Blue's WordPress Blog

Some more updates from ezboard’s CEO, Robert Labatt, in his WordPress “CEO Blog” on ezboard and on his own Yuku “blorum”. I’ll deal with the Yuku updates in a separate post as this one will be fairly lengthy.

ezboard’s Customer Services [sic] staff have been doing their best to ‘rubbish’ the ezboard platform for a while now, as did Rob Labatt in one of his original blog entries on 7 March 2006 (referred to by Cincom as it was apparently critical of its product, Smalltalk, that ezboard was based upon). 

And yet now we have Labatt saying:

“Well, today ezbaord has more features than Yuku.”

Given ezboard, Inc.’s criticism of, er, ezboard and given that ezboard has been working on Yuku for what, 18 months now, wouldn’t you expect Yuku to have at least as many features as ezboard by now? The same Yuku that ezboard heralded when they lost all that data in May/June 2005. The same Yuku that was launched as “available today” at DEMOfall in September 2005.

So after all this time developing Yuku, Labatt says they’re building new message boards “right now”, presumably having spent the last 18 months faffing about with user profiles? Surely the core element of Yuku must be its message board system? He goes on to say that they will be faster, although he doesn’t state what Yuku will be faster than. Presumably he means faster than ezboard rather than faster than competing products like vBulletin. I made a post on another message board comparing a like-for-like visit to a thread within a forum on Yuku and another at the same level on a vBulletin installation:

“Let’s see how fast it is from a new browser instance (already opened) navigating to http://help.yuku.com then the busy bug reporting forum followed by the first non-sticky thread.

I am on a 2MB ADSL connection here in the UK with only a 20:1 contention ratio. This is with Firefox on a PC.

Not bad today: 38 seconds.

For comparison, I went to a vBulletin installation I have running on a shared server. I entered the URL of the board, then clicked on a forum and the first non-sticky thread.

7 seconds.”

So it looks like Yuku still needs some significant work to make it faster and more feature-packed than even ezboard was. Hmm. What about Rob Labatt’s CEO Blog entry on 14 March 2006 where he writes:

“Ceco and his team are working to make Yuku faster and we are developing new features every week.”

Oh dear…

Labatt then goes on to say that once they’ve finished writing the message boards – “this summer” – they will then build the board import tools. But wait: didn’t ezboard say on 13 March 2006 that:

“In the next few weeks there will an easy to follow Free Board migration process available in Yuku.”

and

“In the next few weeks there will an easy to follow Gold Board migration process available in Yuku.”

and

“During the next two months we will help you move your board over…”

Yes, yet again, the promised timescales and milestones from Rob Labatt continue to drift and pass by without being met.

Back to the Bizarre Land of Yuku/ezboard then with the next statement from Rob’s latest CEO Blog entry:

“What you see on Yuku today is not what you will see in a few months.  So don’t go making plans based on what you see today.”

Yes, this is also the line being trotted out on the Yuku Help [sic] Forums whenever anyone takes a look at Yuku and declares themselves unhappy with the ‘look and feel’, speed or other aspect of Yuku.

And yet, Yuku was launched back in September 2005 and ezboard users were actively encouraged to go and give it a try. Indeed, users visiting their ezboard user control panels presently will see an import/export button to create a matching Yuku profile that can be used on Yuku. Why bother showing someone something only to say that it won’t be like that when it’s finished? And why bother developing and supporting something that’s apparently going to change so significantly? Unless, of course, the users are starting or continuing to vote with their feet…

And didn’t Rob Labatt also write in his CEO Blog entry on 14 March 2006 that:

“Personally, I think we are a month or so away from the time that you will look at Yuku and say ‘wow, I need to be there’.”

More than three months later, it seems that even Labatt himself still isn’t wowed by Yuku…

Good to see that Yuku is as good as ezboard always is. I went to check on a few things over at Yuku and got this:

Yes, Yuku is down “for maintenance”. And it’s not even out of beta and being used in earnest yet…

Take a look at ezboard’s Server Status Help [sic] Forum.

