DON'T "upgrade" your profiles (the "Just for you!" link)

[1992casey]

Yuku Supporters are seeing a "Just for you!" link in their navigation

bars.

It's "inviting" members to "upgrade" their profiles.

 

The reality

is

that Yuku's new Facebook Open Platform profiles are in Beta, and they're

currently in terrible condition. I

don't have time to get into it right now except to say that the PM

interface is unusable.

 

Also, if you upgrade, there's no

going back.

 

Suffice to say that I'm not very happy with

Yuku right now. "Beta" requires cautions and warnings, not a giftwrapped

box.

 

 

EDIT: For the benefit of non-Supporters, this is what Yuku Supporters are seeing:

 

http://images.yuku.com/image/png/c5d25239afc1c5cd11b1ca1ff437d5edffd4f3e.png

[1992casey]

It's being reported that the gift box is displacing "important" stuff in the navigation bar. Items reported missing may include the comments notification thinger, the navigation button, or the Admin link (for board admins).

 

A hard refresh should take care of any navigation bar issues. If that doesn't work, clear your cache.

[1992casey]

I guess I owe everyone something more explicative than the terse lead.

When the gift box suddenly popped up, I figured that I'd better get

something posted quickly.

 

As I mentioned, Yuku is in the process

of rolling out new

profiles based on the Facebook Open Platform.

They're currently in beta and are in very rough shape.

 

While the

huge majority of the Brewerfan/LambeauLeap membership doesn't appear to

do a whole lot at the profile level, this still affects us. The biggie

is that the majority of us use the PM interface; that's part of one's

profile. Putting it bluntly, it's not ready for prime time. Examples:

• If
   
   
  you're sent a PM as part of a group, your only option is to reply to
  the group. You can't reply only to the sender. Yuku is addressing this.
• The PM interface lacks CC, BCC, the ability to
  change the subject upon replying, the ability to exclude people when
  replying to all, Forward, Save to Drafts, and a Trash folder.
• It uses a conversation format, which would be
  fine if it were done right. Picture a long Gmail conversation with
  nothing collapsed. This separates the "To" field from the box where you
  compose your reply. Also, you can't choose to reply to an individual
  message. All you can do is add to the conversation.
• When you go to read your new PMs, there's no
  clear indication as to which messages are new. Entire conversations are
  highlighted in a different color. The new message should be highlighted,
  not the whole conversation. Also, you can't depend on color to convey
  meaning. sbrylski06 can tell you about that. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif
  There needs to be some indicator (such as an icon) next to each new
  message.

Unfortunately, when Yuku staff is asked about

PM-related issues, they awkwardly try to defend the interface by saying

it's just

fine. It would be much more comforting if we could be assured that the

awful condition of PMs is due to beta and that we can expect

improvements. Staff won't commit to anything other than offering the

choice of replying to the sender of a group PM vs. replying to all.

 

Other

 

 

areas of concern:

• Privacy. When converting, private stuff
  doesn't necessarily remain private. I'd assume this would get better as
  the beta process goes on. Also, privacy settings are complex and
  incompletely documented at this point.
• Conversion
   
   
  glitches. Sometimes images and PMs don't transfer and have to be taken
  care of manually by staff. A new album conversion script was pushed last
  Friday;
  that should be given some time to shake out before trusting it.

• The juvenile nature. We
  can hug, kiss, bite, and dropkick each other. Currently, we can also
  *********^{1[/sup] each other. Yuku is
  removing that one.}

  To give you an
  idea of where Yuku is coming from, "kick *ss"^1[/sup] is the central point of their
  advertising. Yes, that's
  how they spell it. Worse, the information presented isn't necessarily
  accurate.
   

• Yuku can't be
  bothered with details like grammar and usage. If you ever run across a
  401 page, please don't think the verbiage you see came from us. These
  are currently in place for everybody.

What really hurts

Brewerfan/LambeauLeap is that Yuku has essentially abandoned work on the

boards while profiles have been under development. We have serious bugs

that are a year and a half old (or older): funky reply numbers and page

numbers would be the top bug that comes to my mind. There's been no

commitment on the part of Yuku staff to deal with those.

