Blue’s WordPress Blog

I wonder if, with the second anniversary of the ‘launch’ of Yuku rapidly approaching, ezboard, Inc. are finally getting somewhere close to taking it out of beta?

As I mentioned earlier, an old ezboard account of mine has been migrated to a Yuku one without my agreement and without my acceptance of any revised terms of use, etc. Interesting.

Of course, the benefit of doing this to Yuku is that they can claim a larger number of users when trying to sell advertising - whether or not those users are actual, live and regular user accounts or simply dormant ones - and also serve ads. on the users’ profile pages.

Talking of which, I noticed that instead of the regular Google Ads block on a Yuku user profile, there was an ad being displayed for Justin Timblake’s “Futuresex Loveshow“, whatever that may be. Nice for all those users complaining about Yuku’s classification as a dating site by corporate website content blocking providers.

I also noticed that Yuku are once more using OASIS - “Open source Ad Serving and Inventory System” - rather than just the Google Ads they were serving.

Maybe this is a precursor to their finally beginning to share advertising revenues with board owners, as Robert Labatt, ezboard, Inc. CEO promised at the Yuku launch. I won’t hold my breath…

Back in April 2007, a Yuku user asked “so do we really have 1TB of image space?“ adding that it sounded “ridiculously high, and quite misleading” which was my conclusion too.

However, a Yuku representative replied, saying:

“I thought that there was not actually a limit… so I guess you could say 1TB.

“I have no idea on the actual answer.”

Excellent stuff…

Another Yuku representative then relayed what she had been told:

“You are limited in amount of pictures you can save in a album, but you are allowed to make an unlimited amount of albums. So it really is nearly unlimited.

“I believe we have the right to limit that at some point.”

It fell to another Yuku user to provide the definitive answer to the question - she pasted in part of an e-mail she had received when her board was moved from ezboard to Yuku:

“In addition, we have added some new features:
1. Search - fast and accurate search that works
2. Free Image Hosting - 1TB of storage to host jpegs, gifts, bmps, pngs
3. Posts Don’t Fall Off the 20th Page - unlimited storage of posts
4. Advanced Private Messaging - 4GB of storage for you, friends list, ignore list, mark as unread
5. Profiles With More Customization Options - (e.g. embed videos/music, choose from a list of ready-made designer skins, HTML blocks that you can edit any way you want, etc).”

[emphasis added]

There are further examples of the 1TB storage limit being mentioned in this message board post.

Now then, 1TB is 1,048,576 MB. So when someone apparently ran out of image storage, they raised a query on Yuku and were told that:

“Ok, it should be fixed now.

“Log out and then log back in for it to take effect. You should then have 30MB of space for images.”

[emphasis added]

Only 30MB? Of course as the Yuku Help Wiki has been down for a while now, I cannot check there what limit there really is on image storage size.

Fortunately, Yuku came to the rescue recently: an ezboard I once posted on has been migrated to Yuku and so that old ezboard account was migrated over as well - without my agreement, I hasten to add - and an e-mail (with the usual Yuku grammar errors) sent to me, telling me about Yuku:

“In addition, we have added some new features:
• Search: fast and accurate search that works
• Free Image Hosting: 30MB of storage to host jpegs, gifts, bmps, pngs
• Posts Don’t Fall Off the 20th Page: unlimited storage of posts
• Advanced Private Messaging: 4GB of storage for you, friends list, ignore list, mark as unread
• Profiles With More Customization Options: (e.g. embed videos/music, choose from a list of ready-made designer skins, HTML blocks that you can edit any way you want, etc).”

[emphasis added]

Compare that to the details sent out in April 2007. Yes, ezboard, Inc. has reduced the storage allowance by a factor of nearly 35,000!

Funny how they kept quiet about that…

Wahay! Quietly and quickly, my posting here about Yet Another ezboard Data Loss has done the trick and both our old board and the community chest have been restored.

I wonder how long it will take them to break things again?

http://wp.bluescrap.com/2007/07/04/ezboard-inc-wheres-our-money/

Well, within the last hour our community chest, which was finally restored at the end of July, has now disappeared again.

