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…