 

Even

when Yuku staff says the focus isn't shifting from boards to profiles,

there's no reason to believe them. Their credibility has eroded

considerably. Examples:

• The fact that it took 17 months
  to make Convert URLs work as intended.
• The
   
  fact that until late January, there
   
  were no significant code pushes for 11 months, even though there were
  plenty
  of bugs on the table to fix. For the most part, longtime board bugs are
  still present.
  

• Board
  search engines break routinely, and over the past year, they've taken up
  to three months to be fixed. (The fix is actually a five minute
  process.) The worst part of
  this is that search pages are paid views; people use
  the search, see nothing, and the community is charged.

  The searches on Brewerfan and LambeauLeap
  were never down for as long as three months, but the search on BPS was. The general
  excuse for the delay in fixing searches was that the developers were
  busy on other projects (i.e. the new profiles). One real doozie of an
  explanation was that if Yuku fixed the search engines on the boards that
  reported issues, it wouldn't be fair to the boards that didn't report. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/frown.gif

• Chat was down for two weeks in early November.
  "Because of member complaints," a substandard replacement was
  instituted. When members would ask about getting the "real" chat back,
  we were constantly told that "chat isn't broken; it's just different."
  Obviously, that's an insult to members' intelligence. Chat was finally
  fixed (more or less) in January.
  

• While our members don't really use the profile
  comment feature, this is really telling. Over the past year, issues
  related to profile comments were constantly reported in the Bugs forum. A
  common response
  from staff was that comment issues would go away in the new
  profiles.

  I
  don't think anyone ever dreamed that the staff response meant that
  comment issues would go away because comments were being eliminated.
  Staff has backtracked and decided to return comments as a feature in
  the new profiles, but that doesn't erase the disingenuous
  and misleading nature of the information being posted at the time.

Rolling

 

out these profiles with hype rather than explaining the truth about

beta adds to existing credibility issues. Nothing in the conversion

interface even mentions beta. Instead, it focuses on stuff about how

conversion is reserved for "premiere" members. (It's isn't; all 15

million Yuku members can convert if they wish.)

 

It's not as if

the new profiles lack positives. Image management is improved. Members

will be able to crop, rotate, and re-size images. It'll be easier to get

rid of "stock" HTML boxes that are going to go unused. And the PM

interface (which sucks in every other way) can be skinned; members can

"fix" stuff that's hard to read or that simply doesn't appeal to them.

 

The

 

bottom line is that if you're curious and want to take a look, create

 

a test profile on a new account (different e-mail address), and

convert that. Don't convert the "real thing" at this point.

 

Non-supporter

 

profiles can be converted via an "invitation" from a converted profile.

If that's something you're interested in doing, I can invite you from a

converted test profile.

 

I know there's a lot to absorb here, so

if you have questions, feel free to ask. And actually, there's a lot

more I could have included. Consider this to be the "condensed" version.

 

------------------------

1.

 

Please don't use "*********" in your

posts (unless you want to comment on this soon to be defunct feature).

And if you need to say "kick *ss," feel free to say "kick ass" (please

restrict "kick *ss" to this narrow context). The only reason I posted

those terms was to quote Yuku. It's ironic that the first half of

"*********" is in Yuku's default cuss filter.

[TheCrew07]

With Yuku's relative lack of support concerning the most annoying bugs we've been dealing with over for well over a year, is there a better alternative? It's seems like they are hung up on their own agenda without providing adequate support to the product most of us are utilizing. Every forum I've ever been a part of was Ezboard (now Yuku) based for obvious reasons so I don't have any experience outside of the current host.

[1992casey]

It's seems like they are hung up on their own agenda without providing adequate support to the product most of us are utilizing.