Look at the many, many instances of people reporting slow and unresponsive servers and look at the delayed or non-existent replies and updates from ezboard.

Shocking stuff.

But not as shocking as people still using ezboard and, worse still, paying them for the privilege.

Yes, their latest CEO Update – back to being written using WordPress as usual - lists a number of vacancies for various positions, but mainly for “rocket scientists” (you’ll need to click through to see this). And better still, they’re offering a bounty for people getting developers to fill those positions. Smacks of desperation to me…

It seems they’ve realised they haven’t got a clue and need to hire some “brilliant” developers – presumably this might augment the team rather than replacing people who aren’t “brilliant” – and I expect this may have come about from Labatt making promises about the product that his developers can’t deliver? I could be wrong of course.

Interesting is his description of ezboard as “a re-starting start-up”. Maybe they found some loose change down the back of a sofa?

So that data loss that happened on ezboard around 31 May 2005/1 June 2005. The one where ezboard managed to lose a year’s worth of messages (according to the stats. for our ezboard, something like 70,000 messages including a whole section devoted to one of our members, a paramedic who’d died from a brain haemorrhage). The one where those messages were dismissed as mere historic data by ezboard. The one where we discovered that the backups we were paying ezboard to make had somehow all been deleted too.

Well if you recall, ezboard offered a little reward for information leading to the arrest of this heinous hacker. And ezboard told us they’d brought in the FBI to apprehend the villain who’d been clever enough to hack into ezboard’s network, delete all the current data, hop across to another network and delete all the backups (note how they weren’t secure, off-site backups – Disaster Recovery, anyone?).

Well that hacker must have been very clever indeed or he’d have been apprehended by now wouldn’t he? What with the might of the FBI hunting him down and everything. Funny how I’ve seen nothing about any arrest or even any ongoing investigations. If I were a cynic, I might be tempted to think that there never was a hack at all and that it might just have been incompetence from ezboard that led to the data loss. And that claiming it was a hack would have diverted criticism away from Labatt and his small band of lackeys to some nebulous creature for people to blame.

I’m reminded by a comment I just posted on another Yuku/ezboard-watch message board that there are a couple of issues with the whole ezboard to Yuku profile imports and the claimed numbers of Yuku users.

Firstly, my old ezboard account has been exported to Yuku without my permission and without me asking for the account to be migrated. That’s not very friendly, is it? Especially as the wonderful account migration has messed up the profile so that I am apparently a 2006 year-old female. It doesn’t help that I can’t log in with that account – I’ve been banned from Yuku for “privacy violation” apparently (spot the irony in that…) – and even if I could, there’s no facility within Yuku to delete your account anyway. Presumably a reduction in user numbers wouldn’t help Yuku to look good for advertisers.

I do still have a working ezboard account and I migrated that one across to see if it would actually work (see my comments in my last post about this). I decided to hide all the profile details given that they were mainly wrong: as an example, your location has to include a US State even if you’re outside the US. How does that work then? Maybe this is just poor coding or maybe it looks like there are more US-based profiles than there actually are?

But one think strikes me about the forced account migration for my banned account: if I were to set up a user account and profile for Robert Labatt (ezboard, Inc.’s CEO) on another message board and not allow him to access or delete that account, I wonder how long it would be before my ISP began getting bombarded with hysterical legal threats from ezboard? Double standards? Surely not…

Well I’m fairly gobsmacked at some weird and wonderful developments over on Yuku.

For his latest update, ezboard, Inc.’s CEO has decided to update his Yuku ‘blorum’ instead of his WordPress blog, presumably to stop me from pointing out an apparent lack of faith in his own product.

Mind you, that lack of faith is probably well-founded given that some of the hyperlinks in his latest ‘blorum’ update don’t actually work, having been broken up by Yuku itself.

Anyway, he points out that they’ve been really quiet for the last six weeks – I began to fear they might have simply run out of money – but that they’ve been beavering away on the froth (the user profiles) whilst seemingly ignoring the platform itself. He actually says:

“…the core engine has been extensively revised to be faster and more flexible and ezboard users can now import their accounts with the click of a button.”

