Blue's WordPress Blog

Do I detect rats leaving sinking ships?

Anyone who knows anything about the Internet will know that an important part of success online is a good product or service and similarly that what’s as important is the domain name you use. Vanchau Nguyen knew that, which is why when he was creating an easy to use message board system, he knew the domain name ezboard.com would be part of its success.

Fast forward seven years and ezboard, Inc.’s CEO Robert Labatt announces the next generation of ezboard will be Yuku. Not exactly a great name to start off with and they settle on an aboriginal word for ‘tree’ as the supposed genesis of the name.

Over the coming year, Labatt announced that all ezboards would eventually move to the new Yuku platform and that instead of pnnn.ezboard.com/bboardname they would become boardname.yuku.com. So when you make such a fundamental change, one of the key elements of your business has to be protection of your domain name, especially when you’re running your business largely on venture capital.

Indeed, your VC backers would probably want to see up to date risk assessments for the business and a key element of that assessment would be the domain names.

I wonder what they would make, then, of the recent change of registrant for the domain name Yuku.com.

If you lose control of the domain name, the new registrant could use it for their own ends or point requests for the domain to ‘dodgy’ content or to link farms, for instance.

So the recent changes to the registration of Yuku.com are very strange indeed and one wonders what ezboard’s backers would make of them:

yuku.com – 2007-05-18 13:46

Registrant:
ezboard Inc
564 Market Street
705
San Francisco, CA 94104
US
415 773 0400×255

Domain Name: YUKU.COM

Administrative Contact:
Labatt, Robert 
564 Market Street
705
San Francisco, CA 94104
US
415 773 0400×255

Technical Contact:
Gakovic, Ceco 
564 Market Street
705
San Francisco, CA 94104
US
415 773 0400×214

yuku.com – 2007-08-05 23:29

Registrant:
Expert In The House, LLC
650 Delancey Street
102
San Francisco, CA 94197
US
415 205 7465

Domain Name: YUKU.COM

Administrative Contact:
Labatt, Robert 
650 Delancey Street
102
San Francisco, CA 94197
US
415 205 7465

Technical Contact:
Gakovic, Ceco 
564 Market Street
705
San Francisco, CA 94104
US
415 773 0400×214

So who is “Expert in the House, LLC”? Well coincidentally, Robert Labatt used to sell networking DVDs through their web site http://www.expertinthehouse.com/about.html.

Maybe Labatt has plans for the domain name if things go wrong (or worse…) at ezboard, Inc.? Or maybe it’s Just Another Ezboard Cock-Up…

Much was made by ezboard about its community spirit.

Labatt referred to ezboard’s customers as the “ezboard Family” in the early days after they lost over a year’s posts from our board because they didn’t have proper backups.

One of the reasons for not leaving ezboard for self-hosted options was that you wouldn’t benefit from the ezboard community and ezboard “board hops”.

But I reckon this thread over on Yuku dispels any lingering doubts about the ezboard community spirit being in truth only so much hot air:

“I would add names to the ban list on ez to prevent known morons from even getting one nasty post in.”

and

“On ez gold communites it was a nasty trick of competiting communites to go pile into your board and drive your gold cost up. Others would harvest email addresses from profiles or harass members in PMs. Some steal pictures and repost elsewhere stealing bandwidth in the process the list goes on and on.”

and

“There are other dirty tricks competitors would pull to drive you renewal cost up, I’m not going to mention them here but we picked up on them and paid the jerks back with interest.”

That, by the way, from one of the ezApologist faithful…

So we’ll leave the last word to Alison “Let It Rip” Harrison, a Yuku staffer:

“We’ll look into adding a way of banning people without actually inviting them.”

Good stuff!

Ouch! One of the people running what appears to be a semi-official Yuku forum, Ben, has dared to question whether ezboard, Inc. should be continuing to release new features when the present Yuku software is so full of bugs.

It’s a very good point and immensely ironic given that the reason touted by ezboard, Inc. behind moving to a new platform from ezboard’s Smalltalk platform was that there were so many bugs in it and that fixing one bug would create another.

Maybe it’s not the development platform but the developers who are at fault?

So when Ben asks the developers to fix some of the long-standing bugs rather than reeasing new features, one of the long-term, sycophantic, happy-clappy ezApologists, “favafoyo” jumps in to say that users would be bored with the same feature set (even if it was working properly):

“if, for six months, nothing but bugs were fixed in pushes, users would become bored with the system”

Yes, you read that properly – users enjoy the excitement of buggy software!

When Ben calls them on this and worse still says “Having said that, if there are six months worth of bugs to be fixed, does anyone else find that concerning?!”, the ezApologist comes right back saying:

“I don’t enter the bug forum often but I have personally never seen a bug last very long… I think based on yuku’s bug fixing history, we can be sure they will be fixed in time.

Having said that, if there are six months worth of bugs to be fixed, does anyone else find that concerning?!

I hope you are joking..”

Yes Ben! How dare you question the mighty ezboard, Inc.!

A pity then to let the facts get in the way of a good argument, but then Ben is easily able to point out that bugs are left unanswered in the forum for months and that occasional workarounds are noted much later that are buggy themselves.

[Update, 9 August 2007]

Of course, it occurred to me that the Yuku Wiki says:

“Bugs: We fix bugs as soon as we know about them in yuku. So if you are “lucky” enough to find one, please drop by the developer forum and let the dev guys know about it, and then wait to see what happens.”
[Emphasis added]

Well it appears that the answer is often “nothing”.

Of course, it doesn’t then help when Alison “Let It Rip” Harrison says:

“Sometimes a fix for a bug gets put out, but it doesn’t fix the bug.”

So… technically, that’s not actually a fix then, is it? Or has ezboard, Inc. redfined the term ‘fix’? She continues:

“And other times bugs are left because major work is going to be made on the environment that the bug lives in soonish, and changing it prior to that would be a waste of time.”

Which to my mind is something different to fixing bugs as soon as they know about them. Left hand, meet right hand.