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In order to quell some “mass hysteria” on ezboard about its terms of use in relation to ownership of copyright, ezboard, Inc. moved swiftly and re-wrote the terms of use for ezboard and Yuku.

Now bear in mind that ezboard, Inc. threatens to take legal action against people copying posts made on ezboard to other message boards or web sites, how do you think they’d re-write the relevant section? Pay a lawyer to re-write it or rip them off from someone else by copying them from elsewhere?

Here are the sections from the recently amended MySpace terms:

“MySpace.com does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) that you post to the MySpace Services. After posting your Content to the MySpace Services, you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Content, and you continue to have the right to use your Content in any way you choose. By displaying or publishing (“posting”) any Content on or through the MySpace Services, you hereby grant to MySpace.com a limited license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content solely on and through the MySpace Services.

“Without this license, MySpace.com would be unable to provide the MySpace Services. For example, without the right to modify Member Content, MySpace.com would not be able to digitally compress music files that Members submit or otherwise format Content to satisfy technical requirements, and without the right to publicly perform Member Content, MySpace.com could not allow Users to listen to music posted by Members. The license you grant to MySpace.com is non-exclusive (meaning you are free to license your Content to anyone else in addition to MySpace.com), fully-paid and royalty-free (meaning that MySpace.com is not required to pay you for the use on the MySpace Services of the Content that you post), sublicensable (so that MySpace.com is able to use its affiliates and subcontractors such as Internet content delivery networks to provide the MySpace Services), and worldwide (because the Internet and the MySpace Services are global in reach). This license will terminate at the time you remove your Content from the MySpace Services. The license does not grant MySpace.com the right to sell your Content, nor does the license grant MySpace.com the right to distribute your Content outside of the MySpace Services.”

Now let’s look at the updated section from the ezboard terms:

“ezboard.com does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) that you post to the ezboard Services. After posting your Content to the ezboard Services, you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Content, and you continue to have the right to use your Content in any way you choose. By displaying or publishing (“posting”) any Content on or through the ezboard Services, you hereby grant to ezboard.com a limited license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content solely on and through the ezboard Services.

“Without this license, ezboard.com would be unable to provide the ezboard Services. The license you grant to ezboard.com is non-exclusive (meaning you are free to license your Content to anyone else in addition to ezboard.com), fully-paid and royalty-free (meaning that ezboard.com is not required to pay you for the use on the ezboard Services of the Content that you post), sublicensable (so that ezboard.com is able to use its affiliates and subcontractors such as Internet content delivery networks to provide the ezboard Services), and worldwide (because the Internet and the ezboard Services are global in reach). This license will terminate at the time you remove your Content from the ezboard Services. The license does not grant ezboard.com the right to sell your Content, nor does the license grant ezboard.com the right to distribute your Content outside of the ezboard and its sublicensees Services.”

Hmm! Now let’s look at the revised Yuku terms:

“Yuku.com does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) that you post to the Yuku Services. After posting your Content to the Yuku Services, you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Content, and you continue to have the right to use your Content in any way you choose. By displaying or publishing (“posting”) any Content on or through the Yuku Services, you hereby grant to Yuku.com a limited license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content solely on and through the Yuku Services. Without this license, Yuku.com would be unable to provide the Yuku Services. The license you grant to Yuku.com is non-exclusive (meaning you are free to license your Content to anyone else in addition to Yuku.com), fully-paid and royalty-free (meaning that Yuku.com is not required to pay you for the use on the Yuku Services of the Content that you post), sublicensable (so that Yuku.com is able to use its affiliates and subcontractors such as Internet content delivery networks to provide the Yuku Services), and worldwide (because the Internet and the Yuku Services are global in reach). This license will terminate at the time you remove your Content from the Yuku Services. The license does not grant Yuku.com the right to sell your Content, nor does the license grant Yuku.com the right to distribute your Content outside of the Yuku and its sublicensees Services.”

Now, do these look only-ever-so-slightly similar to the MySpace terms? Apart, obviously, from the music elements (as neither ezboard nor Yuku presently offer music storage facilities), they do seem remarkably similar, don’t they? I know ezboard are desperately seeking to have Yuku become a MySpace clone, but this is taking the piss! Oh and in this post on an ezboard message board, the poster claims to quote from an e-mail from Robert Labatt, ezboard, Inc.’s CEO, in which he is claimed to have admitted that:

“Our new TOU is a copy of the MySpace TOU.”

I wonder what MySpace will have to say about this?

Well it’s been almost a fortnight since I last checked in on Yuku to see how things are going and yes, they’ve finally started getting things moving even if that’s ‘moving’ in the glacial sense.

Yuku Version 2.0

Firstly, there was the announcement on Labatt’s Yuku Blog that “new board pages” had been released. No, I’ve no idea what that means either. And apparently:

“About Yuku Blogs…

“We have not created the new blog pages or mangement screens – yet. Blogging does not exist in the new system. As a result all Yuku domains that are blogs will remain in the old system for now. The new blog features are bing speced and we will be building the blog functionality in the next few weeks. We really want to get back to one code base and one product, reliably and as fast as possible.”

