The utter shambles that is Yuku is further revealed by a series of posts.

We know that there have been significant “issues” with Internet Explorer and Yuku: back in March 2006, ezboard, Inc.’s CEO, Robert Labatt, wrote that “the best Yuku experience is on FireFox” before attempting to show that Internet Explorer’s market share was less than everyone else knows it to be. We’ll ignore for one moment that the best Yuku experience is leaving it well alone…

So in a further move to get more people to use Firefox - when Yuku had a help forum, it was littered with advice from ezboard staff to install Firefox - Labatt announced they’d written a Firefox extension to help Firefox users to use Yuku: maybe the GUI and structure of Yuku isn’t sufficiently easy to navigate without it, let alone the potential consequences of leaving your browser in a state where it allows anyone using it an “automatic login to your account”. Still, we already know that ‘ezboard’ and ’security’ don’t exactly go hand in hand…

So if you visit the special Yuku Firefox extension, it has a clickable link to “Install Now” … except that it doesn’t actually get installed now if you have the default security settings running.

Never mind: two days later Labatt posted a link to the Yuku Wiki page about it. No, no mention there of how to set up the browser to allow installation to take place properly. Mind you, that does show that there is actually a page in the Wiki about Firefox. Try going to http://help.yuku.com and simply type the word “firefox” into the search text box: as you type, it produces output that says “You searched for Firefox” but doesn’t produce any results. That’s because, despite what it says clearly in the page, you haven’t actually searched at all unless you click the “Go” button…

Meanwhile, in the absence of a ‘proper’ help forum, a user has started a thread in “The Lobby” about the extension not being installed despite repeat downloads. The ever-helpful ezboard staff answer:

“Firefox extensions will install themselves automatically, you don’t actually download them to your computer then attempt to install them after.”

and

 ”and it won’t actually load until you close firefox and restart it”

It finally takes a reply from another user to actually provide the answer:

“When I first installed it, a message appeared at the top of Firefox: “Firefox prevented this site from installing software…” Then there is a button that you can press to allow installations from Yuku.com. You then have to click on the install link a second time, and it should display a dialog. Then you can install.”

Ah yes! The benefits of a user to user help forum like you get with vBulletin, phpBB, InvisionFree, etc.

The user then suggests that should be in the Help Wiki; clearly a very sensible suggestion now that the Help Forum route has been abandoned by ezboard. Now apparently ticked off about this, one of the ezboard staff writes:

“I will add it to the wiki when I can, but in the interim, I thought my instructions in the firefox extension thread in the announcements forum were quite detailed:”

The what? Oh yes, a thread in the Lobby, which is just a general chat forum and not a help forum, as they continue to insist. And right on cue, the other ezboard staffer chimes in to say that that other Lobby thread says exactly what the user had said.

In that case, why isn’t in the official Help Wiki and why wasn’t that thread mentioned earlier, instead of giving out incomplete information? Of course, the answer is “because this is Yuku/ezboard.”

Wait a minute though: “when I can”? So Pinky had enough time to write a new announcement thread in the Lobby but chose to do so instead of editing the Help Wiki? The Help Wiki that Yuku users are told to go to to get help? What sort of bizarre prioritisation is that?

And the final irony? Yes, yet again Yuku/ezboard release code that hasn’t been properly QA’d: a user reported that the Yuku extension clashed with a weather chart extension. And the ezboard staffer’s reply is priceless:

“I couldn’t have guessed it was another extension!”

But at the end of the day, it’s the users’ fault for asking for help where they shouldn’t: after all, “the lobby is not a help forum”. Clearly not…