Well looking at the first of those, I haven’t seen any improvements in speed: Yuku still crawls loading a ‘page’ or the elements that make up a page. It’s a case of click and wait. Maybe that’s just me, but I doubt it.

The “click of a button” actually just starts the process: there are a few more clicks involved than that. On the machine I tried it from, it seemed not to have worked and I still can’t actually log in from it using either Internet Explorer or Firefox. I can log in with Firefox on this machine – I assume its security level is more lax than my main PC.

But still no details of pricing for Gold boards and no mention whatsoever of how Yuku intends to share advertising revenues; the Unique Selling Point from DEMOfall.

Following my earlier post on the last Labatt CEO WordPress update, he hasn’t done as he promised and posted details of where they’re up to in the alphabet – no real surprise there.

I’ve found that the migration link has now reached the ‘e’ accounts, or at least one of mine starting with ‘e’. So I clicked the link, re-entered the account password and it apparently went through OK. I say “apparently”, because there’s been no e-mailed confirmation, I can’t sign in with either Firefox or Internet Explorer (remember all the problems they were having getting Yuku to work with IE?) and the migrated account doesn’t show up in the Yuku user search.

Oh dear.

If I was really that bothered about the whole thing, I could open up a support ticket but ezboard, Inc.’s fabulous customer services representatives have confirmed that migration issues are being handled by … wait for it … one person which explains why one user has already been waiting five days with no response.

One person to handle the claimed 14,000,000 ezboard users and any issues they may have with the account migration process which appears to me at least to be broken.

Why doesn’t that surprise me either?

Yes, an update from ezboard, Inc.’s CEO, Robert Labatt using WordPress as usual. Wonders will never cease!

Of course, it would be too much to expect it to be news of the transfer of ezboards over to Yuku (that’s late) or for that matter for ezboard, Inc. to finally release details of how it intends to share advertising revenues.

No, this one concerns the migration of ezboard user accounts over to Yuku and they’re even phasing them in alphabetically over the next two weeks – another deadline to watch… – starting at A and moving through to Z. Presumably this is because they’re worried their servers will crash? Labatt will let us know how they’re getting on…

One thing caught my eye though:

“There are now over 1,800 communities and 280,000 people on Yuku”

Well we know those figures are wrong already: there were two Yuku communities I set up. The first one couldn’t be configured by me due to a bug in the Yuku boards. The second one was presumably deleted when my Yuku/ezboard destroyer account (according to Yuku, anyway) was blocked by ezboard, Inc.

Then the 280,000 figure. Well that presumably includes my old ezboard account – also blocked – that Yuku have already migrated across, presumably as part of the testing process. Also, take a look at the Yuku user search: changing the default women search (I know) to search for both men and women, it produces 248 pages of results, with pages presumably all including 20 profiles per page. That would make only 4,960 users…

Changing the user search to a user search (yes, it’s ridiculous) produces 388 pages with 20 profiles per page, or a maxiumum of 7,760 users.

So either the 280,000 figure is pie in the sky, or the Yuku user search is broken, or both.

Let’s just remind ourselves why Yuku is “better than free”, shall we?

There’s the famous DEMOfall launch presentation given by ezboard, Inc.’s CEO, Robert Labatt back in September 2005 in which he delineated Yuku from its competitors as being easy to set up (that’s subjective, but a look at the Yuku help [sic] forums might suggest otherwise), having backups and sharing advertising revenues.

So the jury is out on USP #1.

Backups? Well let’s not forget this is the same company who promised backups for “Gold” ezboards as part of the premium the board owners paid. The backups that in my experience were non-existent after the alleged hack took place, the clever hacker having somehow managed to delete all the backups as well. Someone remind me: what defines a proper backup? Still, some 9 months after it was “available today”, they haven’t sorted out restorals yet:

“there’s no restore in place right now…”

Ah.

OK, advertising revenue sharing? Nope. Still completely silent on that…