Blue’s WordPress Blog

OK, time to help ezboard with their ultra-extended beta testing of Yuku again. I got banned last time I helped out, but there you go.

Looks like no-one else has noticed that their super new version 2.0 is easily confused:

Ignore for one moment the raw HTML up there instead of a hyperlink and instead look at the last comment title and time. It’s telling us that the last post was in the thread with a title starting “Inviting people o…” and that was by “DemisMom” at 4:53:10 today.

But if you click through to that forum, you’ll find this:

Oh dear! The last comment was indeed by that person and at that time, but it was actually a comment to a thread entitled “What are tags?”

More quality coding by ezboard, Inc.!

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:

1. There are no real ezboard boards imported yet
2. They’re worried about overloading either the ezboard or Yuku networks (or both) during the import; and
3. 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!

Robert Labatt, ezboard, Inc.’s CEO, has made a somewhat bizarre entry on his Yuku blog my publishing what appears to be a short review of the Sonos wifi music distribution system.

Why is it bizarre? Well, Labatt’s Blog is entitled “what’s happening on yuku” and every other entry concerns that subject matter. So why would he suddenly post an off-topic item more akin to a personal blog entry?

Maybe it’s to show what blogging on Yuku will be like; after all, he recently posted that his developers had broken the blogging element in the new message boards system so that any blog-type Yuku boards (Labatt’s included) would remain using Yuku version 1.0 (sounds like a release, but it’s still late-alpha/early-beta) rather than go to version 2.0.

That doesn’t sound likely though.

Now let’s bear in mind that for Labatt and ezboard, online advertising is the great be-all and end-all. What does Labatt say led him to try Sonos?

“A few weeks ago I was at an evening event where they had the Sonos playing. I talked to the guy who was using it and he gave me a quick demo. The short story is that it looked like a really easy solution to my problems.”

Now a Sonos system isn’t exactly cheap so that quick demo must have been really something as Labatt says he then spent two weeks thinking about it before placing an order.

What else does he say?

“I did not mean for this to sound like an advertisement (now that I am proof reading it…it does sound a bit addy, sorry). I just wanted to share with our Yuku family what I have learned about solving my music listening problem.”

We’ll ignore for now the “family” bullshit - it’s the same crap he churned out when ezboard lost a year’s data from their ezboard system last year - and note that he’s conscious the ‘review’ sounds like an advert. Even though he claims to have ordered the system himself - note he doesn’t claim to have bought it, nor does he say which system he installed and how much it cost him.

And then my attention was drawn to this Internet marketing entry (watch for all the link spamming comments at the end).

“The deal also involves banner ads and calls for Sonos to give [the blogger] a demo unit.”

The blogger in question is Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist, rather than a music journo or someone from that industry. Sounds familiar? Labatt, after all, became CEO after his wife’s company provided venture capital to ezboard. Still, at least Wilson is up-front with the reason he has the Sonos system.

So that’s a one-off then, is it? Er… No.

Here’s another instance:

“The folks at Sonos offered to send me a [starter] set to try out to see for myself.  For those not familiar with the product, it is trying to be to the home stereo what the iPod was to the Discman.  So I got their shipment and following is my take, which largely mirrors Fred Wilson’s conclusion, which is that it rocks as a product even though it is pricey and has a few shortcomings…”

“Rags” is at least connected with digital media, though.

There’s another interesting post about Sonos that mentions something that Labatt curiously omits from his ‘review’: that the Sonos system will not play any DRM-protected music, i.e. it won’t allow you to play any tracks you downloaded from iTunes, Napster, etc. From the Sonos FAQ:

“Music downloaded from online music services such as iTunes, Napster, MusicMatch, SonyConnect, Rhapsody, WalMart, and MTV are copy protected using Digital Rights Management (DRM) or use proprietary audio formats which cannot be played back on a Sonos Digital Music System.”

As usual, I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions from all this.

And finally … I think I’ll be using this quote from Labatt from time to time in my “nastygrams”:

“Being a problem solving kinda guy…”

In the Yuku Help [sic] Forums a loyal ezboarder has quoted the infamous 3 June 2005 message by Labatt - just after they’d wiped out a year’s posts and mysteriously ‘lost’ all the claimed backups we were paying for - where he says that the new community software (or Yuku as it’s since been revealed) will allow community backups by the board owners themselves in addition to the famed ezboard ones.

