Blue’s WordPress Blog

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…

Or should that read “Moron Yuku Pricing”? I wonder…

Since my recent posting about the pricing for an ad-free Yuku message board, there have been some updates to the pricing pages because their customers and indeed their own staff don’t really understand the pricing model for Yuku or how it will be calculated(and understandably so).

The latest version of the Yuku pricing is set out here: http://www.yuku.com/home/goldpricing/

“Large Yuku communities that generate over 50,000 page views a month can participate in the Gold Ad-Free Community offering using easy credit card or PayPal payments. Advertising can be removed from community pages that serve Yuku ads at a rate of $0.20 per 1,000 pages served. Yuku serves ads on only half of all the pages in a community, and the Gold Ad-Free Community contributions are applied only to those pages. Pages that do not carry Yuku ads do not count against the contributions. The minimum contribution is US $1.00.”

So for your dollar, you’d get something between 5,000 and 10,000 page views per month, depending upon how exactly ezboard/Yuku are going to deliver those
ads to which visitors at which frequency. And if I understand the pricing correctly - though even Yuku staff don’t understand it - that would be over and above your $6 a month.

So how much would a board cost? Well we abandoned our ezboard after they lost a year’s messages but still have it on ezboard because they refused to refund our community chest. We now have a self-hosted vBulletin board. It’s not a huge board by any means, but the stats. are useful: in December 2007, we saw successful requests for pages at 541,147.

So on Yuku’s pricing formula - if I understand it correctly - the equivalent Yuku board would cost us:

Basic monthly cost: $6
Ads. served: (541,147-50,000)/2/1,000x$0.20=$49.12

Total monthly cost= $55.12

Total annual cost = $661.44

How much do we pay? $120…

Now like I said, our message board is not a heavy traffic board - it caters for a one make motorcycle model that’s been discontinued and which wasn’t a massive seller when it was being built. And yet the equivalent board on Yuku would cost us five times as much! And still no sign of the promised $3-$5,000 in revenue sharing for board owners - I wonder where that’s gone?

Leaving Yuku really is the only sensible option.

All you have to do is pay…

I kid you not: there is apparently a one month free trial period for Yuku Supporter - basically a way to hide adverts from Yuku message boards if you pay $7 for six months:

“Become a Yuku Supporter!

Welcome to the Yuku Supporter purchase screen. Here you can upgrade to or renew your Yuku Supporter account for your username, giving your username premium status including no ads and special features.
As a new Yuku Supporter subscriber, you are qualified for a one month free trial period.”

Great! So where’s the option to select the free one month trial? You can only select $7 for six months or $12 for 12 months.

It must be on the next screen. Check the box that says you agree to the Yuku T&Cs and on we go.

“Selected Subscription Options

You have selected:

Six months subscription for $7 USD without Automatic Renewal.

You are qualified for a one month free trial period.”

Woohoo! On we go. We’re now taken to PayPal and for some reason they want to charge me $7 still.

Where’s my one month free trial period?

Oh and you know the bit where it says “giving your username premium status including no ads”? Well that’s not strictly accurate either:

http://support.yuku.com/topic/4922/t/Gold-community-and-yuku-supporter.html?page=-1

“Yuku supporters will not see yuku placed ads, but they will see any ads placed by board admins.”

So “no ads” means “ads”. Ah I see.

So then. Back to the question of the supposed one month free trial. How do we sign up for free?

http://support.yuku.com/topic/4904/t/One-month-yuku-supporter-free-trial.html

“if you pay for it, you get a month free thrown in. You don’t get a free month to try it first. The free month is a reward for paying.”

Oh I see! So the one month free trial isn’t a one month free trial after all. It’s a one month subscription extension once you’ve paid.

More creative use of language or misleading information depending on whether you’re ezboard, Inc. or the rest of the world…

Well it’s still not entirely clear if yuku is in beta or not: the home page says nothing about the beta status but the yuku help wiki still has beta references and graphics and as anyone who’s using it can see, the software is still full of bugs and the promised features are not all present.

But they’ve revealed prices at last!
http://www.yuku.com/home/goldstory/

$72 for 12 months up to 50,000 page views per month, though how they’ll be working out what page views are with AJAX architecture is anyone’s guess. $72 for 12 months now instead of $54 on ezboard which means a one-third price increase!

Over 50,000 page views?

http://www.yuku.com/home/goldpricing/

“Advertising can be removed from community pages at a rate of $0.20 per 1,000 ads served. The minimum contribution is US $1.00.”