From an e-mail:

“After reviewing the transaction logs I have reasonably determined that the current balance now showing is correct. So, as of 7/24/07 your board has a $443.00 balance.”

Not any more, it hasn’t…

ezboard has managed to lose every single post from our Gold Community.

Way to go, ezboard! We’ll get our “ezOp” to request a restoration from the “Weekly backups and free restores [to] protect [our] board“.

We shall see…

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could find friends on Facebook without having to give out your webmail or Contacts information (which in my case don’t list all my friends anyway…)?

You see that’s the problem with Facebook: as a way of interacting with existing friends, it doesn’t really work quite as well as MySpace or LiveJournal, I don’t think.

And for those of us who use different e-mail addresses for different purposes, people entering their personal Hotmail/Gmail/etc. log-in details and/or providing access to their contacts database in the hope of finding existing friends on Facebook won’t find me anyway. I tend to use {service/company}@{one_of_my_domain_names} e-mail addresses to register with sites like this, so the e-mail addresses I give to my friends and associates to contact me would be useless.

The other aspect to this, of course, is that there’s the whole issue of trust and privacy with your contact database. Facebook may or may not be super-legitimate but, like Yuku used to do*, they do seek your contact database to search.

*The last time I looked, when registering at Yuku they suggested giving them your web-based e-mail account log-in details to search for friends already on Yuku. Given their history, trust isn’t something I’d associate with Yuku…

But then, as it’s an ezApologist doing it, I suspect that not only will they not be told to remove the inappropriate content, they’ll probably be praised by Alison “Let It Rip” Harrison again.

What am I talking about?

I’m referring to this user’s Yuku profile, where it says:

“R. Morris can bite me”

Now you may be able to hazard a guess as to whom that might be directed, but the Yuku Terms of Use do prohibit content that:

“Defames, abuses, harasses, stalks, threatens or otherwise violates the legal rights (such as rights of privacy and publicity) of others”

and

“promote physical harm or injury against any group or individual”

Not that I’d particularly want to bite anyone, especially someone who seems to think that “100% heterosexual males” aren’t into dating. Methinks he doth protest too much…

Do I detect rats leaving sinking ships?

Anyone who knows anything about the Internet will know that an important part of success online is a good product or service and similarly that what’s as important is the domain name you use. Vanchau Nguyen knew that, which is why when he was creating an easy to use message board system, he knew the domain name ezboard.com would be part of its success.

Fast forward seven years and ezboard, Inc.’s CEO Robert Labatt announces the next generation of ezboard will be Yuku. Not exactly a great name to start off with and they settle on an aboriginal word for ‘tree’ as the supposed genesis of the name.

Over the coming year, Labatt announced that all ezboards would eventually move to the new Yuku platform and that instead of pnnn.ezboard.com/bboardname they would become boardname.yuku.com. So when you make such a fundamental change, one of the key elements of your business has to be protection of your domain name, especially when you’re running your business largely on venture capital.

Indeed, your VC backers would probably want to see up to date risk assessments for the business and a key element of that assessment would be the domain names.

I wonder what they would make, then, of the recent change of registrant for the domain name Yuku.com.

If you lose control of the domain name, the new registrant could use it for their own ends or point requests for the domain to ‘dodgy’ content or to link farms, for instance.

So the recent changes to the registration of Yuku.com are very strange indeed and one wonders what ezboard’s backers would make of them:

yuku.com - 2007-05-18 13:46

Registrant:
ezboard Inc
564 Market Street
705
San Francisco, CA 94104
US
415 773 0400×255

Domain Name: YUKU.COM

Administrative Contact:
Labatt, Robert 
564 Market Street
705
San Francisco, CA 94104
US
415 773 0400×255

Technical Contact:
Gakovic, Ceco 
564 Market Street
705
San Francisco, CA 94104
US
415 773 0400×214

yuku.com - 2007-08-05 23:29

Registrant:
Expert In The House, LLC
650 Delancey Street
102
San Francisco, CA 94197
US
415 205 7465

Domain Name: YUKU.COM

Administrative Contact:
Labatt, Robert 
650 Delancey Street
102
San Francisco, CA 94197
US
415 205 7465

Technical Contact:
Gakovic, Ceco 
564 Market Street
705
San Francisco, CA 94104
US
415 773 0400×214

So who is “Expert in the House, LLC”? Well coincidentally, Robert Labatt used to sell networking DVDs through their web site http://www.expertinthehouse.com/about.html.

