Blue’s WordPress Blog

You know, it is really sad sometimes.

I was trawling through the wreckage that is Yuku’s Support [sic] forum this morning and came across a worried ezboard Gold Community owner asking about migrating to Yuku. What caught my eye was this:

“We just paid our Gold Community for the next year (it was about $1,200 for the year). We’re really active and growing daily, and we hope to grow further.”

And the customer’s self-summation also caught my eye:

“I’m not a computer person, and don’t understand much of the lingo that’s kicked around these owner/administrator discussion areas.”

And that is the perfect customer for ezboard, Inc.

Why?

Well I tracked down their ezboard Community, PaleoPlanet, and had a quick look at their community chest. They had indeed recently paid a whopping $1,121 for a year’s Gold Community and indeed the board owner had topped it up by $121 just before renewal and there’s presently $412 sitting there that they would never get back if they chose to leave ezboard even if it is unspent funds.

Their daily posts statistics are similar to our self-hosted vBulletin board. The difference, though, is that our board doesn’t have mimits on how many pages of threads there are. Oh there’s also the slight difference in hosting costs: ours is around 10% of theirs and of course there’s no comparison between the features our members enjoy and those theirs endure.

So if any of their members reads this, do yourselves a favour and go to DreamHost instead and sign up for what is basically an unlimited hosting plan (in real terms) with none of that 20 page maximum nonsense at ezboard.

And if you use the promotional code EZSAVE50 you can even get $50 off your first year’s hosting. Go on! Give it a try!

Remember how “Silent” Rob Labatt finally broke cover to thank his remaining staff for a “fantastically smooth release” when they ‘pushed’ yet another Yuku update?

Well, amongst other things:

• It didn’t work in Opera.
• Opting out of receiving messages from boards is broken.
• Trying to change a user’s active profile hangs Internet Explorer (and sometimes the whole PC).
• Trying to log out of Yuku does the same thing.
• Marking messages as Spam does nothing.
• Member management hangs people’s browsers.
• Forum security is all to cock too.
• Oh and the new Admin. Menu has meant that all ezboard to Yuku migrations are on hold.

Well if that’s a “fantasically smooth release”, I’d hate to see a bad one. Still, this is Yuku/ezboard, I suppose…

From the “Do As I Say, Not As I Do” department comes news that ezboard, Inc. staff are impersonating their customers by sending out messages apparently from community administrators:

“From: {board Admin}
To: {user}

{boardname} has moved to Yuku!

Please check it out here!

This was a community message from {board Admin} on {boardname}.

{board Admin’s signature}”

Now I can understand it if the Board Admins. themselves want to send out a global announcement to their members, but this was not one of those messages. As the aggrieved board admin. writes:

“I don’t like being impersonated, even if the reason is benign”

Of course, a quick look at the Yuku ToU shows that impersonating another Yuku user (or indeed another person) is forbidden.

So ezboard, Inc. are impersonating a Yuku user by sending out these faked messages and as we’ve already seen, they also pretended to be celebrities by setting up Yuku profiles in a pathetic attempt to attract traffic to their display ads.

What a nice bunch of people.

You have to laugh! True to form, ezboard has deleted the topic a disenchanted customer started as I reported here.

Yes, try clicking the second link to “Worst Service Ever“:

“The post you selected no longer exists. It may have been recently deleted.”

You bet they want potential advertisers and investors to think the customer base is a happy one…

A fairly shocking discovery for anyone stupid enough to still be using ezboard would be the news that should their Gold Community go belly-up, their request for the backup - remember them? - to be used to restore it to its former glory might take longer than they might envisage and not go as smoothly as expected either.

Take a look at this message thread at the ezboard Help [sic] boards before ezboard, Inc. deletes it. On Monday, 9 July, one of the board admins. reports that a banned user has managed to hack their board and delete its contents. An ezboard Customer Services employee suggests opening a support ticket to request a restoral.

On Thursday, 12 July, another customer reports that they have done that but had heard nothing since. Another admin. also says:

 ”I’m worried about the restoral as well. It says that we’d be answered within one business day and we haven’t heard from them. If nothing happens before Sunday are we out of luck because they back it up every Sunday? We just need some action fast before everything is lost and we don’t know who to contact to see something done about it.”

