Message Boards Catch Y2K Bug

Although the rollover to the year 2000 was overall a non-event, some
companies were bitten by the Y2K bug, including a few users of InfoPop
Corp.’s Ultimate Bulletin Board (UBB).

Ultimate BBS provides message board technology to more than
100,000 Web sites including Prodigy and
Warner Brothers online. Like most companies
preparing for Y2K, most sites using the service had no problems, but a few
ended up slipping through the cracks.

Visitors to sites such as Investorville.com
and internet.com properties Intranet
Design Magazine and MyDesktop.com
message boards were presented with messages containing incorrect dates, such as Jan-02-100.

Rosemary O’Neill, vice president of communications for InfoPop, said that the firm developed a Y2K compliant version of UBB in June, and notified its 7000 licensees. It was the customer’s responsibility to upgrade individual systems.

“E-mail is the primary means of contact with licensees,” she said. “Some people got the e-mail and ignored it, or didn’t get the e-mail because their contact information was not updated in our database.”

O’Neill added that the number of reported problems was surprisingly low.

“With 7000 licensees, we expected a bigger blip than what we actually got,” she said. The company staffed its tech support over the weekend, but was met with only a small amount of inquiries.

The company has created a retroactive fix for sites still reporting problems — version 5.42b. User fixes have also been developed and can be found here.