How to turn what appears to be a reasonable parking rate into an unreasonable one.

We had a week away on holiday in the south-east recently and decided to go and be all touristy in London. Rather than drive into London and pay petrol, congestion charge and expensive car parking, we decided instead to drive to Tunbridge Wells and take the train from there.

After struggling to find anywhere to park at the railway station, we were directed to the council’s Torrington car park where we bought a pay and display ticket, parked up and went on our way. On our return, we found a penalty charge notice stuck on our windscreen demanding £60 (reduced to £30 if paid within 14 days). Here’s our appeal:

“Dear Sirs,

Following my telephone call to your office this morning, I would like to appeal against a penalty notice I received on 15 August 2007 whilst parked legally (as far as we were concerned) in your Torrington car park. We were holidaymakers staying locally and had decided to have a day trip to London.

We drove to the station to park, but could only find “premier permit” (if I recall correctly) parking spaces and we had no idea what that meant so we asked a station worker who directed us to the Torrington car park.

On our arrival there, we were confronted by a sign and two ticket machines. The sign says this:

As you can see, the sign says that railway day tickets can only be purchased for the machines at “the south eastern trains entrance” and we did not want to drive back out and head around to the station to buy a ticket from their machines.

Instead, we used one of the blue machines on the ramp and put in the maximum sum it would accept. As I explained to your staff this morning, the ticket machines on the ramp to your car park are not marked in any way to differentiate them from other pay and display machines and indeed they were the only ticket machines on the entry ramp, so we naturally assumed they were valid machines for this car park:

We did notice the section about a £2 rebate for rail users but did not avail ourselves of this rebate.

Having bought a ticket which was valid until 4.00am on 16 August 2007, we then drove into the largely empty car park and parked in a bay.

On our return, we found a penalty notice fixed to the windscreen. On enquiry this morning, we were told following your staff member looking at the parking attendant’s photograph of our ticket, that the ticket was a rail user ticket so we should have known and parked in a red bay. Looking at the ticket and also the machine which says “Central Parking System”, how were we supposed to know this?

We were always prepared to pay the full price for parking and had assumed from the information clearly visible to us that that was exactly what we had done. We are not local residents and therefore unaware of the peculiarities of your parking systems: our local car park at Norwich next to the station has two ticket machines per entrance lane and you simply validate your ticket at the railway station for a reduced rate and pay as you return to your vehicle. The system is simple and works faultlessly.

Accordingly, we wish to appeal against the penalty charge notice and await your reply.

Yours faithfully”

I copied this to Southeastern for their comment and reply using the e-mail address they gave me over the telephone. It bounced. I rang them again and was told they do not have an e-mail address any more for customers to contact them through. Maybe they were fed up with having to handle customer complaints?

Any respect I had for Royal Mail’s management has now disappeared.

I use their SmartStamp system for printing postage onto my letters whch saves them the inconvenience of having to send me rolls of first and second class stamps and also frees up their counter staff to serve other customers. For saving them this time and cost, I have to pay an annual fee…

So you can imagine my joy upon returning from my holidays to find a card saying that there was an envelope waiting for me to collect from the sorting office which had insufficient postage on it (to the tune of 6p) and for which I would have to pay a fee of £1 in addition to the additional postage charge.

I suppose that £1 fine would in some way compensate them for the cost of the sticker to say that there was 6p too little postage and the cost of the postcard they put through the letterbox and the time taken for them to write the card out in the first place. I did think about posting it back to them without a stamp to see how they would feel about having to pay a fine because the sender had got it wrong, but decided that was too petty…

So I did my bit for global warming and got in my car at my expense to drive to the sorting office to collect the letter and to pay the £1.06 that I know apparently owed them. There was the envelope, properly addressed with a first class stamp on it. It contains a couple of screws a friend had sent me. I asked why there was insufficient postage on it and was told:

“A lot of people ask that [pause there to see if there’s a lesson to be learned by Royal Mail]. It’s because it’s thicker than 5mm…”

I kid you not…

So Royal Mail? I won’t be renewing my SmartStamp service this year. And I will also be considering whether to continue paying you for a PO Box too. All because of 6p.

But then, as it’s an ezApologist doing it, I suspect that not only will they not be told to remove the inappropriate content, they’ll probably be praised by Alison “Let It Rip” Harrison again.

What am I talking about?

I’m referring to this user’s Yuku profile, where it says:

“R. Morris can bite me”

Now you may be able to hazard a guess as to whom that might be directed, but the Yuku Terms of Use do prohibit content that:

“Defames, abuses, harasses, stalks, threatens or otherwise violates the legal rights (such as rights of privacy and publicity) of others”

and

“promote physical harm or injury against any group or individual”

Not that I’d particularly want to bite anyone, especially someone who seems to think that “100% heterosexual males” aren’t into dating. Methinks he doth protest too much…

Do I detect rats leaving sinking ships? Anyone who knows anything about the Internet will know that an important part of success online is a good product or service and similarly that what’s as important is the domain name you use. Vanchau Nguyen knew that, which is why when he was creating an easy to use message board system, he knew the domain name ezboard.com would be part of its success. Fast forward seven years and ezboard, Inc.’s CEO Robert Labatt announces the next generation of ezboard will be Yuku. Not exactly a great name to start off with and they settle on an aboriginal word for ‘tree’ as the supposed genesis of the name. Over the coming year, Labatt announced that all ezboards would eventually move to the new Yuku platform and that instead of pnnn.ezboard.com/bboardname they would become boardname.yuku.com. So when you make such a fundamental change, one of the key elements of your business has to be protection of your domain name, especially when you’re running your business largely on venture capital. Indeed, your VC backers would probably want to see up to date risk assessments for the business and a key element of that assessment would be the domain names. I wonder what they would make, then, of the recent change of registrant for the domain name Yuku.com. If you lose control of the domain name, the new registrant could use it for their own ends or point requests for the domain to ‘dodgy’ content or to link farms, for instance. So the recent changes to the registration of Yuku.com are very strange indeed and one wonders what ezboard’s backers would make of them:

