Oh dear!

It seems that ezboard managed to have yet another data loss involving their new backup strategy [sic]:

“Ok good news and bad news. Good news: the backups work. Bad news: we lost todays posts. We had a massive database failure (go mysql). Please don’t blame the admins. They hate me probably more than you right now.”

Oh and that was edited… Now don’t forget, Survivor Sucks is one of the busiest boards on Yuku and it was 11 September when posts are made to mark the anniversary of “9/11″.

Notice how it’s not ezboard’s fault - it never is, is it? - but yet again they’re blaming the software rather than what they have done both in terms of their own software and their strategies. Just like they did with Smalltalk.

Even the SS Admins chose to have a go at ezboard for a change, rather than kowtowing to them:

“Just to reiterate

1. “the backups work”
2. Backups are used to restore data lost for various reasons
3. Testing the backups caused a day’s worth of data to be lost
4. Apparently no backups of this data exist”

Testing backups, eh?

Now after paying all that money to ezboard when SS was based there, a user asks the obvious question:

“Why exactly would we move a board this large to a place that’s still in BETA?!?!?!? Unless of course we were going to be guinea pigs to see how well it could handle stuff (which it can’t obviously or at least the idiots in charge can’t anyway)”

No answer to that one yet…

Now we all know that the whole issue about backups is a sore point as far as ezboard, Inc. are concerned. Understandably so, given their track record on this. So they probably weren’t too pleased when the administrator of an ezboard chose to (apparently) copy a post he’d made over in the ezboard Help [sic] Forums.

These are some extracts from his post:

“I am asking this here because I have had a support ticket open for many days with Yuku that has remained unanswered.”

“Following the huge disasters at EZBoard in May and August of 2005, in which most all EZBoards lost many posts, and my two grief-support boards lost thousands of precious posts dealing with people’s expressions of grief and loss at the death of family members and friends, including memorials for deceased children, are general email was sent around by then-CEO Robert Labatt stating that with Yuku, admins would have the capability of backing up their own boards. (EZBoard had foolishly left their own backup system connected to the rest of EZBoard, making it a prime target for hackers).” 

Some intelligent questions and points, I think.

He posts some excerpts from the posts made at the time of the last major ezboard data loss where Robert Labatt, ezboard, Inc. CEO, stated that “[Yuku] is faster, more reliable, offers automated backup to your home computer, fast restorals”, etc. This was on 23 June 2005.

By 19 December 2006 - some 18 months later - Michelle, a “Helpdesk Representative”, allegedly wrote that “Yuku does back up baords on our end but I will have to check on the status of admin backups.” But I thought Labatt was talking in the present tense back in 2005? Well, apparently:

“…what the tech guys have told me is that the backup function is nearly complete just a few minor adjustments left - but it’s being intensively tested at the current time. Apparently they want to make sure that a board owner can’t do more damage by restoring their board - so they’re trying to make it as foolproof as possible.

Regular system backups do currently happen though.”

So they’d gone back in terms of development? And of course, there’s still no facility to do this well over two years on from Labatt’s promise.

“Let It Rip” Alison then tries to defuse the thread:

“That is pretty much it - when changes are made to the core model of yuku, a back up made 2 months ago might fail to restore, since the database tables or whatever else is involved might have changed. We can’t offer you a backup that backs up great… but doesn’t restore. We do have backups, and you can see when the last date of backup was for your board in your stats and logs section. We also have an undo function for deleted topics, and coming soon is an undo feature for deleted forums. But back up to your hard disk is not available yet.”

Yes, Alison, but surely the Admin would want to restore from the most recent backup, unless a two month old one was the most recent?

Someone else then tells everyone the unpalatable (to ezboard) truth:

“The ezBoard brand is a joke in the industry, associated with poor management, bad service and loads of problems. The other real problem, unlike other systems, is that ezBoard and Yuku have no export process. Why? To avoid mass defections. ezBoard and Yuku is all about prisoner loyalty, trapping people and binding them to the service because they stand to loose their users and all they’ve built. Read up, most people do not like ezBoard and Yuku is not shaping up to be anything revolutionary. All of the features are found free on other systems or software for decades. It’s much cheaper and more efficient to run your own board hosted elsewhere.

“Yuku is just promises and is taking so long to implement the most basic of features. They can’t even get the current pushes done right, where is the Quality Assurance Team when you need them? Don’t get me wrong, Yuku is 10x better than ezBoard but still lacks much of the functionality of many free or inexpensice alternative solutions.”

Ouch! So Alison shuts the thread down. Standard behaviour from ezboard.