
Then EZBoard announced a server changeover, scheduled to last a day. I'd seen that EZBoard was slow some days and down at other times and hoped that the changeover would "seal the deal" and make me want to upgrade to CSC.
Instead, the events of the last 2 weeks have been:
-about 5 days of downtime and/or extreme slowness
-Suddenly my users and I are seeing 5-10 popups in a typical visit
-There are buttons EVERYWHERE that EZBoard is inserting into my boards about CSC including banners at the top and bottom AND popups, AND a whole row of text between my topic controls and the actual list of topics
-I have received several e-mails regarding CSC
Folks, you clearly have NO interest in keeping your people here. I am seriously considering buying UBB and dealing with the bandwidth costs myself. Even if it cost me twice as much as EZBoard, I wouldn't have to deal with the extortion you have propogated against all of us. Did you honestly think, given all the events above, that people would be signing up like crazy?
I understand EZBoard is a free service and you have to pay for yourselves and stay afloat. But you have done EVERYTHING to piss me and my users off without extending any kind of olive branch or incentive for me to pay. I have seen no increase in stability, only an increased ability to serve more popup windows in a shorter period of time.
As a sidebar, I am still puzzled when I see public service announcements (Smokey prevents forest fires) and EZBoard-related ads in rotation (do either of these make you any serious money?).
The EZBoard search engine is still abysmal and now I have users leaving en masse. I have asked my users several times in the last 2 weeks to give me more time to decide whether to give EZBoard another chance and get on board, or to go UBB on my own server. But I think the pressures you have put on users are too much for even me to endure. I have the money here in my hand to either pay you or hit the door. What's it going to be?
When your investors ask you why things went sour so fast, you can tell them that someone decided to drop everything in the users' and administrator's lap in a span of 1 week, turning all the ads to full volume PLUS have unbelieveable downtime and slowness, giving them no reason to want to pay up.
login.ezboard.com/fezboar...5043.topic