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.