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Relocation !!!!

Sunday, January 27, 2002

Hello,
This Friday, February first, starting at about 11:00 pm Central time we are moving to a new server. Due to our huge growth we have outgrown our current hosting. Because of the extremely dynamic nature of this site we are forced to close down the old site and make the move. We have taken steps to hopefully minimize the amount of time you are unable to reach your message boards. However, because some ISP's are slow at updating their DNS servers it could be anywhere from 8 hours to a few days that you will not be able to reach our site. Rest assured that your board will be safe and sound on our new server. Also keep in mind that your board members may be able to reach the new site before you can. Feel free to send us a e-mail if you have any questions.

Downtime

Friday, December 21, 2001

Hello,

Over the past 24-36 hours there were time when the boards were slow or at times unreachable. Our host had a hardware problem at their data center. They are expecting to receive the parts to correct the problem soon and everything should return to normal.

Advertising and your Message Board

Sunday, December 16, 2001

This is a pretty simple concept, We provide a FREE service and in exchange you agree to accept the advertising we place on your Message Boards and Guest Books. Simple concept.. We don't kill you with ads, one banner ad and one pop behind ad. Go visit some of our competitors and you'll spend all your time closing pop up windows. However it seems that some of our members just don't get it and try to defeat our system, stealing our service. Be warned that if you are found trying to defeat our advertising system in any way your board will be removed from our system with no warning. It also seems that some of you are promoting the use of pop-up killers and web washing software. Once again this will not be tolerated. If you are found to be promoting or encouraging the use of this type of software your board will be removed. Also be advised that we are close to finishing development of a tool that will deny access to our site to ANYONE using any kind of ad-blocking tool. It a shame that we have to spend our resources developing a tool like this when we could be making our Message Boards and Guest Books better.

Lots of new features

Monday, November 19, 2001

Hi,

Over the past few weeks we've added a number of small new features and one bug fix to the boards.

First, the bug fix. If you are using smilies on your board they now display when previewing a message. In the past you only saw the code for the smilies on the preview page, now you see the image!!

In the administration area the board administrator can mow make a "administrator" post. This post stands out on the board because the author is administrator and the color of the word administrator is different than the other posts

Due to the many requests we have added the ability for the board administrator to either require a e-mail address or not require one to post a message to the message board. Please make the changes in the administration area.

Small Enhancement

Tuesday, August 28, 2001

Hello,

Today we improved the feature that indicates if a image or link is included in the message. If it includes a image there will be a small (IMG) next to the date. If the post includes a link to a outside site there will be a (LNK) next to the date, and of course if a message has both it will include both tags. please report any problems you encounter on the support board.

Enjoy

Small Upgrade

Wednesday, July 18, 2001

Hello
We released a small upgrade/bug fix to our administration script. The bug fix allows you to properly remove individual messages from your board. We also added a informational message to the first page of the administration script. The message tells you how many messages you have on your board and how fast it will load for your visitors. As you know we do not automatically drop messages from your board like other hosts do, we leave it up to you to keep a clean, fast loading board for your visitors to enjoy. Allowing your board to repeatedly grow huge may be grounds for removal of your board from our system.

Downtime

Wednesday, May 16, 2001

Hello,

Last night we suffered a serious hardware failure that caused the long period of downtime. We are sorry for the problems this may have caused you and the visitors to your site. It is our goal to have 100% uptime.

I guess the server is still not stable, it may be up and down for the next few hours.

Contest

Thursday, May 10, 2001

I thought it might be fun to reward our members that take the time to come and read our news page.
The contest
Be the first person to e-mail us at this address
and you will receive 30 days of Ad Free message board service FREE!*
If you are one of the next 5 people to send a e-mail to this address
you will be eligible for a 25% discount off a 3 month subscription to our Ad Free hosting service.
Pretty simple..

Of course there are rules
The winners will be determined by the time stamp on the e-mail sent. In the event of a tie, we will randomly chose a winner.
*The 30 days of free service does not include the digest option.
At the end of 30 days you will have the option of continuing the service at it's normal price of $18.95 for 3 months or having the ads returned to your board.

New Ads

Thursday, May 10, 2001

Hello,

Once again we are trying to fight the slump in internet advertising by trying out some new ads. It's always been our goal to keep our advertising to a minimum while at the same time paying our bills. We try to chose our ads carefully to make sure they are not going to open a bunch of windows in the background or crash your browser. The new ads are once again going to open behind your browser window. The new window should only open about once per visit if you have cookies enabled. If you see something that interests you please follow the links in the ads.

Server Relocation *****Updatex2****

Sunday, April 22, 2001

Hello,

Early this week, either Monday or Tuesday, we are planning to physically relocate our server. This means we will have to shut it down and move it to it's new location. The new data center is about 2 hours away by car so we expect about 3 hours of downtime. This move should eliminate many of the current network problems we've experienced. We will post updates on exactly when the move will occur as we know more.