Maybe Labatt has plans for the domain name if things go wrong (or worse…) at ezboard, Inc.? Or maybe it’s Just Another Ezboard Cock-Up…

Much was made by ezboard about its community spirit.

Labatt referred to ezboard’s customers as the “ezboard Family” in the early days after they lost over a year’s posts from our board because they didn’t have proper backups.

One of the reasons for not leaving ezboard for self-hosted options was that you wouldn’t benefit from the ezboard community and ezboard “board hops”.

But I reckon this thread over on Yuku dispels any lingering doubts about the ezboard community spirit being in truth only so much hot air:

“I would add names to the ban list on ez to prevent known morons from even getting one nasty post in.”

and

“On ez gold communites it was a nasty trick of competiting communites to go pile into your board and drive your gold cost up. Others would harvest email addresses from profiles or harass members in PMs. Some steal pictures and repost elsewhere stealing bandwidth in the process the list goes on and on.”

and

“There are other dirty tricks competitors would pull to drive you renewal cost up, I’m not going to mention them here but we picked up on them and paid the jerks back with interest.”

That, by the way, from one of the ezApologist faithful…

So we’ll leave the last word to Alison “Let It Rip” Harrison, a Yuku staffer:

“We’ll look into adding a way of banning people without actually inviting them.”

Good stuff!

Ouch! One of the people running what appears to be a semi-official Yuku forum, Ben, has dared to question whether ezboard, Inc. should be continuing to release new features when the present Yuku software is so full of bugs.

It’s a very good point and immensely ironic given that the reason touted by ezboard, Inc. behind moving to a new platform from ezboard’s Smalltalk platform was that there were so many bugs in it and that fixing one bug would create another.

Maybe it’s not the development platform but the developers who are at fault?

So when Ben asks the developers to fix some of the long-standing bugs rather than reeasing new features, one of the long-term, sycophantic, happy-clappy ezApologists, “favafoyo” jumps in to say that users would be bored with the same feature set (even if it was working properly):

“if, for six months, nothing but bugs were fixed in pushes, users would become bored with the system”

Yes, you read that properly - users enjoy the excitement of buggy software!

When Ben calls them on this and worse still says “Having said that, if there are six months worth of bugs to be fixed, does anyone else find that concerning?!”, the ezApologist comes right back saying:

“I don’t enter the bug forum often but I have personally never seen a bug last very long… I think based on yuku’s bug fixing history, we can be sure they will be fixed in time.

Having said that, if there are six months worth of bugs to be fixed, does anyone else find that concerning?!

I hope you are joking..”

Yes Ben! How dare you question the mighty ezboard, Inc.!

A pity then to let the facts get in the way of a good argument, but then Ben is easily able to point out that bugs are left unanswered in the forum for months and that occasional workarounds are noted much later that are buggy themselves.

[Update, 9 August 2007]

Of course, it occurred to me that the Yuku Wiki says:

“Bugs: We fix bugs as soon as we know about them in yuku. So if you are “lucky” enough to find one, please drop by the developer forum and let the dev guys know about it, and then wait to see what happens.”
[Emphasis added]

Well it appears that the answer is often “nothing”.

Of course, it doesn’t then help when Alison “Let It Rip” Harrison says:

“Sometimes a fix for a bug gets put out, but it doesn’t fix the bug.”

So… technically, that’s not actually a fix then, is it? Or has ezboard, Inc. redfined the term ‘fix’? She continues:

“And other times bugs are left because major work is going to be made on the environment that the bug lives in soonish, and changing it prior to that would be a waste of time.”

Which to my mind is something different to fixing bugs as soon as they know about them. Left hand, meet right hand.