Well, nearly!
On 7 March 2006. ezboard, Inc. CEO, “Silent Rob” Labatt used his WordPress blog to announce Yuku (having launched it in September 2005…), stating amongst other promises that he and his little band never kept that:
“Later you can click a button and your board will automatically move to Yuku - archives, threads, members, banned users and all!”
Well it appears that “later” is almost upon us: there’s a global ezboard announcement going around that mentions “Next generation of ezboard: Yuku” with hyperlinked text saying “Upgrade your community now!” The hyperlink is to this page: http://www.yuku.com/ezboard/import/
Now the problems start to appear: you have to be logged-in to Yuku to view that page which means that for anyone who’s only been on ezboard, they can’t exactly have a one-click button to have their board and indeed their ezboard account migrated as they need to set up a Yuku account first … doh!
The second problem is that ezboard were saying that they were reserving ezboard account names on Yuku so if you are JosephTBloggs on ezboard, you shouldn’t be able to regsiter an account under that name on Yuku.
So, you go ahead and register, say JosephTBloggsTest on Yuku and then you go back to that page. It says:
Welcome to Yuku!
Importing your Ezboard Community is one click away. The process generaly takes up to 24 hours depending on the size of your message board. We will contact you by email when your board is imported into Yuku.
By clicking “I Accept” you have agreed to the terms.
Having problems? Get help now!
And then there’s a button labelled “I ACCEPT”. So still not quite a one-click install as you have to manually enter the user-unfriendly URL of your ezboard and then click a button and wait.
So there’s the next problem: someone at ezboard is going to have to check that the person who’s filled in this form is the same person who is the “ezOp” or board owner on ezboard and hence has the authority to do so: a tad tricky given that the Yuku username and the ezboard username probably won’t match and neither might the e-mail address.
The next problem is that they don’t actually make it plain that Yuku is still in beta and hence it isn’t working properly still.
And then there’s the big problem for all their Gold Communities: how much will Yuku cost? It’s a hell of a leap of faith to say that you’re going to go through the pain of migration from ezboard to Yuku - apparently with your members’ contributions to the community chest intact - without knowing what the cost will be for a gold Yuku community when they start rolling out the banner ads. on the free Yuku boards.
And finally, the Yuku developers acknowledge that your new Yuku board won’t necessarily look like your old ezboard one, so hard luck about losing all that work!
Still, once this is all done - and I doubt that the 24 hour target will be met, somehow, ezboard will have yet more claimed members - including those extra Yuku accounts that people will need to start the migration off, remember and whilst they’re looking at the benefits to ezboard, Inc. of the migrations, I’m sure they’ll be thinking that the ezboard to Yuku migrants won’t want to go through all the pain of moving again despite finding that life at Yuku may not be what it’s cracked up to be.
A win-win situation for ezboard, Inc. though. Well … apart, that is from the lack of new income from Gold ezboard Communities and ezSupporter subscriptions. Best hurry up and roll out the ads, Bob.