Blue's Movable Type Blog

I wonder if, with the second anniversary of the 'launch' of Yuku rapidly approaching, ezboard, Inc. are finally getting somewhere close to taking it out of beta?

As I mentioned earlier, an old ezboard account of mine has been migrated to a Yuku one without my agreement and without my acceptance of any revised terms of use, etc. Interesting.

Of course, the benefit of doing this to Yuku is that they can claim a larger number of users when trying to sell advertising - whether or not those users are actual, live and regular user accounts or simply dormant ones - and also serve ads. on the users' profile pages.

Talking of which, I noticed that instead of the regular Google Ads block on a Yuku user profile, there was an ad being displayed for Justin Timblake's "Futuresex Loveshow", whatever that may be. Nice for all those users complaining about Yuku's classification as a dating site by corporate website content blocking providers.

I also noticed that Yuku are once more using OASIS - "Open source Ad Serving and Inventory System" - rather than just the Google Ads they were serving.

Maybe this is a precursor to their finally beginning to share advertising revenues with board owners, as Robert Labatt, ezboard, Inc. CEO promised at the Yuku launch. I won't hold my breath...

Posted by Captain Blue at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back in April 2007, a Yuku user asked "so do we really have 1TB of image space?" adding that it sounded "ridiculously high, and quite misleading" which was my conclusion too.

However, a Yuku representative replied, saying:

"I thought that there was not actually a limit... so I guess you could say 1TB.

"I have no idea on the actual answer."

Another Yuku representative then relayed what she had been told:

"You are limited in amount of pictures you can save in a album, but you are allowed to make an unlimited amount of albums. So it really is nearly unlimited.

"I believe we have the right to limit that at some point."

"In addition, we have added some new features:
1. Search - fast and accurate search that works
2. Free Image Hosting - 1TB of storage to host jpegs, gifts, bmps, pngs
3. Posts Don't Fall Off the 20th Page - unlimited storage of posts
4. Advanced Private Messaging - 4GB of storage for you, friends list, ignore list, mark as unread
5. Profiles With More Customization Options - (e.g. embed videos/music, choose from a list of ready-made designer skins, HTML blocks that you can edit any way you want, etc)."

There are further examples of the 1TB storage limit being mentioned in this message board post.

Now then, 1TB is 1,048,576 MB. So when someone apparently ran out of image storage, they raised a query on Yuku and were told that:

"Ok, it should be fixed now. :)

"Log out and then log back in for it to take effect. You should then have 30MB of space for images."

Only 30MB? Of course as the Yuku Help Wiki has been down for a while now, I cannot check there what limit there really is on image storage size.

Fortunately, Yuku came to the rescue recently: an ezboard I once posted on has been migrated to Yuku and so that old ezboard account was migrated over as well - without my agreement, I hasten to add - and an e-mail (with the usual Yuku grammar errors) sent to me, telling me about Yuku:

"In addition, we have added some new features:
• Search: fast and accurate search that works
• Free Image Hosting: 30MB of storage to host jpegs, gifts, bmps, pngs
• Posts Don't Fall Off the 20th Page: unlimited storage of posts
• Advanced Private Messaging: 4GB of storage for you, friends list, ignore list, mark as unread
• Profiles With More Customization Options: (e.g. embed videos/music, choose from a list of ready-made designer skins, HTML blocks that you can edit any way you want, etc)."

Compare that to the details sent out in April 2007. Yes, ezboard, Inc. has reduced the storage allowance by a factor of nearly 35,000!

Funny how they kept quiet about that...

Posted by Captain Blue at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

http://wp.bluescrap.com/2007/07/04/ezboard-inc-wheres-our-money/

Well, within the last hour our community chest, which was finally restored at the end of July, has now disappeared again.

From an e-mail:

"After reviewing the transaction logs I have reasonably determined that the current balance now showing is correct. So, as of 7/24/07 your board has a $443.00 balance."

Posted by Captain Blue at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

ezboard has managed to lose every single post from our Gold Community.

Way to go, ezboard! We'll get our "ezOp" to request a restoration from the "Weekly backups and free restores [to] protect [our] board".

We shall see...

Posted by Captain Blue at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

aka The ezboard Shuffle

It starts! Regular ezboard users will be aware of the ol' ezboard shuffle: people complain about the slow speed of their ezboard and it gets shifted to a different server until that server slows right down and then boards are moved again, etc. ad infinitum.

So I suppose that the news that they've started doing this on Yuku already - and remember, kids, it's still not finally released yet - should come as no surprise really. After all, they've been reeeeeaaaally slow over there for ages now, blaming users and indeed search engines for the treacle-like performance.

Hey ezboard! Here's a thought: how about getting some servers and more connectivity instead? Oh yes, that would mean spending money...

Posted by Captain Blue at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You know, it is really sad sometimes.

I was trawling through the wreckage that is Yuku's Support [sic] forum this morning and came across a worried ezboard Gold Community owner asking about migrating to Yuku. What caught my eye was this:

"We just paid our Gold Community for the next year (it was about $1,200 for the year). We're really active and growing daily, and we hope to grow further."

"I'm not a computer person, and don't understand much of the lingo that's kicked around these owner/administrator discussion areas."

Why?

Well I tracked down their ezboard Community, PaleoPlanet, and had a quick look at their community chest. They had indeed recently paid a whopping $1,121 for a year's Gold Community and indeed the board owner had topped it up by $121 just before renewal and there's presently $412 sitting there that they would never get back if they chose to leave ezboard even if it is unspent funds.

Their daily posts statistics are similar to our self-hosted vBulletin board. The difference, though, is that our board doesn't have mimits on how many pages of threads there are. Oh there's also the slight difference in hosting costs: ours is around 10% of theirs and of course there's no comparison between the features our members enjoy and those theirs endure.

So if any of their members reads this, do yourselves a favour and go to DreamHost instead and sign up for what is basically an unlimited hosting plan (in real terms) with none of that 20 page maximum nonsense at ezboard.

And if you use the promotional code EZSAVE50 you can even get $50 off your first year's hosting. Go on! Give it a try!

Posted by Captain Blue at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Remember how "Silent" Rob Labatt finally broke cover to thank his remaining staff for a "fantastically smooth release" when they 'pushed' yet another Yuku update?

Well, amongst other things:

• It didn't work in Opera.


• Opting out of receiving messages from boards is broken.


• Trying to change a user's active profile hangs Internet Explorer (and sometimes the whole PC).


• Trying to log out of Yuku does the same thing.


• Marking messages as Spam does nothing.


• Member management hangs people's browsers.


• Forum security is all to cock too.


• Oh and the new Admin. Menu has meant that all ezboard to Yuku migrations are on hold.

Posted by Captain Blue at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From the "Do As I Say, Not As I Do" department comes news that ezboard, Inc. staff are impersonating their customers by sending out messages apparently from community administrators:

"From: {board Admin}
To: {user}

{boardname} has moved to Yuku!

Please check it out here!

This was a community message from {board Admin} on {boardname}.

{board Admin's signature}"

"I don't like being impersonated, even if the reason is benign"

So ezboard, Inc. are impersonating a Yuku user by sending out these faked messages and as we've already seen, they also pretended to be celebrities by setting up Yuku profiles in a pathetic attempt to attract traffic to their display ads.

What a nice bunch of people.

Posted by Captain Blue at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You have to laugh! True to form, ezboard has deleted the topic a disenchanted customer started as I reported here.

Yes, try clicking the second link to "Worst Service Ever":

"The post you selected no longer exists. It may have been recently deleted."

Posted by Captain Blue at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)