...and tempers go up. As does anxiety. And insanity. No, not mine.

This isn't to discount the importance of the information that was lost in the recent ezboard outage - I lost some things that were important to my community too, but more to focus on what happened on a personal level to a lot of people.

People felt lost.
People felt disconnected (despite the fact that ezboard "Helps. People. Connect.")
People got pissy and insane.

I think a few people actually want revenge at this point. On Ezboard, not on the "hacker". This definitely isn't your normal ezBoard downtime.

Oh yes. All you had to do was read the help forums and you got a big taste of what was going on with the frustration and abject bitterness that people were putting forth against the ezboard moderators who were trying to get us as much information as possible as quickly as possible.

There were users threatening lawsuits (and still are). There were users who were crying for the truth, and yelling for it. There were conspiracy theories - because, after all, in the absence of real information people are usually content with making up their own. These are most likely folks who are frustrated with what they see as a lack of progress with the ezboard restoral process, such as it is.

There aren't backups, in terms of the traditional word. There aren't tapes - there are files. That wasn't smart. And apparently whomever did this knew where those files were because they ignored everything else that they could have wiped out. This wasn't a script kiddie or a brute force attack. This was intelligent.

Here's what bugs me about it - why? I'm beginning to think that someone didn't want something to get out. Or that there was something on a board somewhere that they didn't want the world to see (or they didn't want the government to see). There's something that just doesn't seem right about this whole thing, and I suspect that's the key issue.

Something isn't right. It's taking too long to restore things. Ezboard doesn't have tape backups (which they really should). They're using some sort of experimental process to restore things that's never really been tried before. They're leaving a lot of subscribers/users to wonder aimlessly about what's going on behind the scenes, even with the daily updates. There's no one who is claiming responsibility for the hack (and clearly, that should have been whispered about somewhere in the hacking commmunity but it's not surfaced to anyone I know who is still in touch out there). Oh, and they've found another "packet" of data. Gee, I wonder when they're going to find a mysterious file that's got *EVERYTHING* that was lost. It's got to be around there somewhere, don't you think?

It just smacks more and more of either Ezboard not knowing what they're doing, or knowing exactly what they're doing because whatever was attempted to be erased needs to be found and addressed by whomever the proper powers would be.

Of course, that's just another conspiracy theory, and it's all mine. So no, you can't have it, and don't spread it around because I really don't know why anything is happening the way it is. This is my place to wonder about things, after all. But I've gone slightly off track (yes, I've digressed) and I apologize for that.

I was talking about how off kilter people have gone. There are people screaming on the ezboard help boards about all the lies that have gone on, and why won't they tell us the truth. Or why the CEO doesn't know anything. Or why he's contradicted himself multiple times. Or why can't anyone tell us what server will be restored by what day.... it just goes on and on and on. I can understand wanting to get on with the business of running one's board. Believe me, I do - I have two that I take care of, and one of them (a small private place) is back up to it's former glory. The other, the larger community that people regularly visit, isn't.

This bothers me. As an admin and owner, I've invested time (and a little money) into the board, and while it's not a venture that I will make money on, it *is* a venture that I expect to reap emotional rewards from. I love my community, they are a great bunch of people and I hate seeing them torn up and lost as they were a couple of short weeks ago. Thankfully, as far as I can tell, no one left as a result of this ezMess (as many others have called it). Since I've not seen any recent threads return, I suspect that the others are lost and I'll have to rebuild some things (like sale/trade and behavior guidelines). I'll really be sad to see some of those posts go - especially my "how to get hate mail" one. That one was classic. There were a few others in the archive that I'd really love to see back, but I'm not holding my breath.

So... we start over most likely. We've already been rebuilding the community slowly over the last couple of weeks, but I can't wait to reopen all the forums to everyone and sort out the topics from the new temporary forum into the various categories they belong in. I think the members of the community will be happy to have everything back to normal as well, whatever normal means in the ezboard world...

...which for some is going to be going off the deep end and screaming about whatever comes to mind.