Well here we are at the end of 2006. Let’s see what it’s like for ezboard users now in such a momentous year.

Robert Labatt - no, not the Canadian gay porn star, the other Canadian one put in place to run ezboard, Inc. by his wife’s firm, Labrador Ventures - started off mentioning this great new upgrade when in May 2005, under his leadership, ezboard managed to lose a year’s worth of posts from our ezboard and countless others due to - they claimed - a hacker somehow deleting all the current data than managing to delete the so-called backups.

Then in September 2005 at DEMOfall, Labatt launched Yuku as being

“available today”

with

“more than 14 million registered users and 500,000 communities. Yuku is growing by more than 200,000 registered users and 6,000 communities a month.”

Of course, that was completely misleading: Yuku was a closed alpha test at that time with just a few testers using it.

By 7 March 2006, Labatt decided to use his WordPress blog on ezboard to announce Yuku:

“Yuku is message boards, multiples profiles, avatar and image hosting and blogs - all in one place and available with one login.”

OK, so Yuku is message boards, MySpace-like profiles (complete with MySpace-like T&Cs), limited avatar and image hosting, but not blogs any longer - that’s if a regular message board with closed forums counts as a blog anyway.

He goes on:

“We anticipate that Yuku will be ready for prime time in late 2006.”

Well you can’t get much later in 2006 than today … and Yuku’s still not “ready for prime time”.

He also wrote:

“During the next two months we will help you move your board over and build custom board skins.”

That should have taken us to 7 May 2006. Of course, there are custom skins written by ezboard staff and punters and these have been re-written to cope with code revisions. So yes, the frippery is done … ish. And just a handful of boards have been manually ported over to Yuku very recently.

“Later you can click a button and your board will automatically move to Yuku - archives, threads, members, banned users and all!”

“Later” appears to be “at some time way in the future” as it hasn’t happened yet!

“In the next few weeks there will an easy to follow board migration process available in Yuku.”

That’s a pretty major failure then: “the next few weeks” having turned into “maybe during 2007″.

In fact, Yuku is still way off being “read for prime time”. The infamous “charisma” system - that turned into good and bad votes and is now “kudos” - is still mentioned in the FAQs, the Help Forum is a wiki system with no official support forum. And what of the following:

  1. “Board backup features directly available to admins”;
  2. Advertising revenue sharing with board admins, this being the major feature pushed by Labatt in his DEMOfall presentation and the reason why Yuku was supposedly “better than free”;
  3. Pricing for boards without Yuku advertising - bearing in mind that you can’t add your own Google ads to your boards; and
  4. Pricing for the removal of advertising from your profile pages?

Who knows? Apparently not even the ezboard staff know these answers.

Mind you, if you want to know “what’s happening on Yuku” you could always visit “Silent Rob” Labatt’s Yuku board. Except he can’t be bothered to update that with his last post being on 1 November 2006.

Pathetic, isn’t it?