ezboard, based in the United States, is the largest provider of free hosted Internet forums.

They offer free and paid accounts for posters and for boards. The free accounts have advertisements, which are embedded on the board display and/or in popup or popunder advertisements. The paid accounts (called Gold) do not have any of these and provide more features for owners of such accounts and boards. One such feature is account linking, in which multiple accounts owned by one poster can share settings. Accounts can either be local and tied to a specific board, or global which allows posting across different ezboard forums.

The ezboard forum software is not as full-featured as many other forum software. For instance, the board search function works infrequently. Threads aren t marked as read unless they are manually marked as such, as opposed to the automatic read marking common other places. Where they succeed is comparative ease of use and the inherent lock-in common with hosted forums (that is, the data isn t exportable). These attract and retain customers, respectively.

Controversy was caused in 2002 when many features formerly available to free users and boards were removed and made only available to subscribing users and boards.

As of May 31, 2005, ezboard was Security cracking, causing over 9,000 boards to lose information, become inaccessible, or be completely wiped.

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