Blue's Movable Type Blog

So Yuku have been busy tapping away at the their keyboards now for weeks and weeks and now there's another "code push" today.

The triumphant announcement tells us that:

"...one of the most asked for features has been implemented in yuku! Forum specific customisation is here."

Now whilst I'm sure that's excellent news for those bravehearts who are still grappling with the interminably-long beta of Yuku, I should just point out that that's been possible with vBulletin, a decent product from a decent company, for ages now. Maybe longer even than Yuku has been in beta!*

But that's not what's strange about the announcement. No, that's where this was announced: in "the Lobby", which is a general chat forum. It's not even linked to in any of the Yuku footers, unlike the Developers Blog which remains silent as usual, much like "Silent Rob's" Yuku adverblog for other products.

*I can't be bothered to check just how far back this was, but it's at least version 3.0.x from early 2005.

Posted by Captain Blue at 8:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With the glacial progress of development over at Yuku - they really should invest some money in some decent coders - members of the ezboard customer base are beginning to get edgy - those that haven't seen the light and jumped ship already, of course. Boards like the massive AskMen.com one that abandoned ezboard earlier this month (for a phpBB option).

If you recall, nearly nine months ago Labatt proudly declared that:

"Yuku is really coming along"

and:

"We anticipate that Yuku will be ready for prime time in late 2006"

He went on to say that:

"all boards will move to Yuku eventually. But NOT until Yuku is ready for prime time and it is proven to be easier to use, more stable, faster and better than ezboard"

Of course, Labatt then went on to say that:

"it is true that ezboard, Inc. will be shutting down ezboard.com. BUT, not until all of you have moved to Yuku. When is that? You’ll tell us by moving to Yuku. We are not going to turn off ezboard.com at the end of 2006. We will turn off ezboard.com when everyone has moved to Yuku."

He then had to modify that once more:

"No. You can’t keep your board on ezboard forever. Eventually all ezboards will be moved to Yuku, but you don’t have to move right now, or even very soon. There will be a cutoff date when all ezboards will be moved to Yuku, but we don’t know that exact date."

Fast-forward to earlier this week and there's a posting in the ezSupporter forums - from where, in common with all the ezboard Help [sic] Forums, I'm banned by ezboard, Inc. - in which there's a reply to a concerned ezboard customer. In that thread, an ezboard staffer writes:

"...You can stay on ezboard for as long as you choose, no one will be moved to Yuku by force. But at some point in the future there will come a time when all of the ezboards that are going to move have moved and they will shut down the remaining boards. I don't see this happening for quite a while. There are thousands and thousands of ezboards and it will take many months to move them all."

Now let's just have a look at that again:

"You can stay on ezboard for as long as you choose, no one will be moved to Yuku by force."

Well that's great news for those people who like ezboard but loathe Yuku. Even if it contradicts (again) what Labatt says. But then she wrote:

"But at some point in the future there will come a time when all of the ezboards that are going to move have moved and they will shut down the remaining boards."

So let's get this right: you won't be forced to leave ezboard and move to Yuku but if you don't, your ezboard will be nuked! Excellent stuff!

Just like walking the plank then: you're not forced to walk to the end and into the ocean, but if you don't, you're run through with a cutlass...

Posted by Captain Blue at 1:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

...something that's been troubling me about ezboard, Inc.'s CEO, Robert Labatt's Yuku profile is that he seems confused about dates.

He appears to be confused as to when his company's data was compromised by what they claimed was a hack attack and they lost all that data: 70,000 posts on our ezboard alone. That's one out of the 500,000 claimed ezboards.

He writes:

"I came to ezboard in 2004 as the CEO with a mandate to improve the service and create a great company. In the time I have been at the company, we have really improved the reliability of our systems (and after the May '03 attack, our security)."

You know, I could have sworn that was May 2005... You know, after he was put in charge and not, as his self-penned profile might erroneously suggest, before.

I'm sure that's just another typo and not deliberate though...

Posted by Captain Blue at 9:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So come on then, are you migrating ezboards to Yuku yet or not?