 

Bingo. The general tacks are:

• to dismiss an issue by attempting to tell us it's not an issue
• to offer a complicated workaround for something that should be easy
  
• to tell us that when a bug is fixed, something will be announced, and in the meantime we should sit back and wait

We know all about sitting back and waiting. The page and reply numbering issues have been going on since August, 2008. There's been an issue with using the back button in Mozilla browsers that's been on the table since June, 2008. It's started to go away because of new browser releases (Firefox 3.5 and SeaMonkey 2.0), but it still affects Firefox 3.0, Camino, and Flock. These three browsers are still being actively maintained; each of them has had a new release within the past month.

 

On August 5, 2008, a troll "alerted" us to the fact that Yuku's default profanity filter didn't contain any plural cusses. It was also noted that a common 13-letter cuss isn't filtered. This still isn't fixed. We know the fix is easy. Immediately after we migrated, we requested that "dick" be removed from the default filter. Among other respected gentlemen, that's Mass Haas' dad's name. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif It was taken care of, pending a code push, within 45 minutes of the time the request was posted.

 

We've addressed the cusses at Brewerfan/LambeauLeap by adding them to our custom filter, so we're covered. There are a ton of boards out there, however, who wouldn't be aware of this and think they have cuss filter protection, when in fact there are big gaps.

 

Here's another example. In December, I submitted a help ticket about this issue:

blocks, the information contained within is still viewable by savvy

members

unless one first sets the block's permissions to be viewable to

"only me." The "official" response from...">Disabled

profile blocks still viewable

. I explained that when one "disables" profile blocks, they're still viewable if someone knows how to "crack the code"--which isn't very hard to do.

 

Quoting the staff response: "Disable = hide it from view." No, it's not. Hiding from view isn't the same as disabling. To disable something means to prevent it from working, or to make it unable to be used, or to make it inoperative. When your intelligence is insulted like that, you end up being too dumbfounded to respond. In the meantime, these "disabled" blocks are still totally accessible.

 

A recent code push caused people to lose PMs. OK, fine; things happen. It's comforting to know that when a member reported that her PMs were missing on August 14, 2009, her messages were restored promptly... on March 2, 2010.

 

It wasn't always this way. Boards received excellent attention until

KickApps purchased Yuku in early 2008. By late 2008, staff members were

leaving en masse. I believe at least seven left within the span of about

four months. This group included Kristin and Ransom, the two who were

so helpful in seeing us through our migration from ezBoard.

 

Having said all that, it would certainly make sense to look at alternatives. However, with 3,600 members and two boards, a decision like that can't be made quickly. Before undertaking such a task, it would be absolutely necessary to make sure the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.

[1992casey]

The gift boxes are now displaying for some "longtime" members, whether they're Supporters or not. I don't know how Yuku defines "longtime," but from what I can gather, it's quite a number of years of membership. (If a lot more people were seeing these for the first time, all hell would have broken loose at Support by now. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif)

 

Again, I don't recommend converting at this time.

[adamb100]

Yuku cant supply backups of forum data right? Like if you were to ask for a database backup or something of this forum and then simply convert the data to work on vBulletin or another forum? It seems the work with managing a forum yourself(like applying forum upgrades, security updates, etc) is alot less hassle than Yuku.

[1992casey]

When Brian and Peavey ran the PHP LambeauLeap board, they found that security was a hassle. I don't think it was necessarily difficult, but dealing with it was constant. Peavey was kept busy on a daily basis. Besides security, the other reason for going with a hosted solution is cost. Essentially, we're pooling our costs with other boards to share the system, and the monetary aspect is reasonable.

 

Yuku does have daily backups, but we don't have direct access to them. If we were to experience data loss, we'd have to submit a help ticket and hope that our problem was considered a high enough priority for them to assign a developer to attend to the issue.

 

Yuku's terms of use would prevent us from exporting our board to another system. Mainly, the issue would be the membership list. Your account is with Yuku rather than with Brewerfan. I guess that's to protect Yuku members from unscrupulous board owners. Ironically, right now, it seems that we're protecting our members from Yuku.

 

Their terms of use would also prevent us from automatically scraping data for the purpose of transferring it elsewhere. I believe we could do manually it a page at a time if we wanted to. Of course, that would be a daunting task.