As there has been silence from ezboard on this feature ever since, she asks if that will still happen (it is a pretty categorical statement by Labatt, after all, and let’s not forget he also mentioned backups along with advertising revenue sharing at DEMOfall).

The reply from jennifer - my old mate at ezboard - was that she has no idea (as usual) but she asked Labatt to address this point in his next blog update.

We’ll see…

In order to quell some “mass hysteria” on ezboard about its terms of use in relation to ownership of copyright, ezboard, Inc. moved swiftly and re-wrote the terms of use for ezboard and Yuku.

Now bear in mind that ezboard, Inc. threatens to take legal action against people copying posts made on ezboard to other message boards or web sites, how do you think they’d re-write the relevant section? Pay a lawyer to re-write it or rip them off from someone else by copying them from elsewhere?

Here are the sections from the recently amended MySpace terms:

“MySpace.com does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) that you post to the MySpace Services. After posting your Content to the MySpace Services, you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Content, and you continue to have the right to use your Content in any way you choose. By displaying or publishing (”posting”) any Content on or through the MySpace Services, you hereby grant to MySpace.com a limited license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content solely on and through the MySpace Services.

“Without this license, MySpace.com would be unable to provide the MySpace Services. For example, without the right to modify Member Content, MySpace.com would not be able to digitally compress music files that Members submit or otherwise format Content to satisfy technical requirements, and without the right to publicly perform Member Content, MySpace.com could not allow Users to listen to music posted by Members. The license you grant to MySpace.com is non-exclusive (meaning you are free to license your Content to anyone else in addition to MySpace.com), fully-paid and royalty-free (meaning that MySpace.com is not required to pay you for the use on the MySpace Services of the Content that you post), sublicensable (so that MySpace.com is able to use its affiliates and subcontractors such as Internet content delivery networks to provide the MySpace Services), and worldwide (because the Internet and the MySpace Services are global in reach). This license will terminate at the time you remove your Content from the MySpace Services. The license does not grant MySpace.com the right to sell your Content, nor does the license grant MySpace.com the right to distribute your Content outside of the MySpace Services.”

Now let’s look at the updated section from the ezboard terms:

“ezboard.com does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) that you post to the ezboard Services. After posting your Content to the ezboard Services, you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Content, and you continue to have the right to use your Content in any way you choose. By displaying or publishing (”posting”) any Content on or through the ezboard Services, you hereby grant to ezboard.com a limited license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content solely on and through the ezboard Services.

“Without this license, ezboard.com would be unable to provide the ezboard Services. The license you grant to ezboard.com is non-exclusive (meaning you are free to license your Content to anyone else in addition to ezboard.com), fully-paid and royalty-free (meaning that ezboard.com is not required to pay you for the use on the ezboard Services of the Content that you post), sublicensable (so that ezboard.com is able to use its affiliates and subcontractors such as Internet content delivery networks to provide the ezboard Services), and worldwide (because the Internet and the ezboard Services are global in reach). This license will terminate at the time you remove your Content from the ezboard Services. The license does not grant ezboard.com the right to sell your Content, nor does the license grant ezboard.com the right to distribute your Content outside of the ezboard and its sublicensees Services.”

Hmm! Now let’s look at the revised Yuku terms:

“Yuku.com does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) that you post to the Yuku Services. After posting your Content to the Yuku Services, you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Content, and you continue to have the right to use your Content in any way you choose. By displaying or publishing (”posting”) any Content on or through the Yuku Services, you hereby grant to Yuku.com a limited license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content solely on and through the Yuku Services. Without this license, Yuku.com would be unable to provide the Yuku Services. The license you grant to Yuku.com is non-exclusive (meaning you are free to license your Content to anyone else in addition to Yuku.com), fully-paid and royalty-free (meaning that Yuku.com is not required to pay you for the use on the Yuku Services of the Content that you post), sublicensable (so that Yuku.com is able to use its affiliates and subcontractors such as Internet content delivery networks to provide the Yuku Services), and worldwide (because the Internet and the Yuku Services are global in reach). This license will terminate at the time you remove your Content from the Yuku Services. The license does not grant Yuku.com the right to sell your Content, nor does the license grant Yuku.com the right to distribute your Content outside of the Yuku and its sublicensees Services.”

