Blue’s WordPress Blog

Well, well, well. There’s been very little movement over in Yuku-land over the past couple of weeks with the only apparent changes being some tinkering with user profiles and the replacement of “charisma” with simply postive/negative voting. Looks like there’s been a charisma bypass there…

So no important news about the much-heralded advertising revenue sharing - remember the DEMOfall presentation where Labatt bandied a figure of $3,000 to $5,000 per month being made to Yuku board owners - which appears to have been quietly dropped.

Now, advertising is the life-blood of companies offering free services to people. ezboard currently offers free boards that display adverts (with monies going to ezboard). They also have their Gold Community product where no ads are displayed but the board owners pay ezboard on the basis of ezboard’s claimed page views. And finally they offer individual users an ad-free experience in return for $12 a year which they call ezSupporter. This last product means that anyone buying ezSupporter doesn’t see ads on any ezboard and board owners of Gold Communities don’t get charged for ezSupporter page views either.

With the move over to Yuku, the ezSupporter was being dropped. This brought howls of anguish from ezboard’s customers especially as there was no gain in terms of any announcements about advertising revenue sharing either. ezboard users didn’t want to see ads and board owners saw that they’d be likely to be paying more due to the lack of ezSupporter page view credits (although it should be noted that ezboard still hasn’t released pricing for Yuku).

So imagine my surprise to find that ezboard’s CEO, Robert Labatt has made a U-turn in his latest WordPress blog entry:

“After a groundswell of questions and requests for ezSupporter to be continued in Yuku, we have decided to offer ezSupporter in Yuku.  I am not sure what we will call it, but it will deliver an ad free experience for those of you who want to subscribe to the Yuku version of ezSupporter.  I’ll give you more information on this as we figure things out over the coming weeks.”

Wow! That’s a significant change and I’m not sure how they’ll implement this in Yuku (unless it’s only in relation to users and not boards). But given the DEMOfall presentation, what will happen to advertising revenues? Well maybe Yuku/ezboard is discovering that potential advertising revenues won’t be as much as they’d hoped?

Interesting then for me to read a posting in another Yuku/ezboard-watch message board by a user this morning:

“No one seems to question the basic premise of sharing ad revenue. Has anyone put it to EZB to explain exactly how much volume will produce how much shared revenue? And who are the advertisers buying YUKU these days? EZB wasn’t worth diddly (flat out refused by some) to most advertisers when they had huge volume. YUKU needs to be pretty big if they’re going to sell any decent paying ads.

“I asked a buddy of mine who works for an ad agency where the money would be most likely found. He laughed in my face. I’m still trying to find out what the economics of internet advertising look like, but it’s pretty complex.

“The one thing I have found out is that YUKU is a joke to advertisers, most likely. MySpace has become toxic to most, and the “me too’s” out there are basically dismissed.

“My 2 cents.

“BE” 

Interesting times…

Last week, ezboard’s CEO, Robert Labatt, posted an update to his WordPress blog to try to calm down fears about one bit of JavaScript in particular that was being loaded any time someone visited a Yuku board or indeed the ezboard web site as well.

It’s called Urchin and it’s part of the Google Analytics software.

Now, Labatt writes:

“They do not slow the site down or touch any personal information. The information collected is anonymous and aggregated so no-one can determine any information at an individual level.”

That’s interesting. If you follow that link to the Urchin FAQs, you’ll see it says:

“Urchin has five different methods for identifying visitors and sessions, depending on available information. Of these, the patent-pending Urchin Traffic Monitor (UTM) is a highly accurate system that was specifically designed to identify unique visitors, sessions, exact paths, and return frequency behavior.”

Of more interest, perhaps, is this:

“5. Urchin Traffic Monitor (UTM): The last method for visitor identification available in Urchin is the Urchin Tracking Module. This system was specifically designed to negate the effects of caching and proxying and allow the server to see every unique click from every visitor without significantly increasing the load on the server. The UTM system tracks return visitor behavior, loyalty and frequency of use. The client-side data collection also provides information on browser capabilities.

“The UTM is installed by including a small amount of JavaScript code in each of your webpages. This can be done manually or automatically via server side includes and other template systems. Complete details on installing UTM are covered in the articles later in this section.

“Once installed, the Urchin Traffic Monitor is triggered each time someone views a page from the website. The UTM Sensor uniquely identifies each visitor and sends one extra hit for each pageview. This additional hit is very lightweight and most systems will not see any additional load. The Urchin engine identifies these extra hits in the normal log file and uses this additional data to create an exact picture of every step taken by the users. This method also identifies visitors and sessions uniquely so that return visitation behavior can be properly analyzed. While this method takes a little extra time to configure, it highly recommended for comprehensive detailed analytics.”

