…who appear to have all their eggs in one basket, which should be a worry for its customers.

One of their servers apparently failed on 1 December 2007 - coincidentally the server where the Help Forums are hosted (including the Server Status Forum…).

Unfortunately for their customers, that was a Saturday and Internet services provider ezboard, Inc. don’t work weekends… Three days later and they were still copying data to other servers. Five days later and people were finally seeing their boards up and running and the missing data restored.

Of course, some were not quite so lucky and they are awaiting the one member of staff who can apparently fix things:

“ckerr wasn’t available yesterday and I don’t think he is in the office today. I did give the URL to your board and this topic to one of the other technicians and he tried reloading your board, but the missing forums didn’t display. He said they are still there, but ckerr will have to be the one to yank them out of hiding. (There are simply some ezboard things no one but ckerr can fix.)”

Now excuse me, but if there’s only one person who can fix things when they go wrong, I’d love to see ezboard, Inc.’s Risk Analysis/Statement … if they have such a thing, of course!

Oh and it’s the same with yuku: a user who is hosting their domain name with ezboard has been having DNS issues for months apparently. ezboard’s reply when they promised to sort it out after the weekend?

“I think you might have been bumped down the list by the inbox problems.”

Well, that’s what appears to be the case, if the LinkedIn profile page of someone claiming to be Robert Labatt is to be believed. You will need to sign in or join LinkedIn to view this:

Current

• Entrepreneurial self starter at Looking for my next great adventure

Past

• President, CEO, Director at ezboard, Inc.
• Consultant, Entrepreneur at Self
• Research Director, Consumer Internet, Web Services

This part of his summary amused me:

“Most recently Mr. Labatt was CEO of ezboard, Inc. a profitable and growing network of consumer generated and white label enthusiast communities. During his over three year tenure at ezboard Mr. Labatt delivered the companies [sic] first profits, conceived and released the successful successor to the companies [sic] core community product and negotiated and sold the company to a strategic buyer.”

Strange how he doesn’t mention the loss of customer data whilst under his tenure. Nor the extended (and continuing) beta status of the software.

So who is the mystery buyer? Well if you recall back in September, I mentioned the rumour of a sale to Kickapps. Whether they are the buyer of course is another thing as their web site is silent on it.

Funnily enough, there’s no mention of any of this on ezboard, Inc.’s web site or on yuku. I wonder if that’s to calm the jitters about the move to the (still beta, still buggy, still un-priced, still ad. revenue selfish) yuku?

Of course, all of this could be wildly inaccurate so I wouldn’t necessarily rely on any of it.

Those oh-so-important user numbers…

Someone else has asked the oft-repeated question of how they can delete their yuku account.

The answer - from one of the evangelists that they have apparently empowered - is the usual:

“The option to delete an account is temporarily unavailable.
You could just abandon your account until the delete option gets reinstated.”

How temporary? A week or two?

Well, my long term reader might recall that I blogged about this way back on 1 August 2006! Not exactly my definition of “temporarily”…

Still, we can’t have people getting the impression that yuku user numbers are doing anything other than growing. After all, wouldn’t that affect how valuable advertising space on yuku might be?

For a while now, the staff over in the yuku help forums [sic] have been claiming that there are no forced migrations of ezboards over to yuku and that they have to be requested by board owners.

If you recall, I mentioned this back in September.

Now you should bear in mind that:

1. ezboard, Inc. has yet to reveal pricing for ad. removal from yuku boards; and
2. yuku is still in beta, which is the excuse they always trot out when somebody complains that something isn’t working on yuku
3. ezboard, Inc.’s Help Wiki still says “Do I have to switch to this next version of software? No, not unless you want to.” and “Do I have to move my board to yuku.com domain? No, you do not have move to yuku.com.”

Of course, being ezboard, it appears that the truth and the statements at item 3 above are mutually exclusive…

Or what about this?

“Will my ezboard forum be switched over without my consent?
No, boards will need to be switched by the admin. At this stage, they will not be switched over by our system if you do not initiate the switch.”

So nothing to worry about then.

Oh dear. “ezdollar”, presumably someone working for ezboard/yuku, writes:

“My understanding is that they are now migrating some small batches of boards without the owner’s request, but, a few days before migration, those boards should display an Important Announcement at the top of the board, stating that it will soon migrate.

“If the developers had been able to write an upgrade for the ezboard program, it would have been sent out to all servers and no ezOp would have had any choice whatsoever about whether to use the new version or not or when to make the switch to the new version. The upgrade would have happened virtually (if not literally) overnight. This is really no different than a major ezboard upgrade, except that, in effect, ezOps have been able to choose to go to the new version early, and the upgrade is being done gradually instead of overnight.

“Migrating your account to Yuku has nothing to do with board migration.

“Having Gold or not having Gold has nothing to do with migration.

“As I keep saying… if you have issues with Yuku, you have to take them up with Yuku staff by posting at Yuku Support or opening a Yuku Help ticket. We may feel your pain, here, but we simply can’t help you with most Yuku related issues here.”

So that confirms that they are indeed moving boards without the owners’ say-so. And it makes no difference if they’re Gold - with no ads. - or non-Gold. I bet gold communities won’t be very happy when they start showing ads. … which is due to happen soon, no doubt, as they have recently confirmed they are finally working on yuku versions of gold communities and ezsupporter which should be ready for testing “within a month or two at the latest“…

So there you have it: forced migrations despite what they tell you elsewhere. Forced migrations from release code (if buggy) to beta code (very buggy and incomplete). What a way to treat your long-suffering customers!

Oh and still no word on whether they plan to actually share revenues with board owners as ezboard, Inc. CEO, Robert Labatt, promised. And where is Mr. Labatt? Incredibly silent, even for him…