There's another announcement over on the Lobby:

"The board migration tool has been completed, and is ready to go. We're going to take it slow to start with, so that if there are any problems, we don't have a flood of boards with the same problem."

This was posted on Friday afternoon. Maybe there's been no response, because alison saw fit to "bump" that topic this morning.

Of course, given that this "announcement" was made in one of the chat forums on Yuku, that might explain things. After all, isn't that preaching to the converted (if misguided)?

Surely the place to make an announcement about migrating ezboards would be ... ezboard? Well there's no official system-wide announcement and nothing in the help forums apart from another staffer saying:

"Boards being migrated to Yuku is still down the road a bit, maybe by the end of the year."

That was posted two days earlier, so the board migrations must have come as a bit of a surprise or something to them...

It certainly is just more confusion and lack of communication between ezstaff. After all, no-one seemed to know they were ready to go until I reminded people of their own situation. No-one involved on the tech. side seemed to have told any support or other staff.

Posted by Captain Blue at 9:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You know, when you promised that:

"You should know that we have changed some of our processes to ensure that this type of outage will not occur again."

Wasn't that earlier this week?

So when one of your servers falls over, sorry, has unscheduled downtime I presume you're talking about a different form of outage. Or something. But tell me, don't your customers just experience their boards being unavailable? Thank goodness that fabulous new service, Yuku, is ready, eh? Kudos to you...

Posted by Captain Blue at 11:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yes, hold on to your hats for the rush: ezboard, Inc. hasn't announced that they're ready for all the claimed 500,000 boards to migrate to Yuku:

http://www.digg.com/tech_news/Yuku_Announces_ezboard_Imports_Can_Go_Ahead_Now

That article, "Dugg" by me as no-one else at ezboard seems to want to announce it, links to http://www.yuku.com/feedback/viewitem/id/63 and reads:

"As the URL is only accessible by logged-in Yuku users, it states that: "Importing ezboard communities is completed and we have moved communities successfully. If you want your community moved please contact the CS team from the help.yuku.com pages." No official announcement has been made nor is there a promised clickable link for one-click imports"

Why hasn't Robert Labatt announced that, when he's happy to tell everyone that they've fixed their Firefox extension? Surely the board migrations are more important?

All is explained in a post on the Yuku Lobby. Alison states that they are doing them one by one ... so with half a million claimed boards, that's going to take a lot of time to do...

Got to love the way that in such a small organisation where everyone works together according to Labatt, confusion reigns:

"The situation I think is that the developers have finished it, they've hit the "done" button, but since no announcement has been made yet, it's just going to spawn confusion. They probably thought it would automatically make bells ring in the right place to let people know... I could make an announcement, but I haven't been given the official details. I don't want to confuse people any further.

I'll get the full information tonight (SanFran morning) for you, if you want to go ahead and submit a ticket in the interim, then feel free - it's going to be michelle who gets it anyway, and we'll work out what is going on then!!"

Left hand, meet right hand.

Of course, there's been no 'official' announcement anywhere on ezboard yet. No system-wide announcement. Nothing in Labatt's ezboard or Yuku blogs. And other than my post on Digg.com and the link to it here and on the Yuku Lobby chat forum, no-one can find out about it unless they go looking.

Planet ezboard at its best!

Posted by Captain Blue at 6:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

In his latest update on Yuku ezboard, Inc. CEO Robert Labatt mentions "some of the major improvements" to Yuku before his usual request for us to "stay tuned" to find out about "new goodies to come in the weeks and months ahead".

And what do you know? They've released a new goody he didn't even mention!

Adverts!

Hurrah! The raison d'être of Yuku has been rolled out on the user profiles to start with. Of course, as ezboard/Yuku hasn't yet sorted out its pricing for the Yuku equivalent of ezSupporter, there's no way for users to have their profiles ad-free. The complaints have already started...

Hmm. I wonder if this means that ezboard, Inc. will now deliver on their promised sharing of advertising revenues with board owners? Oh, was that a pig I just saw flying by?

Posted by Captain Blue at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)