More Lies from Yuku

It’s funny how the staff at Yuku just can’t help but tell bare-faced lies. Presumably this is now part of KickApps’ focus on Customer Service

The Usual Suspect this time is “Let It Rip” Alison - no surprise - who seems to get her facts completely wrong for some reason.

Someone decides to have a well-written moan in the Support forum. Another disgruntled board Admin. mentions the Wikipedia entry for Yuku:

“…Although yuku administrators (as distinct from board administrators like you and me) say yuku isn’t a social networking site, migrants from ezboard notice the networking features first. Wikipedia’s article on yuku classifies it in the category “Social networking sites.” Make of that what you will….”

Alison Harrison then replies to that point to dismiss it:

“Wikiepedia [sic] is a system that allows anyone to edit it (except those who work with the company), so if the categorisation is incorrect you could easily go and fix it The majority of edits on it have been made by people who don’t actually use yuku.”

Ah OK. Let’s look at each of those points in turn:

“a system that allows anyone to edit it (except those who work with the company)”

When they were both still working at ezboard/Yuku, both Robert Labatt and Brian James (Regimemachine) were regular contributors to the article, although a number of their edits were reverted by other editors to remove the clear advertising slant they sought to apply (especially Labatt), which is against the Wikipedia advertising policy and guidelines. So that statement is untrue.

“if the categorisation is incorrect”

Nicely played, that one: note the use of ‘if’. Long term users will recall that the first element that ezboard concentrated on when working on Yuku was the user profiles and blogs before switching development resources henec the social networking categorisation. This focus was why many people declared Yuku to be a MySpace clone at the time. Of course, the Wikipedia article also categorises Yuku under “Forum hosting”.

“The majority of edits on it have been made by people who don’t actually use yuku”

More untruths. As they well know, I am Admin. of a Yuku board that was migrated over to Yuku recently. As they refuse to refund the community chest funds, I will still be a Yuku user until that board’s Gold Community status expires in a number of years time (or they fold, whichever comes soonest). Also as anyone who has read this blog will know, I have been using Yuku in various guises since it was ‘released’ to an open beta in 2006 and despite Yuku staff banning my accounts there (including the ones they themselves created for me…).

A large number of recent edits have been made by “Askeladden2006″ who has been on Yuku since the early days and is very much a satisfied customer (despite her own board being down for a period last week).

Most of the technical history and feature edits were made by “JamminBen”. Ben was an early adopter too, having being very active in the semi-official ezboard communities before Yuku was released to open beta. Indeed Ben was very regularly posting assistance in the Yuku Support Forum and helping out users on Yuku’s flagship boards like the JJB. With a strong interest in blogging and content management system, Ben was regularly pushing the software to see what it could deliver and actively working with its features. At one point, I was wondering if he’d been taken onto the Yuku staff, he was so ominpresent there!

–ooOOoo–

So there you go: Yuku - never letting the facts get in the way of a good argument…

Car Insurance

I recently received my renewal documents for my car insurance through Norwich Union Direct: £404.17 (with £220 excess), so up a bit on last year.

We had also insured my wife’s car with Norwich Union Direct and after changing the car had had a horrendous time trying to obtain a quote for the new car as that policy too was due for renewal. We eventually received a quote for that of £200.00. Through the Post Office, we’d got insurance for £150-ish with a further £50 cash-back to come after 60 days. The new insurer? Norwich Union…

So I thought I’d do a reality check on my renewal through the Post Office. £304.69 (with an additional £50 cash-back to come) and only £100 excess. The insurer? Yes, you’ve guessed it … Norwich Union!

The Post Office quote had added £24 for legal protection that I don’t want, so I just rang them to take them up on the quote (without the £24) and got re-quoted at £287.64 with £50 still to come back later.

So I’ll be saving £166.53!

Oh and when I rang to cancel the direct debit for my old policy, they asked if there was a way they could look at my renewal quote to get it down. I said no. Too late: “you snooze, you lose”.

