Well what a surprise!

Our closed ezboard was forcibly migrated to Yuku this weekend. And of course, weekends are when there’s no technical support on Yuku or ezboard. Now given that I’m such an outspoken critic of ezboard/Yuku, you’d have thought they’d have been careful that the migration went smoothly, wouldn’t you?

Well maybe if you were anyone other than Yuku with their technical ability and commercial awareness anyway.

The first thing you notice when you visit the board is that right there is a link to allow people to make payment to Yuku. That is despite our having closed the community chest when it was on ezboard, so it’s clear that the settings weren’t migrated like-for-like as they claim they should be. Either than or they’re ensuring that every effort is made to make money off the newly imported boards despite the clear requirements of the board owners.

No problem: I’m an admin. of the board (and listed as such), so I’ll log in and turn the contributions setting to off again.

Ah. No, I can’t - as soon as I’ve logged in and return to the board, all I get is a completely blank page - no HTML or any code is loaded at all. Brilliant!

Wait! Maybe it’s just me they continue to have their petty feud with. So I speak to the board owner. He logs in, migrates his profile and … completely blank page!

Ah wait a minute: he upset them a bit once too. Never mind, one of the other admins can do it. So he migrates his account and logs in and … completely blank page!

Way to go Yuku.

Oh and one other thing: I noticed that Yuku have renamed my account (and promptly banned it) like some kindergarten child would do if they were having a tantrum. I thought that KickApps were focussing on customer service? Apparently not: it seems like the Yuku staff are still the same bunch of also-ran hackers with the same petty agenda as they always were. 

KickApps must be so proud of their new acquisition…

Some things change and yet remain so familiar. With the acquisition of Yuku by KickApps finally announced on both Yuku and KickApps (but the acquistion of ezboard by KickApps only mentioned on the former…), some Yuku users are asking about who is running the show now.

“Let It Rip” Alison helpfully said “the boss of kickapps is the boss”* and left it to another Yuku customer to actually provide a link to KickApps’ “People” page. Being a bit of a geek, I recognise that URL structure as being the type that you get with Joomla! sites and a quick check of the page source revealed that to be a correct assumption.

So just as in the old days when Rob Labatt’s CEO Blog was written in WordPress rather than on Yuku, KickApps aren’t using the technology they’ve acquired but are using Open Source software instead. After all these months, wouldn’t it have been a vote for Yuku to have used it to run KickApps’ own site? Other blogging software like WordPress can be used very successfully to manage static sites and of course it was the blogs and profiles that Yuku worked on first all that time ago.

Well then! Over two months after I revealed the news here, it’s finally been announced that KickApps has bought Yuku/ezboard: it’s their dirty little secret no longer!

The annoucement mentions this:

“As part of the merger, a new leadership team is in place with a renewed focus on innovation and customer service. Rob Labatt, ezboard’s former CEO, has left to pursue other opportunities.”

Well they couldn’t have set the bar much lower in terms of customer service, could they? And funny how they mention the departure of Robert Labatt in the same section about improving customer service. I wonder if the two are by any chance related?

Still no mention of the sale on KickApps’ own website but that San Francisco office address sounds awfully familiar…

Or should that read “Moron Yuku Pricing”? I wonder…

Since my recent posting about the pricing for an ad-free Yuku message board, there have been some updates to the pricing pages because their customers and indeed their own staff don’t really understand the pricing model for Yuku or how it will be calculated(and understandably so).

The latest version of the Yuku pricing is set out here: http://www.yuku.com/home/goldpricing/

“Large Yuku communities that generate over 50,000 page views a month can participate in the Gold Ad-Free Community offering using easy credit card or PayPal payments. Advertising can be removed from community pages that serve Yuku ads at a rate of $0.20 per 1,000 pages served. Yuku serves ads on only half of all the pages in a community, and the Gold Ad-Free Community contributions are applied only to those pages. Pages that do not carry Yuku ads do not count against the contributions. The minimum contribution is US $1.00.”

So for your dollar, you’d get something between 5,000 and 10,000 page views per month, depending upon how exactly ezboard/Yuku are going to deliver those
ads to which visitors at which frequency. And if I understand the pricing correctly - though even Yuku staff don’t understand it - that would be over and above your $6 a month.

So how much would a board cost? Well we abandoned our ezboard after they lost a year’s messages but still have it on ezboard because they refused to refund our community chest. We now have a self-hosted vBulletin board. It’s not a huge board by any means, but the stats. are useful: in December 2007, we saw successful requests for pages at 541,147.

So on Yuku’s pricing formula - if I understand it correctly - the equivalent Yuku board would cost us:

Basic monthly cost: $6
Ads. served: (541,147-50,000)/2/1,000x$0.20=$49.12

Total monthly cost= $55.12

Total annual cost = $661.44

How much do we pay? $120…

Now like I said, our message board is not a heavy traffic board - it caters for a one make motorcycle model that’s been discontinued and which wasn’t a massive seller when it was being built. And yet the equivalent board on Yuku would cost us five times as much! And still no sign of the promised $3-$5,000 in revenue sharing for board owners - I wonder where that’s gone?

Leaving Yuku really is the only sensible option.