 

If we were to move elsewhere at some point, we'd actually be able to keep the Yuku board open as a read-only archive at minimal cost--or we could allow Yuku to serve ads and pay nothing. We'd be covered as far as being able to keep our posting history.

 

I haven't talked to Brian about the latest Yuku issues, so I don't know where he stands. My personal feeling is that things would either have to get worse--or persist for a longer period of time--before we should consider the huge job of moving elsewhere.

 

Also, the staff and moderators feel that the main site is the bigger priority right now. It's currently hard to deliver new content on a regular basis. A new infrastructure would allow us to address that.

[1992casey]

Yuku did a code push today, and it appears that all but the newest members are now seeing gift boxes.

 

To Yuku's credit, there's now some stuff about beta in the conversion interface. That should guard against people converting accidentally (at least a little bit).

 

Again, I don't recommend converting at this time.

[1992casey]

Great service.

drrona wrote:

---

Hi,

We reported a bug on our forum close to a year ago...

 

Still no fix.

Wanting some answer(s) and HELP, please.

 

On our forum: movingintostillness , the SEARCH function is Still not

working.

 

Please, please, please...can ANYONE help FIX this?

We've got lots of members who wish to utilize the function

and we've been very patiently waiting....

no help yet.

 

please contact me to let me know the status of the 'FIX' for our

searches

 

thank you.

sincerely,

dr rona thau

[Invader3K]

I have the gift box appearing at the top of my screen now. Clicked it, then remember this thread. Glad I didn't do the "upgrade."

[1992casey]

This was posted by a member over at Yuku's support board:

http://img697.imageshack.us/img697/3945/yukunuke2.gif

One thing I just found out about today is a privacy issue involving the Friends feature. Even if you have your Friends and Recent Posts blocks set to "Only Me," all of your activity will be broadcast in the Friends News box of anyone who has new profiles.

 

Another thing to really beware of is that if you happen to not have javascript available, the new PM interface won't work at all. Lots of handhelds don't "do" javascript. Also, there are some members who post from behind firewalls that block static.yuku.com. That's where all of Yuku's javascript is located.

 

The telltale sign of not having javascript available is dropdown menus hanging open.

[RyDogg66]

Why do they have to make that darn gift box so tempting to look at.

[1992casey]

Ning is shutting down its free networks. My guess is that Yuku will build an importer to bring over any Ning users who'd like to come to Yuku. I'd also guess that this will push back work on the profiles (which might be a good thing) and further push back any work on the boards (a bad thing).

 

I'm making these guesses based on past experience. In early 2009, MSN shut down its groups, and thousands of its members chose to come to Yuku. Pretty much all staff was put on the import task, and existing Yuku members had to patiently wait until all MSN groups were migrated for their issues to be addressed.

 

During the MSN migrations, several servers were overloaded (including Brewerfan's), and we suffered through several weeks of poor performance (e.g. at best, having to reload pages to see new messages and at worst, messages taking an hour to post).

 

If Ning networks are migrated, hopefully history doesn't repeat itself. More servers need to be brought online, and new boards need to be more equitably distributed among the servers. Unfortunately, I think that Yuku thinks it did a good job with the MSN migrations and won't be inclined to adjust its approach.

 

As a reminder...

 

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y50/KenseidenXL/Smilies/008/JustSayNo-gift.gif

[razzzorsharp]

Too late...

[1992casey]

If you haven't done this already, you might want to disable the Meebo chat bar that appears on every page. Because it does a bunch of data mining, has very complex code, and fully reloads on every page, it can really slow things down.

 

To kill it,

1. Hit the Account link in the old navigation bar or the wrench icon in the new one.
2. Scroll to the bottom of the page and uncheck "Enable chat bar...."
3. Hit the Save Chat Settings button.

[strawbossisevil]

I haven't clicked on the gift. But everytime a page loads I've been noticing that it is loading something related to facebook. This really is slowing down the loading of pages on this forum for me.

