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It’s funny how the staff at Yuku just can’t help but tell bare-faced lies. Presumably this is now part of KickApps’ focus on Customer Service…

The Usual Suspect this time is “Let It Rip” Alison - no surprise - who seems to get her facts completely wrong for some reason.

Someone decides to have a well-written moan in the Support forum. Another disgruntled board Admin. mentions the Wikipedia entry for Yuku:

“…Although yuku administrators (as distinct from board administrators like you and me) say yuku isn’t a social networking site, migrants from ezboard notice the networking features first. Wikipedia’s article on yuku classifies it in the category “Social networking sites.” Make of that what you will….”

Alison Harrison then replies to that point to dismiss it:

“Wikiepedia [sic] is a system that allows anyone to edit it (except those who work with the company), so if the categorisation is incorrect you could easily go and fix it The majority of edits on it have been made by people who don’t actually use yuku.”

Ah OK. Let’s look at each of those points in turn:

“a system that allows anyone to edit it (except those who work with the company)”

When they were both still working at ezboard/Yuku, both Robert Labatt and Brian James (Regimemachine) were regular contributors to the article, although a number of their edits were reverted by other editors to remove the clear advertising slant they sought to apply (especially Labatt), which is against the Wikipedia advertising policy and guidelines. So that statement is untrue.

“if the categorisation is incorrect”

Nicely played, that one: note the use of ‘if’. Long term users will recall that the first element that ezboard concentrated on when working on Yuku was the user profiles and blogs before switching development resources henec the social networking categorisation. This focus was why many people declared Yuku to be a MySpace clone at the time. Of course, the Wikipedia article also categorises Yuku under “Forum hosting”.

“The majority of edits on it have been made by people who don’t actually use yuku”

More untruths. As they well know, I am Admin. of a Yuku board that was migrated over to Yuku recently. As they refuse to refund the community chest funds, I will still be a Yuku user until that board’s Gold Community status expires in a number of years time (or they fold, whichever comes soonest). Also as anyone who has read this blog will know, I have been using Yuku in various guises since it was ‘released’ to an open beta in 2006 and despite Yuku staff banning my accounts there (including the ones they themselves created for me…).

A large number of recent edits have been made by “Askeladden2006″ who has been on Yuku since the early days and is very much a satisfied customer (despite her own board being down for a period last week).

Most of the technical history and feature edits were made by “JamminBen”. Ben was an early adopter too, having being very active in the semi-official ezboard communities before Yuku was released to open beta. Indeed Ben was very regularly posting assistance in the Yuku Support Forum and helping out users on Yuku’s flagship boards like the JJB. With a strong interest in blogging and content management system, Ben was regularly pushing the software to see what it could deliver and actively working with its features. At one point, I was wondering if he’d been taken onto the Yuku staff, he was so ominpresent there!

–ooOOoo–

So there you go: Yuku - never letting the facts get in the way of a good argument…

… no apparent way for an Admin to change the status of a member to a Moderator or Admin. or indeed to demote someone.

The Yuku Help wiki is of no use whatsoever, needless to say.

And yes, the board was indeed down all day again.

Well it looks as though Yuku - powered by KickApps - is living up to expectations.

Our old ezboard, migrated to Yuku on Saturday (but not working properly then) was down most of the day on Monday and came back up for a short while in fully-functioning form. Well, I assume it was working because we don’t want people posting there so no-one tried.

Anyway, we managed to ascertain how long it will be ad-free:

“Contributor Settings
This community disallows contributions.
This community has Ad-Free status until Jan 4, 2016 (2877 days left)”

We’ll see.

But as expected the board has been offline all day today, showing the Yuku magician graphic. It really is amazing … just how useless these people are! And looking at the Yuku support [sic] forum, it’s not just us having boards (and servers) down or showing just a white screen. No sign of any support or even replies from the Yuku magicians either.

So much for KickApps’ focus on customer service…

… to Yuku, the fabulously-complicated pricing model is further explained here. One thing caught my eye:

“This is not fair. I paid on ezboard for 365 days, I had 200 days left, my board migrated and now you’re replacing my days with page views? This was not the deal I signed up for.
The deal has not changed. The remaining days from ezboard will be applied as days, not page views.
Contributions made after the board was imported will be applied as page views.”

Now I cannot access our Yuku board’s administration section to check to see what that says, but when it was on ezboard with a closed community chest - i.e. the contributions were made before the import took place - we still had $389 left in the chest and Gold status until 14 October 2008. On the basis that we were paying the minimum renewal, we would still have enough to keep it there until at least October 2015.

