Blue’s WordPress Blog

I was reminded today about a comment made by someone pretending to be Justin Timberlake (how childish is that?) about me and that made me wonder whether I should sue ezboard, Inc.

 I also wondered if Justin Timberlake knows that someone is pretending to be him with a profile page on Yuku (in common with many other celebrities - I mentioned this a while back).

Anyway, idle musings aside, there’s that comment on the Podtech web site from ’someone’ pimping that fake Yuku profile. No doubt the IP address that comment was posting from would be traced back to a certain ISP and a certain office, the one that also allegedly tried to hack another web site.

They write:

“Blue’s WordPress Blog is garbage. this richardhmorris guy has spammed child porn on yuku! what a loser!”

Now, everyone knows who really wrote that and as I said, the IP address used for the comment would trace right on back to the source. The comment about kiddie porn relates to a very dubious user profile page belonging to a user who was welcomed to Yuku by one ezboard customer services staffer in particular. When this was pointed out, that particular person became a tad irate…

So then. To sue or not to sue?

Well winning would be easy, but what’s the point of winning a pyrrhic victory? Incurring legal costs is all very well and good if you can recover them from the other party, but how much money is there left at ezboard, Inc.? Do they, to use the vernacular, “have a pot to piss in”?

Suffice it to say that I shan’t be suing them. You can take from that whatever inference you care to. I couldn’t possibly comment…

{stands back to avoid the rush}

http://support.yuku.com/topic/1748/t/Ezboard-to-Yuku-board-migrations.html

So, according to “Michelle”:

“The migration process is running very smoothly now … and we’re now able to move boards from ezboard to yuku in a very smooth process. The big backlog of boards is gone (having chipped away at them for the past few months) and now the queue is up to date.”

So does that mean that there are now 500,000 ezboards at Yuku like they claimed as far back as September 2005?

Well … no! Go to the Yuku domain search and marvel at the 6,200 or so apparent Yuku boards.

Ah … wait a minute: aren’t there a load of test forums, abandoned forums (you can’t delete a Yuku board) and test ezboard to Yuku imports? Take a look at the third largest board by membership - “OARfans.com” - and then notice the two listed below (as of today’s date). Yes, they’re test and re-imported version of the same one. Now go to page 623 of the Yuku listings and what’s that? Yes it’s another OAR re-import. I haven’t bothered checking for any others.

Maybe the explanation comes from Michelle herself:

“Of course, there are the occasional hiccups”

Ah yes. This is ezboard, after all.

Still, no doubt there’ll now be a mass move over to Yuku. Unless people are still waiting patiently for its beta status to be changed to final. Or maybe they’re waiting to hear about sharing advertising revenue as promised by Robert Labatt. Or maybe they’re waiting to find out about backing up their message boards to their home PCs (as promised by…). Or maybe they’re waiting to find out how much it’s going to cost them to have no adverts.

Oh and talking of “Silent Rob”, there’s still no sign of their CEO on Yuku since 9 April. Has he gone? Yuku staffers seem to be side-stepping that question recently in this thread.

There’s a very interesting thread going on over in the ezboard Help [sic] Forums.

ezboard has tweaked the settings on all boards - free or Gold - so the regular, non-ezSupporter members no longer have the option to increase the number of posts they see per page in a discussion thread.

“No big deal”, I hear you say.

Well actually it is: this affects all non-ezSupporters looking at free or Gold boards. So if your members decide to pay $20 into your community chest to fund your Gold board, they’ll have to load two pages every time they want to read a thread with more than 25 posts in it. And because they’re not ezSupporters, that means that their enforced post view setting will mean more page views per thread and let’s not forget how ezboard claims to calculate their charges for Gold boards: that’s right! Page views…

So at a stroke the costs of maintaining a Gold board on ezboard have suddenly gone up as has ezboard’s revenues.

And if your user would rather view more posts, they have to buy ezSupporter … which means more revenues for ezboard.

But what about the free boards? Surely that’s not a problem? Well it is given that they display adverts on the pages and of course the more page views that are generated by ezboard, the more adverts can be displayed and hence the more revenue that is generated for ezboard.

No wonder they chose not to make this a global announcement! They probably didn’t want the users or the advertisers to find out.

But of course, all of this is secondary to the real reason - apparently - that this was done. ezboard has been producing a load of error messages supposedly because they can’t handle the search engines spidering the ezboard servers now ezboard has made the post URLs search engine friendly. So that would be (yet another) problem of their own making…

The official party line is:

“This change was put out today. It is intended to reduce the number of 502 bad gateway errors reported on some boards and make sure that the ads are displayed in the correct places.”

Except when disgruntled users challenged this, they were met with this:

“I’m asking you to drop this subject in this forum, please. You have made known your opinions regarding it and that’s enough. “

Typical ezboard customer service [sic].

So are ezboard, Inc. trying to be helpful after they realised their systems can’t cope or are they just using that as an excuse to try to generate more revenue? You decide…