Later the same day, another admin. states:

“We have sent in a couple of restoral requests this week and have received no response. I would normally be patient and wait but to my understanding this is a time sensitive issue. Backups are deleted every 2 weeks. So if the backup done this last Sunday happened after the attack then we’ll need the backup from the Sunday before which will be deleted this upcoming Sunday. I have thoroughly read the Restoral FAQ and according to it there is no reason that we should not be approved for a restoral. We were the victims of a malicious attack and we have proof that the person who did this was not any of the administrators but someone else.

“I don’t know if this is the proper place for this but since the restoral requests aren’t receiving any kind of response then we’re at a lost. Even if you can tell me what kind of time frame it takes for ezboard to grant a restoral would help. Its just waiting with no word on what is going on is really hard especially with such a time sensitive issue. Please understand our stress here. We’ve lost 3 years of great memories and valuable writings and to just sit and wait with no idea of what is being done about it is hard to do.”

On Sunday, 15 July a moderator from the board writes:

 ”…It’s been almost a week, and we’re well aware that the longer something takes, the less likely it is that we’ll get any significant amount of data returned to us. This is FOUR YEARS worth of memories…”

Of course as it was a Sunday, we know already that ezboard staff aren’t working, so it take until Monday, 16th before staff issue a holding reply.

Good news! On Thursday, 19th the ezboard staff report that the board has been restored! Except it hasn’t:

“I think that ezboard waited to long to give us our restoral and they backed it up after our hack.” 

Oh dear! Never mind, just before locking the thread on Friday, 20th, the helpful ezboard staffer makes an implied reference to the forthcoming weekend (i.e. no-one working) when they say:

“Please let the techs know via the ticket that is open, exactly what is still missing. I’ll keep an eye on the ticket and remind them on Monday to take another look.
There’s not anything more that we can do from here, so I am going to close this topic.”

So I suppose it’s not that surprising that one of the admins. then starts another thread saying:

“Dear EzBoard Re: CHARMED’S DESIGNATION

“Your lack of professionalism, and compassion have cost us our board. We begged, we pleaded, we did everything but bribe you and now we lost over 1 million posts, and almost 4 years of archived talent and information that meant the world to over 500 people!

“We are actively looking at other boards, as ezboard has proved that they cannot be trusted nor can they be relied on.

“It’s amazing you people can sleep at night. But, what do you care? As long as we pay our yearly Gold Community price, that’s all we’re good for.

“Thanks for nothing.

“Oh, and thanks for a LATE restoral which caused us to lose even MORE posts.”

At last! Someone’s waking up to smell the coffee!

The next day (21st July - a Saturday!), the same ezboard staffer writes:

“You shouldn’t assume, yet, that you’ve lost your board. The person who needs to look into doing a further restoral has been ill. We regret that there has been a delay as a result, but when the only person who is capable of troubleshooting this problem is unavailable, there isn’t much we can do but hope for your patience.”

[Emphasis added] 

Sheesh! So when ezboard, Inc. CEO Robert Labatt says back in September 2005 that they have 14,000,000 members and 500,000 communities, isn’t it worrying that they have only one staff member who can sort things out?

That staff member, having returned to work, then posted on 23 July, some two weeks after the initial request, to say that he had restored their community from the correct backup.

Not wishing to gloat - oh alright then, wishing to gloat - with my ’self-hosted’ message boards, I can choose from six daily backups to restore from should something happen to my message boards. And it’s oh so easy for me to do that. Likewise if I didn’t know how to set up and install phpBB, for instance, my hosts offer a one-click install and upgrade for it. How pleasant!

Look, I’ll be good to anyone who feels stuck on ezboard or Yuku: why not go to DreamHost instead and sign up for what is basically an unlimited hosting plan (in real terms) with none of that 20 page maximum nonsense at ezboard.

And I’ll tell you what: if you use the promotional code EZSAVE50 you can even get $50 off your first year’s hosting. Go on! Give it a try!

But not on Yuku.

One of the slowest-appearing and most-requested features for Yuku was chat. This is something that worked fairly well on ezboard and was a key feature as far as many customers were concerned.

So on 20 February 2007, it was finally rolled out onto Yuku to frankly mixed reviews.

Since then, the special Yuku chat server has been up and down more often than a whore’s drawers…

Then in April 2007, it disappeared for a few days whilst they tried to make it work better:

“The chat will be back in a couple of days.”

Still buggy, it was changed again in May and then disappeared again for a while in July.

And now, it’s down again. And of course, being Yuku from ezboard, Inc. when the server and chat system is up, it doesn’t exactly work for everyone either.

