So I was looking through my server logs and noticed a lot of referrers coming from “p202.ezboard.com/fheartsofgold7297frm106″ and a few variations of that. I didn’t however notice this forum referring traffic on my sitemeter counters, this probably meant someone was hot-linking an image from me.

I wanted to check it out though and see what they were using so I tried visiting the url, turns out you have to register with ezboard to view their forums, not my cup of tea, but ok sure.

So I quickly ran though the registration, it asked for more info than I preferred but no big deal, then I hit submit. Here is where things got really bad, they showed me some free offers, such us info from Nokia, or Cooking tips, I of course just wanted to register as quickly as possible so I checked NO to all four offers then hit submit. But wait, a javascript notice, “Please select “Yes” to at least one of the following offers to continue”… are you kidding me? Well whatever the curiosity was killing me I selected the Nokia newsletter, and hit submit. But wait, I need to give them my birthday city and zip… Well I’m Canadian, I made up a zip and picked a state sadly they checked and the zip didn’t match the state. After that I hit the little “X” to close their tab.

They could have had me as a user, a member, I could have offered value to their forums, imagine someone who was interested in a forum but had no real drive, they wouldn’t have gone nearly as far as me (probably not ever to the registration page).

I am literally appalled by how EzBoard has chosen to do business, it is, as far as I’m concerned a money grab for web1.0, but not effective at that. Besides the forced leads generated are probably worthless to advertisers (because of the forced nature). Me (or someone else) would be much more valuable to them as a customer than not. Thank god this kind of incompetence is not tolerated on web2.0.

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