*****************************************************
Update!!
The move will now take place this Monday(4-30-2001) morning between 7am and 12am EST.
*****************************************************

Thank You

Pop Under ads

Friday, April 20, 2001

The test went very well for the pop under ads. For the time being we will be running these ads. If and when the internet advertising market improves we will remove them and return to running just a top banner.

If you have cookies enabled you should only see one pop under ad per day. If you choose not to enable cookies then you will see lots of them.

Pop under Ads.

Wednesday, April 18, 2001

Hello,

Once again we are testing some new ads. These ads pop under your existing browser window. If your browser accepts cookies then you should only see one pop under per day. Please feel free to give us feedback or report problems in the support forum. We will be running this test for about the next 24 hours. In the future, if the internet advertising marked does not improve, we may need to use add like this.

Network Upgrade

Friday, April 13, 2001

Tonight, between 06:00 and 07:00 GMT (2:00 and 3:00 AM EDT), VDI, our network provider will be performing an IOS upgrade to their switch. This upgrade is necessary to resolve some of the IP issues we have been experiencing over the past few days.

Pop Behind Ads

Friday, April 6, 2001

For the next 24 hours starting at 10:30 CDT tonight we are going to be testing some pop behind ads on the site. The ads are set by Cookie to only open once per visitor in a 12 hour period, if you are getting them more often then that please make sure you have cookies enabled. We look forward to hearing your feedback on our support board.

Enhancements

Saturday, March 31, 2001

We released 2 new enhancements to our scripts tonight. Both of these enhancements are ideas that you, our members, submitted to us. The first enhancement allows you more control over the look of your board. You now have a choice of 4 ways your message threads can be separated on your index page. Please keep in mind that any change you make to the formatting will only affect FUTURE posts to your board. Look here for examples of the new formatting. To select a formatting style log into your administration area, choose "Change Board Configuration" and then pick your formatting style.

The second enhancement is a indicator to show if an image is included in the post. If an image is included you will see an italic "[i]" after the date. Once again this enhancement will only affect future posts

Network Upgrades

Friday, March 30, 2001

The Network Operation center where our server is located will be doing some network upgrades during the day on Saturday. You may notice some short periods of downtime.

New Switch
The New Switch has arrived, Installation will start 6am on Saturday, march 31.

The installation will take up to 2 hours, so there will be periods of network down times.

What A Day....

Thursday, March 29, 2001

What a day yesterday turned out to be. First thing in the morning I found the server unreachable, a call to our datacenter confirmed that the server was indeed down and technicians were working to get it back up. It took most of the day to find the hardware problem and get it corrected. Later in the day I also found out that our advertising company dropped us due to our extremely low click through rate. Life will go on, we will find another advertiser, eboards will continue to be a great service.

More Enhancements

Tuesday, March 20, 2001

Hello,

Tonight we added Smilies to our message boards. For those of you that are not familiar with smilies they take text like :) and replace it with a image like

To enable this feature you must log into the administration area, chose "Change Board Configuration", check the yes box next to "Allow Smilies" then submit the form. We also put together a "Smilies Legend", the legend is linked at the very bottom of most of the pages on our site.

Enjoy!!

What Happend to us today

Friday, March 16, 2001

As you know we were unreachable or very slow most of the day. Our server is in a very large data center on the East coast. From what we have gathered, early this morning there was a very large outage that effected internet traffic on the East coat. We are still waiting to find out the details of what happened, and we will post them here as we get them.

UPDATE

NEW YORK -- March 16, 2001-Virtual Development Incorporated (VDI), a leading
provider of Application Service Provider hosting (ASP), experienced multiple network outages.
This morning at 9:14am EST, Verizon had an OC-12 outage in the Clifton, New Jersey area. This OC-12 provided VDI with their connectivity to various providers such as Level3 and UUNET. Verizon was on location with in 2 hours
to correct the problem with the OC-12 multiplexor. Once the OC-12 was restored, connectivity to Level3 and UUNET would not come up properly.

The second problem was that our connectivity didn't establish full routes. During the times when we were down, we were told that at that exact time when VDI went down, other multiple providers went down. "The network outage we experienced today was unfortunate" said William Jensen,
president and co-founder of VDI. He continues, "We are taking all the precautions necessary to make sure an event like this never occurs again." VDI is currently working with Cisco systems, Inc., investigating what appears
to be a glitch in the software. By 6:05pm EST, VDI reported that all services had been restored. They are still
investigating the root cause of this issue.

Enhancements

Sunday, March 11, 2001

Friday we released 2 enhancements to the message board service. These enhancements will be included on all new message boards and can be added to the existing boards by request .

Enhancements
1. We now have a check box on the post form so the original poster of a message can decide if they want to receive notification of replies by e-mail

2. We now have a button on the post form and all message pages that will allow you to post your message without previewing it. We still recommend using the Preview button anytime you are using HTML in your message or including a image in your message.