Now, do these look only-ever-so-slightly similar to the MySpace terms? Apart, obviously, from the music elements (as neither ezboard nor Yuku presently offer music storage facilities), they do seem remarkably similar, don’t they? I know ezboard are desperately seeking to have Yuku become a MySpace clone, but this is taking the piss! Oh and in this post on an ezboard message board, the poster claims to quote from an e-mail from Robert Labatt, ezboard, Inc.’s CEO, in which he is claimed to have admitted that:

“Our new TOU is a copy of the MySpace TOU.”

I wonder what MySpace will have to say about this?

Well it’s been almost a fortnight since I last checked in on Yuku to see how things are going and yes, they’ve finally started getting things moving even if that’s ‘moving’ in the glacial sense.

Yuku Version 2.0

Firstly, there was the announcement on Labatt’s Yuku Blog that “new board pages” had been released. No, I’ve no idea what that means either. And apparently:

“About Yuku Blogs…

“We have not created the new blog pages or mangement screens - yet. Blogging does not exist in the new system. As a result all Yuku domains that are blogs will remain in the old system for now. The new blog features are bing speced and we will be building the blog functionality in the next few weeks. We really want to get back to one code base and one product, reliably and as fast as possible.”

So between the alpha and the supposed beta, the blog element has been left until later to code. I see. And whose fault is it that they have more than one code base being developed? ezboard’s, of course. Perhaps not one of their better decisions…

Still, it’s much faster … isn’t it?

“What is different about the new boards?

“In the process of building the new boards we made significant improvements to the way the boards work and their speed of delivery by streamlining CSS, HTML and back end systems.”

Time for another Yuku speed test. The last one I did was on the old version 1.x so I was expecting big improvements, what with all the promises from ezboard’s CEO, Robert Labatt. I did my little speed test at around 7.20pm BST today, i.e. 11.20am at Yuku’s San Francisco base. I emptied my Firefox browser, closed it down and restarted it then started a stopwatch the moment I went to http://help.yuku.com then to its “Help forum and potential bugs” forum and then to its first non-sticky thread. At each point I waited for the page to be loaded before clicking on and stopped the clock the moment that last thread was finished loading.

35 seconds, compared with 38 seconds last time. w00t!

Then the same on my vBulletin forum on one of 1&1 Internet’s shared servers. Loaded the board’s home page, then clicked on a public forum and then the first non-sticky thread (which had more avatars, etc. to load than the Yuku one).

11 seconds, compared with 10 seconds last time.

So no improvements in speed then - quelle surprise!

What have they done, then? Well they have modified the CSS and HTML classes so that those oh-so-precious domain skins moidified by board owners may or may not work - in the meantime, they all default to the basic Yuku skins. Amusingly enough, those Survivor Sucks members still aren’t seeing the new message board system yet: presumably Labatt and his cronies don’t want to upset them by making them re-do their board customisation. Maybe he’ll get one of his “elves” to do it for them…

Oh and they’ve got rid of the “Community, Profiles and Media Sharing” claim that I discussed here. It’s been replaced by “Next Generation Message Boards”. Uh-huh. Nope, sorry - I can’t see they’re “Next Generation” at all: more like ezboard trying (and failing) to play catch-up with the likes of vBulletin.

Photobucket Integration

Labatt proudly mentions their plans to do further integration with other photo-hosting providers - presumably because of the very small web space allocation that Yuku board owners will have. Unfortunately, according to this post in the Yuku Help [sic] forums, the Photobucket folder structure is incompatible with the Yuku system. Oh dear. So the custom API doesn’t work with Yuku (or more likely, vice versa). Oh and if you’re quick to see the skin currently applied to the Yuku Help [sic] forums, you’ll be able to note the lovely way the link to hide individual posts overlays the Reply ID permalink - more good coding in evidence.

