My daughter has been referred to a consultant dermatologist by our family doctor. So far so good. We received a letter from the practice saying that our illustrious Government has introduced a system whereby patient choice is paramount: we can choose where she is seen and make appointments to suit ourselves.

Hurrah!

Despite being disappointed that somewhere exotic like the Maldives wasn’t included, we were given the choice of three hospitals: our local one (durr!) and two an hour or so each way away. So amazingly enough, we decided to book an appointment at our local hospital using the super-duper HealthSpace online booking system provided by NHS Connecting for Health:

“NHS Connecting for Health supports the NHS to deliver better, safer care to patients, via new computer systems and services, that link GPs and community services to hospitals.”

So we thought we’d have better care delivered to us and book online with the details we’d been sent. My wife started our Apple iMac, loaded Safari - the default browser for Macs - and went online only to be met with a message that that browser isn’t supported by HealthSpace. Oh dear…

Never mind, we’d use my PC instead. So I logged in, selected our local hospital from the three choices (actually I deselected the two hospitals that are nowhere near where we live) and entered a slightly later start date leaving the end date open.

Nothing. So I re-selected the other two hospitals and found three appointment slots in September - so much for choice. Back to our local one. I entered an end date for when my daughter is past her 100th birthday.

Nothing (see screenshot):

So my wife rang the booking hotline - not our local hospital… - and after giving our details was told that he couldn’t make an appointment as he was locked out and we should call back in half an hour.

How pathetic is that?

Good grief! I happened to be visiting a couple of Yuku Blorums and wished I hadn’t. Even given ezboard’s history of making Yuku as slow as possible, they’ve now surpassed themselves.

It’s taking me longer than usual to write this post as every page on Yuku is taking an eternity to load.

After a week of apparently ignoring their Yuku users as usual (although reports of slowness had been around since mid-June), the “Yuku Team” finally acknowledged what everyone else was saying and made an announcement that yes, Yuku was slow and no, they hadn’t fixed it. The usual ezApologists were talking them up in the Support [sic] Blorum.

On 15th June, Yuku did say that:

“We currently have some network congestion causing slowness in our systems, we are working with our ISPs and network operators to fix it

Thanks for the report and patience”

They also said that:

 ”We’ve been able to determine this happens generally on monday mornings, we are currently investigating what’s causing the slowness. We appreciate your patience”

So users were reporting slowness generally, but Yuku staff were only noticing it on Monday mornings, presumably as they don’t work weekends… 

They also claimed it was those pesky search engines slowing things down:

“We have alot of crawlers on our site right now. We are trying to add a machine now.”

But isn’t one of the “benefits” of Yuku the “google friendly URLs and search engine optimized code”?

Why on earth are people still flogging a dead horse with Yuku? It can only be because it’s presently free but people are noticing board members leaving, etc. Maybe ezboard’s decision to have Yuku boards unlimited by size is a decision they’re beginning to regret (that is, unless it was a decision forced upon them by the feature set not supporting post culls? That’s just speculation as I don’t know if they can do this with Yuku as it stands).

Oh and still no news on the apparent disappearance of our money from ezboard…

If you’ve ever read this, you’ll know that one of the main issues I had with ezboard, Inc. was that despite us paying for a Gold Community that promised that “weekly backups and free restores protect your board” they never did protect our board, so that all the money in our Community Chest had been effectively paying just to have the adverts removed. Of course, given that many of us had paid for ezSupporter to keep the Gold renewal costs down, this was a moot point.

At the time when ezboard, Inc. lost a year’s data from our ezboard, we had around $566 in our Community Chest. If I recall correctly, one member of our board managed to have their small donation credited to a different board after we made the decision that ezboard losing our data was the final straw in terms of staying there, so we launched our own self-hosted vBulletin board in June 2005.

Despite ezboard having failed to live up to their side of the bargain, they refused to refund the unspent Community Chest balance to us, so we decided that we would just close all the discussion threads and simply renew its Gold Community status every October until all the Community Chest balance had been spent, rather than letting it lapse and have them display adverts that might gain them new revenue. With the ezboard discussion threads closed and with our self-hosted board going from strength to strength, the number of page views fell to the extent that our annual renewals have been the minimum $54 and we renewed in October 2005 and October 2006.

Now, you do the maths: I reckon that c.$566 - (2x $54) = ~$450, so that’s what we should have left in our Community Chest balance.

According to ezboard, Inc., however, the remaining balance we have is zero!

So not only does ezboard, Inc. refuse to refund us the money, but they now tell us there’s no money to spend anyway!

The ‘owner’ or “ezOp” of the board has opened a support ticket with ezboard two days ago as ezboard prefer keeping their activities and mistakes out of public view, saying:

“Where is my ezboard money?

I had over $500 after the last renewal was done, the balance now shows £0

Has someone stolen the money?

Please reply as soon as possible!”

We’ll see…