So between the alpha and the supposed beta, the blog element has been left until later to code. I see. And whose fault is it that they have more than one code base being developed? ezboard’s, of course. Perhaps not one of their better decisions…

Still, it’s much faster … isn’t it?

“What is different about the new boards?

“In the process of building the new boards we made significant improvements to the way the boards work and their speed of delivery by streamlining CSS, HTML and back end systems.”

Time for another Yuku speed test. The last one I did was on the old version 1.x so I was expecting big improvements, what with all the promises from ezboard’s CEO, Robert Labatt. I did my little speed test at around 7.20pm BST today, i.e. 11.20am at Yuku’s San Francisco base. I emptied my Firefox browser, closed it down and restarted it then started a stopwatch the moment I went to http://help.yuku.com then to its “Help forum and potential bugs” forum and then to its first non-sticky thread. At each point I waited for the page to be loaded before clicking on and stopped the clock the moment that last thread was finished loading.

35 seconds, compared with 38 seconds last time. w00t!

Then the same on my vBulletin forum on one of 1&1 Internet’s shared servers. Loaded the board’s home page, then clicked on a public forum and then the first non-sticky thread (which had more avatars, etc. to load than the Yuku one).

11 seconds, compared with 10 seconds last time.

So no improvements in speed then – quelle surprise!

What have they done, then? Well they have modified the CSS and HTML classes so that those oh-so-precious domain skins moidified by board owners may or may not work – in the meantime, they all default to the basic Yuku skins. Amusingly enough, those Survivor Sucks members still aren’t seeing the new message board system yet: presumably Labatt and his cronies don’t want to upset them by making them re-do their board customisation. Maybe he’ll get one of his “elves” to do it for them…

Oh and they’ve got rid of the “Community, Profiles and Media Sharing” claim that I discussed here. It’s been replaced by “Next Generation Message Boards”. Uh-huh. Nope, sorry – I can’t see they’re “Next Generation” at all: more like ezboard trying (and failing) to play catch-up with the likes of vBulletin.

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Photobucket Integration

Labatt proudly mentions their plans to do further integration with other photo-hosting providers – presumably because of the very small web space allocation that Yuku board owners will have. Unfortunately, according to this post in the Yuku Help [sic] forums, the Photobucket folder structure is incompatible with the Yuku system. Oh dear. So the custom API doesn’t work with Yuku (or more likely, vice versa). Oh and if you’re quick to see the skin currently applied to the Yuku Help [sic] forums, you’ll be able to note the lovely way the link to hide individual posts overlays the Reply ID permalink – more good coding in evidence.

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Another Yuku Release?

Two days later, Labatt writes another update heralding a release of Yuku. Another one? Who can tell, especially as I mentioned earlier that not all Yuku boards have been moved from the old Yuku to the new one – let alone any ezboards!

The update once more mentions the Photobucket integration – I think they’re proud of the (broken) feature – before going on to mention the usual Yuku theme:

“We are working on speed improvements now.”

{sigh} I thought he’d claimed they’d fixed the speed issue (many, many times…).

One feature he mentions briefly is this one:

 ”2. tagging for board lead posts”

What does this mean? Well my old friend Michelle helpfully provides some detail over on the Yuku Help [sic] Forums here:

“Tagging here at yuku will allow users inside a forum to search for specific topics on any given tag. It is up to users to create meaningful tags though. For some communities tags will be an informal, fun thing. For communities like the help forum, or for other FAQ forums, tags will be a huge searching enhancement.”

Excellent! One of their developers is particularly proud of this feature:

“you will see other boards copy this soon”

No, I doubt it as it clutters the board layout and is almost completely useless (oh and LiveJournal has had post tagging for ages, so it could be claimed that you copied them… Likewise, Movable Type has tagging too in version 3.3). So why do I think that tagging on Yuku is useless? Maybe because it is. On vBulletin, for instance, there are two levels of searching as opposed to the one on Yuku. Note that they’ve implemented the tag system on the Yuku Help [sic] Forums. However in the opening page at http://help.yuku.com if you enter one of these tags into the Search Domain box, it doesn’t actually return any results from the tags…

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Version 1.0 to 2.0

Another few days later and another post from Labatt apologising for the new release breaking the version 1.0 skins.

He also says:

“We have worked hard to minimize the changes and at the same time give you a much much faster, cleaner and easier to customize message board service.”

Er, didn’t he say earlier that they were working on fixing the speed issues? And yet now he’s claiming the same code has fixed it already (despite my own experiences and speed test)? When will he ever learn? Perhaps he doesn’t actually use Yuku – and who could blame him?

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And Finally…

A curious post from Labatt about a “Nigerian style scam” involving someone sending personal messages to other Yuku users. He writes:

“Does having a Nigerian style scam on Yuku mean that we are finally a somebody?”

Er, hardly! We’ve seen these scams on message boards all over the place for years – I’m just amazed someone could be bothered to wait long enough to use Yuku for any purposes, let alone a bulk PM scam!