SatNavs Compared

I had a journey to go on today: Google Maps reckon the outward leg should have taken 3 hours. The Garmin i3 (aka Psycho SatNav Bitch as ‘she’ tends to taunt me with unrealistic targets, even the way I drive) reckoned around 2¼ hours. My Nokia N95-8GB with Nokia Maps, on the other hand, reckoned 4 hours. Something of a disagreement.

In the end, the combination of the time of day, the occasional spray and muck left over from gritting (even though it hadn’t been icy) and the way I drive meant it took 2½ hours.

The routes themselves were almost identical, the only difference being the route in or around Grantham.

And the other differences were:

  1. the Garmin had the speed camera database to warn me of “accident blackspots”;
  2. as the Nokia was on the cradle and connected to the car kit, every spoken direction muted the radio which is a tad annoying when the voice prompts get a little frantic; and
  3. the Nokia’s display also shows the current speed (good) and the time left rather than the ETA (bad).

Looks like there’s still no ideal solution for me, but the Saga-driver Nokia is closest as it’s so nicely contained within the phone.

Web 2.0 – The Management-Speak

Over a sandwich this lunchtime, I started reading an article in the February 2008 edition of “Project” magazine about using Web 2.0 technology to aid communication within a project team.

But I must admit to a true “laugh out loud” moment when I read the final paragraph:

“It is by leveraging Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate excellent collaboration, the dissemination of the common vision, streamlining of workflow and delivery of rapid authorisation processes, that organisations can create the highly effective working environment required to keep a project focused on the corporate objective.”

Pardon?

Management-speak at its best!

Our Yuku Board – Still Down

Well it looks as though Yuku - powered by KickApps - is living up to expectations.

Our old ezboard, migrated to Yuku on Saturday (but not working properly then) was down most of the day on Monday and came back up for a short while in fully-functioning form. Well, I assume it was working because we don’t want people posting there so no-one tried.

Anyway, we managed to ascertain how long it will be ad-free:

“Contributor Settings
This community disallows contributions.
This community has Ad-Free status until Jan 4, 2016 (2877 days left)”

We’ll see.

But as expected the board has been offline all day today, showing the Yuku magician graphic. It really is amazing … just how useless these people are! And looking at the Yuku support [sic] forum, it’s not just us having boards (and servers) down or showing just a white screen. No sign of any support or even replies from the Yuku magicians either.

So much for KickApps’ focus on customer service…

On the Subject of our Forced Migration

… to Yuku, the fabulously-complicated pricing model is further explained here. One thing caught my eye:

“This is not fair. I paid on ezboard for 365 days, I had 200 days left, my board migrated and now you’re replacing my days with page views? This was not the deal I signed up for.
The deal has not changed. The remaining days from ezboard will be applied as days, not page views.
Contributions made after the board was imported will be applied as page views.”

Now I cannot access our Yuku board’s administration section to check to see what that says, but when it was on ezboard with a closed community chest - i.e. the contributions were made before the import took place - we still had $389 left in the chest and Gold status until 14 October 2008. On the basis that we were paying the minimum renewal, we would still have enough to keep it there until at least October 2015.

So let’s see if this is a promise they keep or yet another promise they renege upon. Place your bets!

[edit] Ah wait, there’s another page that says something different (what a surprise):

“Migrated boards that are over 50k views

If your board migrated from ezboard with active gold community, then the remainder of your Gold that was copied from ezboard will be applied in DAYS, not pageviews, to honour the time that you paid for when you intially purchased gold on ezboard. Contributions and the balance of your ezboard chest will be applied as pageviews.”

Now of course our ezboard was not a board with over 50,000 page views, so this two-tier pricing should not apply…

Our New Yuku Board

…is down:

“Updating Software

Our internet magicians are currently working their magic. Please try accessing the site again later. We appreciate your patience.”

I’m so glad we left this shower! Migrated on Saturday, offline on the Monday. And no, we still can’t administer the site.

Something of interest though: the board down graphic still says “beta yuku” so the ‘is it or isn’t it beta’ debate continues. One day they’ll decide whether to actually remove the beta tags from the system, but I presume that means they need to get it working. Still, they’ve only been working on this for three years now…