Well in the absence of any updates to “Silent Rob” Labatt’s now-abandoned CEO Blogs on Yuku and – using WordPress – on ezboard, it seems that stealth announcements are the order of the day over on ezboard and Yuku still.

“Silent Rob” Labatt

So despite the continued silence from ezboard’s CEO, Robert Labatt, for the last five months, he is – apparently – very busy according to this post on a user’s Yuku board:

“I can’t tell you ‘where’ he is right now, but he’s certainly not dropped out of yuku! He’s very busy and often out of the office.”

Heck! He must be busy: too busy to post on his “third love”, Yuku. Busy doing what, exactly? Ah yes, “thought leadership”, probably… And out of the office a lot, no doubt pleading with new investors and trying to find advertisers!

Advertisements on Yuku

Now, if you recall, at the moment the only ads. being displayed on Yuku are in the user profiles. Indeed, they proudly proclaim that:

“Today yuku has these advantages:

    * search the whole board, a single forum or within one topic
    * addition of tags in topics and profiles
    * cross domain searches using tags and keywords
    * google friendly URLs and search engine optimized code (for example: search for the lobby or search for Alisons profile )
    * add kudos (ratings) to boards and profiles
    * no ads on boards“

Hmm.

Great use of the word ‘today’ there. How so? Well have a read of this reply from Yuku staffer alison:

“The plan is to have ALL features available for free with ads.”

Ah! So there will be ads. on free Yuku boards then. And I bet that when they get their act together with both the coding and the advertisers themselves – all those unsubstantiated ”14 million users” claims – the ads. they serve with be far more intrusive than the Google Ads ones they’re currently displaying.

So having enticed users and board owners over to Yuku with the promise of free message boards with no adverts, it’s going to come as a bit of a shock when – after all the hassle of having their ezboards and users migrated over to Yuku – they suddenly see adverts all over their Yuku boards, especially when no pricing for the ad. removal has been released by ezboard, Inc.

More sharp business practices? You decide…

ezboard Version 7.33

Oh dear. If you read my earlier post on this subject, you’ll have read in awe about its “more stable code base that will result in more uptime and less downtime as well as faster reboots whenever a server is restarted”. Except this is ezboard, remember, so it should come as no surprise to learn that:

“If I remember correctly, version 733 went out to a single server, as a test, but had to be rolled back for further tweaking because the changes in it caused something else to break. I believe it’s still being worked on for future release.”

More ezboard Data Loss?

My goodness but they’re becoming proficient with losing data! After the great ezboard disaster of May and June 2005, it seems they’re still losing data and still have appalling customer service [sic].

The sorry take is linked to from here:
http://p097.ezboard.com/fvortexjeopardyfrm13.showMessage?topicID=2.topic

And unsurprisingly given the loss of messages and the lack of support, they’re closing their (paid-for) Gold board and have moved already to a self-hosted phpBB solution. I really can’t blame them: it’s the smart move.

More “Quality” Support [sic]

This is another great support thread:
http://p080.ezboard.com/fezboardfrm87.showMessage?topicID=8869.topic

During this awful thread – where it’s clear that ezboard wants this user to just go away; how dare they complain?! - it emerges that all those millions of venture capital have resulted in a system that can’t cope with the normal search engine spiders visiting the boards:

“As far as we know, the Bad Gateway error is caused by the Google robot crawling the server. It is not unusual to see it several times, then not see it again until the crawler returns. How long it crawls the server depends on how many searchable boards are on that server and how large they are. When it returns is strictly up to Google. ezboard has no control over the Googlebot’s schedule.”

So when the search engine ‘bots are spidering your or anyone else’s ezboard on a server, you will be unable to access it!

Bug Base Spammage

Yes, that wonderfully secure system over at ezboard keeps getting spammed. Look at any of the Bug Base Forums in the morning (GMT) and you’ll see the latest spams from unregistered spammers. Pity there’s no-one competent at ezboard who can restrict their posting…