Well. A big update this one despite the lack of anything official from ezboard, Inc.

We’ll start with:

The rumours that ezboard, Inc. is for sale.

I’ve seen this suggestion on a couple of message boards now. Under Labatt’s stewardship, they appear to have pared back staff numbers and cost-cut in other ways - ezboard’s Moderators have said before that they don’t have staff working 24/7 or even at weekends (clearly the ezInternet keeps office hours) so that when ezboard falls over big-style as it did over the last weekend, it takes ages for them to get someone to go in and get it running again.

Having stated before that they weren’t fixing bugs or adding other features to ezboard - as ezboard fixing something would tend to break something else (their words, not mine), it then seemed curious that behind the scenes, they’ve started working on it again.

Then they decided to show statistics for every board on each home page. That applied to regular ezboards as well as Gold boards which infuriated a number of ezOps who didn’t want that information shown and indeed had paid for them to be removed as part of the Gold feature set. Being such scholarly individuals, ezboard wrote on 16 October:

“We do not intended [sic] to turn this feature off.”

When it was pointed out to them that ezboard are including Google Analytics on every single page on ezboard and Yuku and so detailed visitor information would already be known to ezboard, Inc. the resultant furore led to a quick volte-face by ezboard:

“ezboard has decided to turn off the mini-community profile until futher [sic]notice”

So why insist on displaying this information publicly? Unless it was part of the window-dressing for potential buyers? Likewise the frantic pruning of the server status forum showing slow and down boards that would tend to dispute the Labatt uptime claims.

And talking of swingeing edits, you have to laugh at ezboard’s attempts at editing out sections of the ezboard and Yuku Wikipedia entries. In the former case, they included the deletion of the alleged hack and the massive data loss and in the latter case they included the deletion of any mention of DEMOfall 2005 and the advertising revenue sharing claims from ezboard as to why “Yuku is better than free”.

What have they got to hide and from whom otherwise?

“Excellent Uptime”

Still on the subject of swingeing edits, ezboard has been pruning the server status forum on ezboard’s help area recently, no doubt as part of the whole window-dressing thing going on. After all, who at ezboard wants to see people complaining their boards are down? Maybe that’s why the Yuku help board was pulled by ezboard.

As I mentioned earlier on, on Sunday afternoon, ezboard.com fell over. Completely. Needless to say, it was the customers who noticed it first as ezboard, Inc. has admitted that they don’t have people working weekends. When alerted to this, a staff member paged someone to go and fix it. ezboard was apparently down from around 3pm but no-one at ezboard was aware of that before until around 4.30pm. Others noted that Yuku was also down for part of the time. Around 7 hours later, Jennifer managed to post an announcement that confirmed that they were still trying to fix things. As I understand it, the system finally came back up at around 1.30am on the Monday morning.

But of course by the time Labatt decides it’s worthy of a post on his CEO Blog, written using an old and insecure version of WordPress (how like ezboard not to be concerned about security…), the facts have been amended to ‘ezfacts’:

“there was an ezboard outage on Sunday evening”.

Now, what’s more interesting than the usual misinformation is that:

  • Labatt felt he needed to post in his CEO blog about this;
  • Labatt felt the need to state that it was not a hack or attack; and
  • Labatt states it was a hardware failure and they’ve used “stand-by” hardware rather than new equipment.

So if it was a hardware failure, what does he mean by this:

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

He states that they can’t and don’t have any way of hot-swapping equipment in terms of a failure, so how can they prevent future hardware failures? Maybe they doth protest too much?

Oh and it wouldn’t be a Labatt CEO update without him trying to spin with an outrageous claim that they have “such excellent uptime”…

That Firefox Extension

Instead of concentrating on getting the ezboard to Yuku import feature completed, they decided to work on the frills again and release that Firefox extension. But typical of Yuku, they managed to overlook that Firefox version 2 was being released and, of course, the Yuku Firefox extension doesn’t work with Firefox version 2.

The dictionary according to ezboard, Inc.

Now we all know that ezboard’s employees aren’t exactly the pick of the bunch when it comes to spelling and grammar, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that they’ve continued trying to create new words - they coined the term ‘blorum’ already, remember?

New in the ezdictionary is the verb ‘kudo’. After they tried using “charisma” to give people positive or negative votes, they changed that to just good and bad votes before hitting the Prozac and making it good votes only. This was then charged to ‘kudos’ and again the Prozac seems much in evidence because rather than concentrating on their core product - the ezboard message boards - their latest and greatest code push has been to add a new menu at the bottom (as well as the top) of some boards like the Developer Blog where Brain hangs out. Oh and:

“Kudos in more places (like posts and threads)”

Yes, they want the Yuku users to be a happy-clappy bunch and award kudos to more stuff. So of course there’s now a link called “Kudo” to “Kudo-this”. The mind boggles. And if no-one’s been daft enough to ‘big-up’ a thread it shows that it has “0 Kudo”, another word that only exists at Yuku.

What is a beta test for, then?

Whilst our minds are being boggled by Yuku, how about this post in the ezSupporter help forum?

“ezGoalieAunt
ezModerator
ezSupporter
Posts: 4994
Posted: 10/25/06 19:45
New Post Re: May not be the right place to ask….MSIE 7 We haven’t heard much feed back from ezboard users that are using IE7 and to my knowledge none of the mods have downloaded IE7 yet, so we really don’t know of any work arounds to any issues that may come up.”

So let’s get this right: you’re developing a new Internet-related product and none of the staff has downloaded Internet Explorer 7, which will be pushed out to Windows users as an automatic update sooner rather than later (on 1 November, apparently)?

More frequent code pushes

So after this latest Yuku code push, people have been having issues with posts going missing, 404s, etc. But what’s bizarre here are two things: firstly, they’ve decided to push bug fixes as an when rather than going for weekly code pushes; and secondly Rob Labatt is actually posting on Yuku! Wonders will never cease!