Blue’s WordPress Blog

Two years plus is a long time in Internet Time. When Yuku was launched as being “available now” in September 2005, its unique selling point appeared to be the way ezboard, Inc. were promising to share advertising revenues with message board owners.

In the presentation, ezboard, Inc. CEO “Silent Rob” Labatt is seen showing off the message board functions and user profiles that had been in development since early 2005.

Unfortunately for them, they’ve since wasted all of 2005, 2006 and now most of 2007.

The idea to combine message boards, user profiles, blogs and media hosting in one place was a good one even if not entirely original - most things on Yuku from ezboard, Inc. are ideas that someone else has had previously - as for instance WordPress can be extended with plug-ins and third party software to incorporate discussion forums, photo albums, etc. with the added benefit of an option to self-host the whole shebang and include advertising to generate a revenue stream as I do here.

In June 2005, Yuku was being touted by Labatt as the next generation of ezboard (although the name ‘Yuku’ had not been unveiled at that stage). Inexpicably, they concentrated not on ezboard migrations or getting the message boards ready for users. No, instead ezboard concentrated on the user profiles no doubt spurred on by the growth of MySpace and indeed Facebook. But by doing so, they dropped the ball and simply became Yet Another MySpace Wannabe even down to the evident similarities in their Terms of Use. Of course, extended beta tests are nothing new, c.f. Google’s applications and services, but then they are not usually quite this long for such products.

So under the direction of Robert Labatt (and presumably with the backing of the venture capitalists led by his wife’s firm), the development of Yuku has gone on and on and it’s still in beta.

In the meantime, however, everyone else has moved on. vBulletin is a very accomplished message board application and one I use myself for three different discussion boards and it’s far better in my opinion than Yuku is. And of course there’s now vBulletin Blog to go with the board software. I’ve already mentioned WordPress and its plug-ins capability.

And now another major player has revealed online communities, blogs and social media in one place.

“Every member of your community can create a personalized profile page. Standard Profile pages include the following content:

“Personal profile information, such as a photo, interests, or location information
A list of comments submitted by that user and comment responses
A list of recommended posts, forums, and comments by that user
Forums, community blogs and a number of templates and skins.”

All sound familiar?

Well this is Movable Type Community Solution from Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type and LiveJournal. But for once they’ve copied Yuku and not revealed pricing (you have to get a custom quote)!

So as time drags on and “Silent Rob” Labatt continues being elusive, maybe going for glider flights in Hawaii or going karting with the (small number of) staff, Yuku falls further and further behind the competition whilst not charging its users for the bandwidth and (reducing…) image storage.

Read all about it here:
http://wordpress.org/development/2007/09/wordpress-23/

Yes, ezboard has been caught out blaming its woes on “Smalltalk” from Cincom again.

Back in March 2006, Cincom’s James Robertson posted a blog entry entitled “Correcting a Misconception” following which Robert Labatt seemed to have back-tracked somewhat on blaming Smalltalk and instead blaming “…[ezboard's] bad software design that happens to use Smalltalk…”.

So things were smoothed over … until ezboard went and did it again, accusing Smalltalk of being “obsolete”. They went further:

“The current program has many bugs that can’t be fixed because each time the developers try to fix them, it causes something else to break. That seems to be the nature of Smalltalk.”

So it’s not a developer issue, it’s a platform issue.

Cincom’s James Robertson has posted a response here which makes interesting reading:

“Instead, they wrote their own server from scratch. They didn’t use a database on the back end, instead serializing objects to disk. Those two early decisions came back to haunt them in a big way - we actually spoke to them about dealing with them inside Smalltalk…

“…they decided to go with a full rewrite in something else, and a general blasting of our product as a way of making excuses. There’s no reason for them to do that.” [emphasis added]

Yes there is: it’s an attempt to deflect criticism away from ezboard to someone else, a not uncommon response.

And this will almost certainly be true:

“Just look at what they say instead: fixing bugs creates other ones. That has nothing to do with Smalltalk (or any other language, for that matter) - it has to do with whatever process they use to develop code. If that’s happening to them now, I guarantee that it will happen to them in the future, without regard to what development/deployment platform they end up using.”

I wonder if ezboard’s development failings - and indeed, past security issues - continue to plague them now? Certainly there are more bugs in Yuku than an entomologist’s study cases. And as for security, well, even ezboard’s CEO Blog, written using WordPress, is two builds out of date, with all the security issues that entails…

Dear Rob,

It’s been over a month since you (or someone from your local area purporting to be you) commented here in my WordPress Blog suggesting you’d like to give me a better understanding of what you’re trying to achieve with Yuku. I invited you to comment on any of the posts I make here and initiate a conversation.

Whether or not that comment was from you, I know that you and/or your colleagues at ezboard/Yuku regularly read this, the other version I publish on my Movable Type Blog, my LiveJournal and indeed the posts I make over on an Invision Power Board. Let’s not forget that in your situations vacant adverts, you claim to have a flat management style and everyone works with you. Given the small numbers of staff employed at your San Francisco offices, I can readily believe that to be the case.

So it seems strange that you’ve been so backward in coming forward, as they say, to address the points I raise in my blogs.

I’ve written about the continuing delays in getting Yuku ready for general public use, the strange set of access log entries that appear to be an authentication hack, adverts on Gold Trial boards, issues with your “near flawless” user migrations, the apparent high costs of running a Gold Community, the apparent lack of customer support on Yuku and some strange figures for the costs of Gold status on certain, key ezboards as well as a number of other issues.

None of these have produced any replies or explanations to help me understand the ezboard position.

So I thought I’d make a list of some of the points I’d really like to understand.