So let’s see if this is a promise they keep or yet another promise they renege upon. Place your bets!

[edit] Ah wait, there’s another page that says something different (what a surprise):

“Migrated boards that are over 50k views

If your board migrated from ezboard with active gold community, then the remainder of your Gold that was copied from ezboard will be applied in DAYS, not pageviews, to honour the time that you paid for when you intially purchased gold on ezboard. Contributions and the balance of your ezboard chest will be applied as pageviews.”

Now of course our ezboard was not a board with over 50,000 page views, so this two-tier pricing should not apply…

…is down:

“Updating Software

Our internet magicians are currently working their magic. Please try accessing the site again later. We appreciate your patience.”

I’m so glad we left this shower! Migrated on Saturday, offline on the Monday. And no, we still can’t administer the site.

Something of interest though: the board down graphic still says “beta yuku” so the ‘is it or isn’t it beta’ debate continues. One day they’ll decide whether to actually remove the beta tags from the system, but I presume that means they need to get it working. Still, they’ve only been working on this for three years now…

Well what a surprise!

Our closed ezboard was forcibly migrated to Yuku this weekend. And of course, weekends are when there’s no technical support on Yuku or ezboard. Now given that I’m such an outspoken critic of ezboard/Yuku, you’d have thought they’d have been careful that the migration went smoothly, wouldn’t you?

Well maybe if you were anyone other than Yuku with their technical ability and commercial awareness anyway.

The first thing you notice when you visit the board is that right there is a link to allow people to make payment to Yuku. That is despite our having closed the community chest when it was on ezboard, so it’s clear that the settings weren’t migrated like-for-like as they claim they should be. Either than or they’re ensuring that every effort is made to make money off the newly imported boards despite the clear requirements of the board owners.

No problem: I’m an admin. of the board (and listed as such), so I’ll log in and turn the contributions setting to off again.

Ah. No, I can’t - as soon as I’ve logged in and return to the board, all I get is a completely blank page - no HTML or any code is loaded at all. Brilliant!

Wait! Maybe it’s just me they continue to have their petty feud with. So I speak to the board owner. He logs in, migrates his profile and … completely blank page!

Ah wait a minute: he upset them a bit once too. Never mind, one of the other admins can do it. So he migrates his account and logs in and … completely blank page!

Way to go Yuku.

Oh and one other thing: I noticed that Yuku have renamed my account (and promptly banned it) like some kindergarten child would do if they were having a tantrum. I thought that KickApps were focussing on customer service? Apparently not: it seems like the Yuku staff are still the same bunch of also-ran hackers with the same petty agenda as they always were. 

KickApps must be so proud of their new acquisition…

Some things change and yet remain so familiar. With the acquisition of Yuku by KickApps finally announced on both Yuku and KickApps (but the acquistion of ezboard by KickApps only mentioned on the former…), some Yuku users are asking about who is running the show now.

“Let It Rip” Alison helpfully said “the boss of kickapps is the boss”* and left it to another Yuku customer to actually provide a link to KickApps’ “People” page. Being a bit of a geek, I recognise that URL structure as being the type that you get with Joomla! sites and a quick check of the page source revealed that to be a correct assumption.

So just as in the old days when Rob Labatt’s CEO Blog was written in WordPress rather than on Yuku, KickApps aren’t using the technology they’ve acquired but are using Open Source software instead. After all these months, wouldn’t it have been a vote for Yuku to have used it to run KickApps’ own site? Other blogging software like WordPress can be used very successfully to manage static sites and of course it was the blogs and profiles that Yuku worked on first all that time ago.

*what was it KickApps was saying about focussing on customer service? It didn’t take long for them to revert to type, did it?

Well then! Over two months after I revealed the news here, it’s finally been announced that KickApps has bought Yuku/ezboard: it’s their dirty little secret no longer!

The annoucement mentions this:

“As part of the merger, a new leadership team is in place with a renewed focus on innovation and customer service. Rob Labatt, ezboard’s former CEO, has left to pursue other opportunities.”

Well they couldn’t have set the bar much lower in terms of customer service, could they? And funny how they mention the departure of Robert Labatt in the same section about improving customer service. I wonder if the two are by any chance related?

Still no mention of the sale on KickApps’ own website but that San Francisco office address sounds awfully familiar…