…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…

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…