1. Advertising Revenue Sharing: when, how and how much?

One of the key elements - probably the key element - of your presentation at DEMOfall in September 2005 was your plan to share advertising revenues with the Yuku community leaders with a sum of $3,000 to $5,000 being mentioned. Now, that must surely be Yuku’s USP and should bring the users in en masse, I’d have thought. So why do you appear to have quietly dropped this most significant feature? If it’s still a live goal, please tell us when it will be implemented and how the revenues will be shared.

2. Free Gold ezboards: where did the money go and how many major boards are being effectively funded by the other boards?

I mentioned some significant sums being withdrawn by anonymous individuals or entities from the main ezboards, as well as their apparently having enjoyed free Gold status since July 2005, shortly after the May/June 2005 data loss and shortly after you yourself wrote:

“The attack does not change our long-standing policy of not providing refunds. This was agreed to by every user each time a service order was placed or payment made.”

So where did the sums I mention in this post go and how many major ezboard communities are effectively operating for free?

3. How much will a Gold Yuku cost?

Yes, I know you’ve said that it should be much like ezboard’s charges, but as Yuku is based on an entirely different architecture, how exactly will it be priced? And bearing in mind what your colleague, Sean Foote, wrote, why shouldn’t Yuku’s charges be significantly less than the charges fixed a long while ago for ezboard?

4. How much will YukuSupporter be?

This question must surely be easier to answer as ezSupporter itself was priced on a nominal basis anyway.

5. When will people be able to backup their boards?

Bearing in mind you wrote this on 23 June 2005:

“the new community engine has solved many of the issues that you have experienced on ezboard in the last year. It is faster, more reliable, offers automated back-up to your home computer, fast restorals”

Why isn’t this feature available on either ezboard or Yuku? One of your staff members has said it will be available “eventually”. And yet you promised it last year, both in your post-data lost messages and of course at DEMOfall.

6. Does ezboard backup its boards properly?

This was, of course, our major complaint last year when it became clear that no matter what you wrote, ezboard had not backed up our message boards safely or securely. If they had been, no hacker would have been able to access them remotely as you claimed.

After all, ezboard is now charged as a premium service when compared with other offerings in the marketplace. Shouldn’t we expect the features we get elsewhere?

7. When will Yuku, with all the promised features, actually launch?

I know you’re smarting from the way I’ve been ridiculing your inability to meet any deadlines or timescales, but you must have a plan for when you need or will be able to launch Yuku properly with all the features your original blog entry promised.

8. Will it be as slow still?

You’ve been promising improvements to the time taken to load pages on Yuku for months and months now and yet it’s still like treacle in winter. Is that as good as it gets? If not, when will you be revealing the new, quick Yuku?

9. How soon after Yuku is launched will ezboard be closed down?

Bearing in mind your advertisement for someone to support ezboard on a contract basis was only until the end of 2006, how soon after you launch Yuku properly will you close down ezboard? As you should be well aware from posts on ezboard and Yuku, there are many boards that don’t want to leave the old platform behind. What are your plans for dealing with those boards?

10. Does ezboard intend to employ sufficient help staff for its customer base and does it intend to have them actually help their customers?

We’ve read the new policy for the Yuku Help Forums and yet people haven’t seen the promised support there. Let’s not forget this is only a small subset of your customer base and there are - please correct me if I’m wrong - no ezboards migrated over yet.

Your staff have also said that the full complement of Yuku support staff hasn’t been put in place yet, so when will there be sufficient customer support people in position?

11. Why is ezboard so expensive?

This in part is tied up with earlier questions, but the main elements are covered in my post here. Why is ezboard so, so expensive compared with other hosting arrangements?

12. Does Yuku see itself as a successor or even a challenger to MySpace?

I’ve mentioned the emphasis that’s being put on profile pages on Yuku as it seems to be postioning itself as a MySpace clone. Why is that emphasis there on profiles rather than community? It’s clear from the order you’ve carried out development that profiles are your main priority. Is it the $580M paid by Murdoch?

13. Why did someone from an IP address associated with ezboard apparently attempt an authentication hack using usernames and passwords only used on ezboard?

My post on this subject is here. It’s no secret that ezboard has access to both usernames and (unlike a vBulletin installation, for instance) passwords for all its users and the ezMods have regularly signed in with your customers’ details to troubleshoot issues. The details are very worrying and frankly disappointing. What is ezboard, Inc.’s position on this? 

14. Given that ezboard’s job ads. state that everyone works with the you, did you sanction the authentication hack as you must have known about it, surely?

The question here is in the heading above. If you were unaware of what took place, what have you done since in terms of your staff and the authentication hack? Or was this in no way connected with ezboard, Inc.?

15. What’s the state of play with the FBI investigations into the claimed hack?

You wrote at the time of the May/June 2005 data loss that the FBI were involved. Given the clear and precise information the hacker must have had, surely any perpetrator must have been apprehended by now? If not, why not?

—oooOOOooo—

You’ve read all these points before - especially the details of the apparent authentication hack that seems to be bookmarked by you and your staff - so you should be able to comment here fairly quickly, I’d have thought.

I’ll look forward to your point-by-point reply.

Yours sincerely,

Richard

Well that didn’t seem to work: having raised the question over in the support forums, it’s been met with a resounding silence. I found something about having to load and run a particular administrator page to publish the e-mailed posts and that it could run automatically with a cron job, but there appears to be no way from within WordPress to schedule the cron job.

If it’s true then that you need to access the blog in a browser to authorise or in some way bring in the e-mail posts, then what’s the point of e-mailing them in the first place?

OK, this is the obligatory first post trying out WordPress.

All the earlier entries than this one were imported … quite successfully, I reckon.