So if ezboard decide to litter the site with ads, that cash will go in a moment…

What about Yuku Supporter?

http://www.yuku.com/home/supporterstory/

“Supporters receive 100 MB of image hosting space. Non-Supporters receive only 30 MB”

Oh I’m sorry, didn’t users get offered 1TB of storage for free?

So, if your “enterprise-quality hosting and software” falls over or you’re fed up with paying someone else to have access to your account - as they do on Yuku - then try another option.

If you go to DreamHost and enter the promo code EZSAVE50, you’ll even get $50 off the first year’s hosting price of $119.40 (you pay $69.40 if you use the promo code) and that includes domain name, e-mail, 500GB of storage (increases @2GB a week) and 5TB of bandwidth, PHP, MySQL, Ruby on Rails, CGI, “real” web statistics, one-click installs of blogging, message board and other software, etc.

It’s a no-brainer…

With Labatt apparently gone and no word - either to confirm or deny - the sale of ezboard, Inc. and its bastard offspring yuku, you do wonder why whoever has bought them hasn’t seen fit to publicise the purchase with a press release.

In most industries - and especially anything to do with the Internet and online services - anything and everything of hardly any importance is greeted with a flurry of press releases and news items on web sites.

So why not this? Or is ezboard such a dirty word these days?

…who appear to have all their eggs in one basket, which should be a worry for its customers.

One of their servers apparently failed on 1 December 2007 - coincidentally the server where the Help Forums are hosted (including the Server Status Forum…).

Unfortunately for their customers, that was a Saturday and Internet services provider ezboard, Inc. don’t work weekends… Three days later and they were still copying data to other servers. Five days later and people were finally seeing their boards up and running and the missing data restored.

Of course, some were not quite so lucky and they are awaiting the one member of staff who can apparently fix things:

“ckerr wasn’t available yesterday and I don’t think he is in the office today. I did give the URL to your board and this topic to one of the other technicians and he tried reloading your board, but the missing forums didn’t display. He said they are still there, but ckerr will have to be the one to yank them out of hiding. (There are simply some ezboard things no one but ckerr can fix.)”

Now excuse me, but if there’s only one person who can fix things when they go wrong, I’d love to see ezboard, Inc.’s Risk Analysis/Statement … if they have such a thing, of course!

Oh and it’s the same with yuku: a user who is hosting their domain name with ezboard has been having DNS issues for months apparently. ezboard’s reply when they promised to sort it out after the weekend?

“I think you might have been bumped down the list by the inbox problems.”

Well, that’s what appears to be the case, if the LinkedIn profile page of someone claiming to be Robert Labatt is to be believed. You will need to sign in or join LinkedIn to view this:

Current

• Entrepreneurial self starter at Looking for my next great adventure

Past

• President, CEO, Director at ezboard, Inc.
• Consultant, Entrepreneur at Self
• Research Director, Consumer Internet, Web Services

This part of his summary amused me:

“Most recently Mr. Labatt was CEO of ezboard, Inc. a profitable and growing network of consumer generated and white label enthusiast communities. During his over three year tenure at ezboard Mr. Labatt delivered the companies [sic] first profits, conceived and released the successful successor to the companies [sic] core community product and negotiated and sold the company to a strategic buyer.”

Strange how he doesn’t mention the loss of customer data whilst under his tenure. Nor the extended (and continuing) beta status of the software.

So who is the mystery buyer? Well if you recall back in September, I mentioned the rumour of a sale to Kickapps. Whether they are the buyer of course is another thing as their web site is silent on it.

Funnily enough, there’s no mention of any of this on ezboard, Inc.’s web site or on yuku. I wonder if that’s to calm the jitters about the move to the (still beta, still buggy, still un-priced, still ad. revenue selfish) yuku?

Of course, all of this could be wildly inaccurate so I wouldn’t necessarily rely on any of it.

Those oh-so-important user numbers…

Someone else has asked the oft-repeated question of how they can delete their yuku account.

The answer - from one of the evangelists that they have apparently empowered - is the usual:

“The option to delete an account is temporarily unavailable.
You could just abandon your account until the delete option gets reinstated.”

How temporary? A week or two?

Well, my long term reader might recall that I blogged about this way back on 1 August 2006! Not exactly my definition of “temporarily”…

Still, we can’t have people getting the impression that yuku user numbers are doing anything other than growing. After all, wouldn’t that affect how valuable advertising space on yuku might be?