Now to me, the statement from Labatt seems to be contradicted by what the providers of the Urchin software claim. I wonder who I should believe?

Just as I’d finished writing a piece about Labatt’s WordPress Blog updates, along comes another. Be careful clicking that link, by the way…

This one, however, made me laugh out loud. Why?

Well, the subject is about visitors to web sites and forums and their anonymity or otherwise and it links to another great article on A List Apart. The latter notes recent attempts at using Wikipedia for other means, much as I touched on earlier.

Which, of course, is ironic given ezboard’s history both in terms of its use of Wikipedia and for ezboard’s attempts to access certain message boards (private and public) anonymously (and yes, before the faux-legal letters start coming in, I can back that up, publicly if desired…).

But what is also ironic is that that update by Labatt contains a hidden link back to Yuku’s stats. (provided by Mint) so that each time that blog entry is loaded, it appears to be tracked so ezboard can monitor who read it.

Here’s a partial source listing for the part of the entry before (and including) the link to the A List Apart article.

Yuku Tracking Object (you’ll need to view the text file or source code)

Of course, it could just be a bad cut and paste job: note the screen resolution, etc.

So we have another update today from Robert Labatt’s WordPress Blog on ezboard.

What I found interesting in that is the comment about significant downtime on ezboard, given that when they were scheduled to have a purge of old and abandoned ezboards on April 3rd, they experienced two server crashes. For the technically minded, Labatt noted it was “a dead hard drive or something”…

Apparently, there hadn’t been any significant downtime for “over two months” as well.

If you take time to check through ezboard’s Server Status Reporting forum you’ll see regular reports of their servers being down, at least as far as their users are concerned.

So why the disparity? Well over on Wikipedia, I’ve been having a small battle with ezboard who appeared to want to treat it as a place to advertise globally for free. If you take a look at the history for the entry about ezboard, you’ll see the extent of the changes made. The entries from “Regimemachine” and 68.167.201.10 are from the same person who works for ezboard.

One such change was the removal of a claimed uptime of 99.95% by ezboard. It’s that claimed uptime percentage that is intriguing.

99.95% uptime over a year is equivalent to, what, 4 hours and 23 minutes downtime in a year. That’s not much and I’m sure that if you were to speak to ezboard’s users, they’d have a very different story to tell. I expect if you aggregated all the servers together, it might be possible to get to that 99.95% figure claimed as there would almost certainly be times when some servers might be up but all the rest were down.

Just goes to show that all those quotes about statistics may be right after all…

Oh dear me. It seems that ezboard might be getting a bit tetchy with all the negative comments on their new, flagship product Yuku (which is still in beta … yawn).

Y’see some non-Americans have the audacity to use ezboards presently and have “foreign language” boards to boot. But Yuku doesn’t have that facility yet. I glossed over that point when reading Labatt’s WordPress Blog in which he says that Yuku only has English language support, but that they plan eventually to have support for other languages. Apparently ezboard presently supports three non-English languages.

phpBB seems to support, what, 60 languages?

vBulletin only supports English and German natively, but users have submitted nineteen language packs.

So anyway, back to Yuku. Remember how ezboard said that all ezboards would be moved over to Yuku in due course? Should you be worried if you’re presently running a French or Spanish (or any other language) ezboard? The answer, it appears, is a definite “yes”.

In that thread, ezboard’s staff say that yes, the user’s French and Spanish ezboard will have to move to Yuku. And what of my “tetchy” reference? Well this reply to the concern about Yuku offering foreign language support reads that way to me:

“I asked for a timeline on this and the answer was ‘eventually means eventually’.”

So after noting that some of ezboard’s staff appear to be “off-message” in relation to their new product, Yuku, I was amused to see another one departing from the Gospel According to Labatt.

In his 29 March update - which I mentioned here - Labatt states that there will be a non-JS version of Yuku (tricky on AJAX, I’d have thought, but there you go).

And yet, just a few days earlier on 26 March an ezboard staff member states in the help [sic] forums that she couldn’t promise an entirely JavaScript-free version. “That is probably unlikely”, she states.

Bearing in mind Yuku has been in development for what? A year now (if you read various posts during that time from Labatt)? Wouldn’t you think they’d have the intended feature set finalised at least for initial release? With all the fundamentals agreed.

Apparently not…