Well, Rob Labatt, ezboard, Inc.’s CEO, has finally updated his Yuku blorum after six weeks.

So what goodies does he have for us this time, I hear you ask?

Well, he starts by talking about being busy with “new functionality and ease of use improvements” although he doesn’t care to outline what these are to those who don’t frequent Reg’s Developer Forum on Yuku. Presumably those include fixing their Photobucket integration (which I’ve had running for a while on our vBulletin message board) and a few minutes’ work on the templates to include “social networking bookmarks”. These are dead simple to implement: see for instance the “Digg This Story” button on the posts here – this took me about 10 minutes to do. And some more eye candy for the lame MySpace clone profile pages.

He also finally mentions the closure of the Yuku Help [sic] Forums I mentioned here:

“Some folks are happy about this, others are sad … There will not be a formal help community in Yuku.”

Now, the only ones who appear to be happy about this are … well, no-one I can see, except perhaps Labatt himself and his VC buddies who will probably be pleased that all their dirty laundry will be hidden from public view, no matter that it will make more work for the ezboard staff.

But it’s good to see that Yuku will finally have one feature that no other message board system will have: the lack of a formal help community. Some originality at last!

What about ezboard board migrations? Yay! They’ve done some at last! Well, it appears there are four so far. Just another 499,996 to go then… Still, he does write that:

“They are going very successfully and we expect that communities will be able to move by clicking a button sometime in the next month. Why so long? We want the process to be easy and bug free. Don’t you.”

Well, that would be a first! So, by 4 November then, Rob? I won’t hold my breath…

And then, he finishes with a flourish:

“As of this post, I’ve decided not to post any information about the specifics of upcoming feature releases because it drives too much speculation and I end up spending hours answering questions about the exact timing of specific functionality being released. I’d rather be getting the features to you instead.”

Ah! I wondered where he’d been all this time – I was beginning to think he’d been given the heave-ho at last! No, he’s been spending hours answering questions, apparently. Not sure where, though: after all support@ezboard.com has been down for a while, his recent Yuku posts (see the “My Recent Posts” section of his Yuku profile) don’t appear to be doing this and nor do his recent ezboard posts (last one being in July).

But what of Ceco Gakovic and Brian James? I thought they were writing Yuku? No, it’s Rob getting the features to us instead! Wow! What a “problem solving kinda guy” he really is…

Oh and one last thing: remember that ezboard’s Jennifer told a customer she’d ask about what was happening with board backups? Jennifer said she’d ask Labatt to address this point in this update. Ah well, at least she know what it’s like to be a customer and be ignored by ezboard…

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