Message Boards Catch Y2K Bug January 4, 2000 By Elizabeth Clampet InternetNews.com Assistant Editor Product News Archives

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.

-- walrud (eggman@abbeyroad.com), January 05, 2000

Answers

I think Homer posted that a couple of days ago. Keep trying walrud he's hard to beat. That guy must work constantly.

-- hank (reardon@not.now), January 05, 2000.

oh gag me!

this story is so...like...4 days ago!

Wake up and smell the 21st Century dudes!

-- plonk! (realaddress@hotmail.com), January 05, 2000.

My local paper's Y2k forum uses UBB. The threads now sort incorrectly, the page takes forever to load, and the most recent post is time stamped as "00-10- 10 39:14 PM" on the main page, and every new post shows the year as "100".

I know: "Head for the hills!!"

-- Steve (hartsman@ticon.net), January 05, 2000.