Another Yuku Release?

Two days later, Labatt writes another update heralding a release of Yuku. Another one? Who can tell, especially as I mentioned earlier that not all Yuku boards have been moved from the old Yuku to the new one - let alone any ezboards!

The update once more mentions the Photobucket integration - I think they’re proud of the (broken) feature - before going on to mention the usual Yuku theme:

“We are working on speed improvements now.”

{sigh} I thought he’d claimed they’d fixed the speed issue (many, many times…).

One feature he mentions briefly is this one:

 ”2. tagging for board lead posts”

What does this mean? Well my old friend Michelle helpfully provides some detail over on the Yuku Help [sic] Forums here:

“Tagging here at yuku will allow users inside a forum to search for specific topics on any given tag. It is up to users to create meaningful tags though. For some communities tags will be an informal, fun thing. For communities like the help forum, or for other FAQ forums, tags will be a huge searching enhancement.”

Excellent! One of their developers is particularly proud of this feature:

“you will see other boards copy this soon”

No, I doubt it as it clutters the board layout and is almost completely useless (oh and LiveJournal has had post tagging for ages, so it could be claimed that you copied them… Likewise, Movable Type has tagging too in version 3.3). So why do I think that tagging on Yuku is useless? Maybe because it is. On vBulletin, for instance, there are two levels of searching as opposed to the one on Yuku. Note that they’ve implemented the tag system on the Yuku Help [sic] Forums. However in the opening page at http://help.yuku.com if you enter one of these tags into the Search Domain box, it doesn’t actually return any results from the tags…

Version 1.0 to 2.0

Another few days later and another post from Labatt apologising for the new release breaking the version 1.0 skins.

He also says:

“We have worked hard to minimize the changes and at the same time give you a much much faster, cleaner and easier to customize message board service.”

Er, didn’t he say earlier that they were working on fixing the speed issues? And yet now he’s claiming the same code has fixed it already (despite my own experiences and speed test)? When will he ever learn? Perhaps he doesn’t actually use Yuku - and who could blame him?

And Finally…

A curious post from Labatt about a “Nigerian style scam” involving someone sending personal messages to other Yuku users. He writes:

“Does having a Nigerian style scam on Yuku mean that we are finally a somebody?”

Er, hardly! We’ve seen these scams on message boards all over the place for years - I’m just amazed someone could be bothered to wait long enough to use Yuku for any purposes, let alone a bulk PM scam!

I’m looking at the Yuku homepage right now for “Yuku - Message Boards 2.0″.

The main image to the site - they have a revolving image script running - shows three pregnant women, presumably this is advertising a feature of the Profiles element of Yuku where they’re trying to compete with the likes of MySpace. When you sign up to Yuku, the information they require apart from a username and password is ASL: Age, Sex, Location. Your profile page by default also shows your sexual orientation and what you’re on Yuku for (including “Fun”, “Dating”, “Relationships” and “Meet People”).

The Communities element is the message board system - currently lacking many of the features of cheaper offerings elsewhere - which will eventually include the migrated ezboards.

But what about this Media Sharing element? No, I can’t actually work out what that means. When you sign up to Yuku, your profile comes with 9.54MB of space for image files only, i.e. no music, no video. And, er, that’s it. Bearing in mind a free Photobucket account comes with 1GB of storage for images and video (images up to 1MB and video up to 100MB), I’d hardly call Yuku’s pathetic offering “Media Sharing”.

But then, what else would you expect from ezboard, Inc.?

Huzzah! Well it’s been almost a month since his last update, but Robert Labatt has finally updated his Yuku Blorum - their term, not mine… - to announce the next major release of Yuku, scheduled for next week.

In a triumph of understatement, he writes:

“…I am betting that there will be one or two bugs we don’t find…”

I think that’s a pretty safe assumption

I’m looking forward to this one as no doubt this will the the super-fast version they’ve been promising for months now… I wonder if it’ll actually show the posts people make (currently showing up as a major issue on the Yuku Help [sic] Forums so empty of Yuku staff these days).

There’s been an interesting thread developing over on the Yuku Help [sic] Forums over the last few days about what to do when adult content is found on Yuku.