yuku.com - 2007-05-18 13:46

Registrant: ezboard Inc 564 Market Street 705 San Francisco, CA 94104 US 415 773 0400×255 Domain Name: YUKU.COM Administrative Contact: Labatt, Robert  564 Market Street 705 San Francisco, CA 94104 US 415 773 0400×255 Technical Contact: Gakovic, Ceco  564 Market Street 705 San Francisco, CA 94104 US 415 773 0400×214 yuku.com - 2007-08-05 23:29 Registrant: Expert In The House, LLC 650 Delancey Street 102 San Francisco, CA 94197 US 415 205 7465 Domain Name: YUKU.COM Administrative Contact: Labatt, Robert  650 Delancey Street 102 San Francisco, CA 94197 US 415 205 7465 Technical Contact: Gakovic, Ceco  564 Market Street 705 San Francisco, CA 94104 US 415 773 0400×214

So who is “Expert in the House, LLC”? Well coincidentally, Robert Labatt used to sell networking DVDs through their web site http://www.expertinthehouse.com/about.html. Maybe Labatt has plans for the domain name if things go wrong (or worse…) at ezboard, Inc.? Or maybe it’s Just Another Ezboard Cock-Up…

Much was made by ezboard about its community spirit.

Labatt referred to ezboard’s customers as the “ezboard Family” in the early days after they lost over a year’s posts from our board because they didn’t have proper backups.

One of the reasons for not leaving ezboard for self-hosted options was that you wouldn;t benefit from the ezboard community and ezboard “board hops”.

But I reckon this thread over on Yuku dispels any lingering doubts about the ezboard community spirit being in truth only so much hot air:

“I would add names to the ban list on ez to prevent known morons from even getting one nasty post in.”

and

“On ez gold communites it was a nasty trick of competiting communites to go pile into your board and drive your gold cost up. Others would harvest email addresses from profiles or harass members in PMs. Some steal pictures and repost elsewhere stealing bandwidth in the process the list goes on and on.”

and

“There are other dirty tricks competitors would pull to drive you renewal cost up, I’m not going to mention them here but we picked up on them and paid the jerks back with interest.”

That, by the way, from one of the ezApologist faithful…

So we’ll leave the last word to Alison “Let It Rip” Harrison, a Yuku staffer:

“We’ll look into adding a way of banning people without actually inviting them.”

Good stuff!

Ouch! One of the people running what appears to be a semi-official Yuku forum, Ben, has dared to question whether ezboard, Inc. should be continuing to release new features when the present Yuku software is so full of bugs.

It’s a very good point and immensely ironic given that the reason touted by ezboard, Inc. behind moving to a new platform from ezboard’s Smalltalk platform was that there were so many bugs in it and that fixing one bug would create another.

Maybe it’s not the development platform but the developers who are at fault?

So when Ben asks the developers to fix some of the long-standing bugs rather than reeasing new features, one of the long-term, sycophantic, happy-clappy ezApologists, “favafoyo” jumps in to say that users would be bored with the same feature set (even if it was working properly):

“if, for six months, nothing but bugs were fixed in pushes, users would become bored with the system”

Yes, you read that properly - users enjoy the excitement of buggy software!

When Ben calls them on this and worse still says “Having said that, if there are six months worth of bugs to be fixed, does anyone else find that concerning?!”, the ezApologist comes right back saying:

“I don’t enter the bug forum often but I have personally never seen a bug last very long… I think based on yuku’s bug fixing history, we can be sure they will be fixed in time.

Having said that, if there are six months worth of bugs to be fixed, does anyone else find that concerning?!

I hope you are joking..”

Yes Ben! How dare you question the mighty ezboard, Inc.!

A pity then to let the facts get in the way of a good argument, but then Ben is easily able to point out that bugs are left unanswered in the forum for months and that occasional workarounds are noted much later that are buggy themselves.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

So when one of the Yuku developers writes:

“You may have noticed slowness in the past few weeks. So many new people!”

…he is supposedly not blaming Yuku’s treacle performance on the number of people choosing to post messages on Yuku. Ah, right. Well he had me fooled (amongst other people too). Or at least, so says Yuku Customer Service [sic] person Alison “Let It Rip” Harrison. No, the reason for the slowness is … er…

“That’s not actually the explanation for the slowness. I believe that there are a few different reasons for the slowness, depending on what you’re experiencing. They are still looking into it.”

Ah right. Crystal clear!

But wait! She’s clearly on a roll. Yuku has been classified as a dating site for a while now by a large provider of enterprise gateway security solutions, no doubt because of the user profiles and all the dating site link adverts they inevitably generate. Despite customers raising this as an issue, Yuku’s half-hearted attempts at getting themselves re-classified - two e-mails in around 6 months it would appear - have accomplished nothing. So after throwing a hissy fit, she fails to answer another point raised in a message thread on this subject:

“Mind you, board owners were also once promised that we’d have the option to be able to back up board data to our home computers. It seems that the Big Man no longer thinks that’s necessary either.”

Alison doesn’t answer that point of course, but then backups have never been their strong point, have they?

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In other news, Yuku’s image server has given up the ghost and it appears that Yuku servers crashing might be a regular occurence. I wonder how bad it’ll be when they import all the ezboards over? Maybe some more investment might not be a bad idea (other than requiring funds to pay for it).