 

Is there anything that can be done so that whatever facebook is trying to load can be blocked so that this doesn't continue to have such a slowing effect on my Brewerfan addiction?

[1992casey]

You're right, and it sucks. We've hidden the icons that are associated with the Facebook stuff as they screw up the navigation bar royally. However, hiding the icons is only cosmetic. The code that's causing the lag still loads; there's nothing we can do about that.

 

Members can hide the Facebook icons in their profiles by following these steps:

1. Hit Account in the new navigation

   bar or the wrench (spanner) in the new navigation bar.

2. Hit "Edit

   Customized Skins" in the upper left-hand box.

3. Hit the "edit

   html" button next to the skin(s) marked "active."

4. Paste ul#ka-facebook-controls

   * {display:none;}[/i] into the Advanced CSS box. To do this, scroll to the bottom, insert your cursor, and hit enter (return) to create a new line. Paste the code into the new line, and hit the save button.

Unfortunately,

this only works for unconverted profiles. For converted profiles, there's no means to cover up the buttons. And just like boards, this fix is only cosmetic; it'll make things prettier, but it won't speed up page loading.

 

This is not a popular addition.

 

"I like" /

facebook social plugin feedback topic

[1992casey]

Yuku just pushed an administrative control option that shuts off the "Facebook like" option on boards. I've turned it off here and on LambeauLeap, but I don't know if that'll speed up page loading on boards or not. There's going to be an announcement with more details posted within the next hour.

 

It doesn't look like anything similar has been pushed for profiles.

[1992casey]

We can hug, kiss, bite, and dropkick each other. Currently, we can also ********* each other. Yuku is removing that one.

We're now being told that there was no promise to remove the ********* "feature." I wouldn't have made the statement above without that assurance. Several feedback topics at Yuku Support were hidden/removed due to member behavior. My guess is that the message I based my statement on was in one of them. Thinking logically, the hubbub about ********** over at Support wouldn't have died down without some kind of assurance that they'd be removed.

My response:

---

Chris, I remember the post you linked to, and I found it last night. I'm

sure it's not the one I saw. I do remember something definitive,

however, as I reported to our members back in March that ********** were

going away. I wouldn't have done that based on the message you

cited.

 

But to answer your immediate question with a

couple of questions, I have to wonder: is a replacement for *********

really necessary? Yuku has eight nudge features. Would reducing the

number to seven make a difference?

 

In contrast,

Facebook has one nudge feature, the poke. Its primary definition refers

nothing offensive, and it's synonymous with

nudge. You have to warp your mind a bit to make it offensive.

(Betty White thinks of "poke" as "something you did

on a hayride... under a blanket." But I digress.

http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif)

 

I've posted ad nauseam that I view just about all

of the nudge features as problematic. If one wants to set up a board of

a serious nature (e.g. a business or religious board), giving members

profiles where the default configuration offers the opportunity for them

hug, kiss, dropkick, and ********* each other would exclude Yuku as a

place to set up shop.

 

While our board isn't so

super-serious, because the media and professional sports organizations

are among our target audiences, we still like to run it professionally.

Yuku's nudges work against that. Additionally, our membership is almost

all male. They don't want to be hugging and kissing each other. More

importantly, they wouldn't want to offer others the opportunity to hug

and kiss them.

 

Way back when the beta profiles were

released, there was feedback that the default configuration should be age-neutral and context-neutral. That would make Yuku usable

by everyone. An example outside of the More menu would be the fact that

the WIBUT box

refers to topics as "rants." "Rant" isn't an accurate characterization

of all lead posts, and it certainly isn't a complimentary one. In fact,

we tell our members that posts that qualify as "rants" are candidates to

be hidden.

 

Assuming that the nudges are remaining

(as Yuku seems hell-bent on the idea that they're an attraction),

********* would seem to duplicate the function of dropkick, which

already exists. At least dropkick doesn't contain a cuss. And it has

nothing to do with men physically abusing female prostitutes. If it's

really necessary to replace ********* with another nudge, BlueRose has

proposed "slap." On its own, that term isn't necessarily

offensive.