Needless to say, there’s been no comment by the Yuku staff as they’re hardly ever around in there anyway. So the discussion mentioned both message boards and individual’s profiles (as I hinted at previously, where people have ‘adult’ avatars).

Now, the Yuku Terms of Use currently say this about adult content on message boards:

“You agree to use the Service only to send and receive messages and material that are legal, proper and related to the particular domain on which you are participating. While Yuku.com prohibits specific conduct and Content in connection with the Service, you understand and agree that you nonetheless may be exposed to such conduct and⁄or Content and that you use the Service at your own risk.”

and

“Specifically, you agree not to publish Content that: …

• Exploits people under the age of 18 in a sexual or violent manner…”

That’s it. Of course the reason behind this is that Yuku doesn’t want to discourage people from posting adult content - after all, ezboards have been doing this in breach of the ezboards ToU for years - and of course ezboard themselves are always happy to serve adult advertising on their non-Gold boards.

So anyway, the discussion was going fine in the usual manner of Internet forum discussions … and then the Survivor Sucks members arrived. Now, you’ll remember that Survivor Sucks is a particularly cossetted subset of the ezboard (and now Yuku) customer base. It appears that despite being one of the busiest boards on ezboard, they pay nothing for their Gold status post the May 2005 data loss. Furthermore, two days after promoting the move from ezboard to Yuku, $7,943 was withdrawn from their community chest by “-Anonymous-” - you draw your own conclusions from that.

The Sucks members have now taken over the thread somewhat, leading one Yuku customer to write:

“I, for one, am appalled at the mockery this has become. This should be a serious discussion about protecting the children of the internets who innocently participate at Yuku, and not an open forum for rebellious hoodlums to post distasteful commentary and pictures.

“You disgust me.”

Another writes:

“Is this the new direction of Yuku? If so then I for one will have no part of this atrocious and immature behaviour and will be moving my board elsewhere.”

Finally, the customers begin to wake up and smell the coffee!

No, it’s not the new direction Yuku’s going in. It’s the direction Yuku was intended to go in the first place…

[edit: awww! Someone at Yuku finally woke up to the way the thread was crawling along - rather than running away - and they've hidden it away in the Vault, the section of the Help [sic] Forums that only the staff and moderators can see]

[edit 2: ...aaand it's back. I didn't realise I held so much sway with them! One reason why the Sucksters have gone in there is that one of them apparently received a message from Yuku asking them to remove a supposedly indecent avatar: it shows a woman's body in a T-shirt with the boobs expanding... Ye Gods!]

“…but you can never leave.”

Some people who’ve had the dubious pleasure of trying out Yuku (and the fabulous Help [sic] Forums) have decided to vote with their feet and leave.

Ah. No, you can’t leave Yuku apparently. I suppose it would make Yuku’s claimed userbase figures look bad for those all-important potential advertisers. And no, I’m not making that up: you really cannot delete your Yuku account.

Take a look at this thread on the Yuku Help [sic] Forums. Someone wants to leave Yuku, so they want their account deleted. The helpful staff say:

“you cannot at this time. You can only delete a profile on an account.”

OK. So how does the user delete their profile, they ask? A day or so later - in the absence of any help from ezboard staff as usual - another user points them to their profile and where they can find a link to delete the profile (more of this later…). But our helpful Yuku staff member chimes in with another terse response:

“You cannot delete your account.”

Yes, you already wrote that - it doesn’t answer the question: try reading what the user actually asked…

And then this ezboard staff member gets sarcastic with the user (as usual):

“we’ve only told her similar in every other thread she’s posted in. Can’t help if people don’t read the answers given to them - and read the answers given to others.”

Good to see they’ve migrated the customer services skills over from ezboard to Yuku with no change.

The user’s issue remains unresolved at the time of writing.

Now, what about deleting the profile if you can’t delete the account? You can’t. I tried this with the profile I migrated over from ezboard to Yuku and got this:

“Delete Profile

“Step 1 - Create another Profile

“Things you need to know about Profile deletion:

1. In order to delete this profile you must make another…”

Yes, you did read that correctly. Unbelievable, isn’t it? I swear, you couldn’t make this up!