Now the chat system - when it does work… - is a nice feature to have and of course, there’ll be those who say “there’s no chat in vBulletin, so there!” but then that’s why you can easily add a rather nice chat feature pretty easily to your self-hosted vBulletin installation that doesn’t require a separate chat server (especially a Yuku Yoyo special) and that does integrate and work very nicely with vBulletin.

Maybe one day those poor unfortunates who battle on with that shower at ezboard, Inc. will wake up and smell the coffee…

Good grief! “Silent” Rob Labatt has finally broken his near nine month silence to post on Yuku - maybe he has to give birth to each post?

Of course, it’s a tad lacking in factual accuracy, but no change there:

“…Well done to the entire Yuku team for a fantastically smooth release…”

Who knows? Maybe having every single Yuku message board offline all morning is smooth by their standards?

[Update]

Oh dear! It appears that they didn’t actually bother testing it in Opera before the code push. Smooth…

Good grief! I happened to be visiting a couple of Yuku Blorums and wished I hadn’t. Even given ezboard’s history of making Yuku as slow as possible, they’ve now surpassed themselves.

It’s taking me longer than usual to write this post as every page on Yuku is taking an eternity to load.

After a week of apparently ignoring their Yuku users as usual (although reports of slowness had been around since mid-June), the “Yuku Team” finally acknowledged what everyone else was saying and made an announcement that yes, Yuku was slow and no, they hadn’t fixed it. The usual ezApologists were talking them up in the Support [sic] Blorum.

On 15th June, Yuku did say that:

“We currently have some network congestion causing slowness in our systems, we are working with our ISPs and network operators to fix it

Thanks for the report and patience”

They also said that:

 ”We’ve been able to determine this happens generally on monday mornings, we are currently investigating what’s causing the slowness. We appreciate your patience”

So users were reporting slowness generally, but Yuku staff were only noticing it on Monday mornings, presumably as they don’t work weekends… 

They also claimed it was those pesky search engines slowing things down:

“We have alot of crawlers on our site right now. We are trying to add a machine now.”

But isn’t one of the “benefits” of Yuku the “google friendly URLs and search engine optimized code”?

Why on earth are people still flogging a dead horse with Yuku? It can only be because it’s presently free but people are noticing board members leaving, etc. Maybe ezboard’s decision to have Yuku boards unlimited by size is a decision they’re beginning to regret (that is, unless it was a decision forced upon them by the feature set not supporting post culls? That’s just speculation as I don’t know if they can do this with Yuku as it stands).

Oh and still no news on the apparent disappearance of our money from ezboard…

If you’ve ever read this, you’ll know that one of the main issues I had with ezboard, Inc. was that despite us paying for a Gold Community that promised that “weekly backups and free restores protect your board” they never did protect our board, so that all the money in our Community Chest had been effectively paying just to have the adverts removed. Of course, given that many of us had paid for ezSupporter to keep the Gold renewal costs down, this was a moot point.

At the time when ezboard, Inc. lost a year’s data from our ezboard, we had around $566 in our Community Chest. If I recall correctly, one member of our board managed to have their small donation credited to a different board after we made the decision that ezboard losing our data was the final straw in terms of staying there, so we launched our own self-hosted vBulletin board in June 2005.

Despite ezboard having failed to live up to their side of the bargain, they refused to refund the unspent Community Chest balance to us, so we decided that we would just close all the discussion threads and simply renew its Gold Community status every October until all the Community Chest balance had been spent, rather than letting it lapse and have them display adverts that might gain them new revenue. With the ezboard discussion threads closed and with our self-hosted board going from strength to strength, the number of page views fell to the extent that our annual renewals have been the minimum $54 and we renewed in October 2005 and October 2006.

Now, you do the maths: I reckon that c.$566 - (2x $54) = ~$450, so that’s what we should have left in our Community Chest balance.

According to ezboard, Inc., however, the remaining balance we have is zero!

So not only does ezboard, Inc. refuse to refund us the money, but they now tell us there’s no money to spend anyway!

The ‘owner’ or “ezOp” of the board has opened a support ticket with ezboard two days ago as ezboard prefer keeping their activities and mistakes out of public view, saying:

“Where is my ezboard money?

I had over $500 after the last renewal was done, the balance now shows £0

Has someone stolen the money?

Please reply as soon as possible!”

We’ll see…