Geocities and Images

Thursday, February 22, 2001

Hello,

If you noticed that your Background or Logo image is not showing up anymore it's most likely because you have it on Geocities and they no longer allow you to link to images from outside their server.

Here is a link to the information on Geocities/Yahoo Goecities Image Linking Info

Background and Logo images

Sunday, February 18, 2001

Some of you have mentioned that your background and logo images are not showing up even though you have them coded properly. There are 2 possible reasons for this.

1. The URL is case sensitive IE File.jpg is not the same as File.JPG.

2. Some of the free webhosts will not allow you to link directly to a non HTML file. If this is the case you can contact us and we will allow you to store 1 background and 1 logo file locally.

Thank you
eBoards4all

New Feature

Sunday, February 18, 2001

Tonight we added a new feature to the message boards. The new feature allows you to set the script to display the time in your local time. To set this feature up you need to log into your admin area, chose "Change Board Configuration" and select the proper time offset . This setting will only effect future posts. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions Support

New Item in the TOS

Wednesday, February 14, 2001

We have been forced to add this item to our terms of service due to the number of boards built and then abandoned.

3.Failure to "Activate" your board within five (5) days of it's creation either by posting a message to the message board or linking it to your website.

Advertising Changes

Thursday, February 1, 2001

So far we are the only free message board service to NOT run any kind of POP up banners or POP up full page ads and we currently have no plans to run any kind of pop up ads. In the past we only ran a single 468x60 ad at the top of every page. In the near future you may see more than one ad running at the top of each page. Don't worry though, we still plan to only use the top 70 ish pixels of each page for advertising so most of the page is still yours for your message board.

Admin Upgrade...

Monday, January 22, 2001

Hello,
We finally finished upgrading all the boards with our new Admin Control Panel. All the feedback so far has been positive and currently there are no outstanding technical issues. Than you for your patience, it took a long time to get to all of you but I think it was well worth the wait

Upgrades

Saturday, January 6, 2001

We are happy to announce the new Administration area/control panel is complete. Because of the changes to the control panel we need to upgrade each and every one of the old boards by hand. Over the next few weeks we will be working our way through the current member boards. If you just can't wait to be upgraded please send us a e-mail and we'll see what we can do to get you done sooner.

Updates

Thursday, December 7, 2000

Message Boards We are currently working on updating the Admin area to allow full control of your message board. Some of the things you should be able to easily change are, text color, background and logo images, links to you home page and much, much more.
Guestbooks over the last few days we have been working on tweaking the output of the Guest Book html to produce a little better formatted page. If you have any suggestions please feel free to send us a e-mail

Upgrades

Saturday, November 18, 2000

Due to the huge growth of eboards we will be performing system upgrades during the day on Saturday. These upgrades will assure continued system stability and performance. For the more curious here are the upgrade we will be performing....
* Upgrading motherboard
* Upgrading processors
* Upgrading RAM
Estimated Downtime: 1 hours

Bug Fix.....

Saturday, October 28, 2000

Tonight we fixed a number of bugs in the Guestbook scripts and the Message Board sign up pages.

On the guestbooks. If you did not have a background image you were not able to change the background color, You can now.

On the Message Board sign up. If you chose to have the suject line editable, it was not. If you chose to have it not editable it was, This is now fixed.

On the Message Boards You could not sign up for a board without the FAQ's , you can now...

Down Time

Saturday, October 14, 2000

We are truly sorry for the extended period of downtime last night and this morning. We spent most of last night working with the tech staff to get our server back up and running. As I write this I'm still waiting for news as to the true nature of the problem, rest assured that we will take steps to prevent problems like this in the future.

Guestbooks and META tags

Sunday, October 1, 2000

We are happy to announce the launch of 2 new services today. The remotely hosted guestbook scripts are up and running. Please feel free to visit the demo guestbook and try out the member administration area. The second script is a META tag generation script for those that are not comfortable writing your own tags. Enjoy!!

Passwords -n- stuff....

Sunday, October 1, 2000

With the new month comes changes to the message boards. When registering to post or view messages on a password protected board you must use a valid e-mail address or you will not receive your password. This should help our message board administrators keep out any unwanted members

Guest Books

Thursday, September 14, 2000

We are getting very close to opening the guestbook service to the public. In the mean time we are inviting those people that are interested in helping us to test the service to send us a e-mail and we will send the detail to you. betatest@eboards4all.com

Updates

Friday, September 8, 2000

eBoards4all is happy to announce that we will be offering what we think will be one of the best guestbook services on the net. In the next few weeks we will be putting the finishing touches on the Guestbook pages and then we will open the service up to the public. If you would like to be one of the first to sign up for a guestbook please E-mail us at Support and we will let you know when the service opens.

No News.......

Tuesday, August 22, 2000

.....is good news. We've been busy making some small behind the scenes changes to make things run better for you. If you have any ideas to make this a better service feel free to e-mail Support@eBoards4all.com us or post your ideas on the Support Board

Backgrounds & Logos

Sunday, August 13, 2000