To Dream the Impossible Dream
Once upon a time (OK, 7 March 2006), Robert Labatt, CEO of ezboard, Inc., wrote:
"We anticipate that Yuku will be ready for prime time in late 2006."
and
"In the next few weeks there will an easy to follow board migration process available in Yuku."
Of course, being ezboard, those fairly firm commitments fell by the wayside such that no ezboards appear to have been imported yet, some 6 months later.
But never fear! Having tried their damnedest to become a clone of MySpace with their user profiles, ezboard has decided to turn their attention towards actually doing something with their core product, the message boards...
Behold! Yuku has an area for the faithful they call "The Lobby". One of their staff has posted this request:
"Ezboarder? I need your help!
I need your HELP!
I am importing an Ezboard to Yuku as a demo. I need an ezboard that:
- Is mid sized. It cannot be one of our top ten boards, and cannot be a board with 30 posts.
- The people like yuku. (We will work alot together.)
- Your comfortable with errors on the first few attempts and helping us out.
If your willing to try and import your board, message me, i need to know pretty soon. You will be the first board imported!"
You'll need to excuse the typos... So let's get this right:
- There are no real ezboard boards imported yet
- They're worried about overloading either the ezboard or Yuku networks (or both) during the import; and
- they expect errors - understandable with betas and even more so when you look at just how long it's taken them to get even this far.
But surely the killer is this requirement:
"The people like yuku"
There's really only one ezboard message board I can think of that would meet that one: the ezdesign board run by one of the Yuku Help [sic] Moderators and populated by what seems like just a few of her cronies. Every other ezboard I've seen that actually knows about the impending forced move to Yuku seems to be filled with people saying they hate Yuku (to which the usual response from ezboard has always been "it's in beta and the finished product will be completely different, yada, yada").
In other news
Well the whole stupid Good Vote/Bad Vote system seemingly adored by, er, the person who wrote it is still rumbling along. Basically, there are a couple of buttons under a user's avatar in their profile that allow other users to give them a good vote or a bad vote. Yes, I know: I have no idea what that's all about either and as has been proven by the Yuku users, it's open to abuse. It's not even explained in the Yuku FAQ, which still refers to the voting system's previous incarnation that they called "charisma" {sigh}.
So some users have taken to modifying their profile CSS to hide the voting buttons, except that it's easy enough to find a way around that and give a bad vote anyway.
But maybe there's method in ezboard's madness? Yes, it seems that some of the Yuku faithful are prepared to pay to have that removed! After successfully lobbying ezboard to allow the users to give ezboard money - I know, I know! - by way of an ezSupporter equivalent for Yuku, they're now pushing for the removal of this hated feature for those willing to pay for it!
Clever old ezboard! Force the board and profile migrations over to Yuku, introduce a stupid voting system and then maybe offer its removal in return for a fee. And better still, have this suggested by a user, so you can be shown to be giving the customer what they want. Bravo!