You may be seeing ads in posts

[1992casey]

Yuku has eaten up all of our prepaid page views within the last day or so, meaning that you may be seeing ads in posts. This is due to a bug rather than a lack of funding. I've submitted a help ticket.

 

LambeauLeap appears to be unaffected by this issue.

[1992casey]

The issue hasn't been fixed, but Yuku has stopped ads from being served to our board until something more permanent can be done.

[1992casey]

I took a closer look at LambeauLeap. It's screwed up too. We're getting way too many page views deducted. However, since the number of prepaid views hasn't yet reached zero, ads aren't being displayed at this point. I've added this information to the ticket I submitted this morning.

[1992casey]

LambeauLeap is now showing ads. I asked yesterday for Customer Service to take a look, but nobody's responded to my ticket. They're dropping the ball pretty badly with this… no announcement or anything. I know of at least one board owner who's thrown money at the problem even though she shouldn't have had to.

[1992casey]

Yuku staff has now turned off ads at LambeauLeap.

[1992casey]

Yuku fixed this issue today.

 

 

This PM came into my inbox about a half an hour ago.

Subject: Hello

 

Hello 1992Casey,

 

As

you know, the community you admin was hit by a sudden views spike in

October which exhausted your ad-free pageviews. Ads were turned off

immediately to prevent advertisements from showing on the board.

We have returned the ad-free pageviews that were lost during the spike and have turned ads back on now.

The community has not been charged for the 3 weeks during which ads were turned off.

We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused you and your members.

 

Yuku Team

Actually,

it's been two days short of a month since the problem arose. While I'm

glad that we weren't charged during this time, I sure wouldn't want to

see prices increase because Yuku isn't cutting it financially.

 

Although

the PM says "community" instead of "communities," the available prepaid

page views on both Brewerfan and LambeauLeap look fine.

[1992casey]

Since Saturday, we've noticed that Yuku has been charging us about 300% of what we were being charged previously. Staff has again turned off ads on both Brewerfan and LambeauLeap, so right now, we're not being charged at all.

 

At first, the staff member who handled my support ticket suggested that the new charges were correct, then she backtracked, turned of the ads, and referred the issue to a technician. Stay tuned. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif

 

The worst part about all of this is that the owner of another board has confirmed that Yuku is only addressing these overcharges for communities that submit complaints. Over a two day period in October, the system ate up hundreds of thousands of prepaid page views (almost a million here on Brewerfan and almost 300,000 on LambeauLeap). Communities that didn't hit zero like we did could have easily missed the fact that they were overcharged back then — and they're very likely to miss the fact that they might be getting overcharged now.

 

Along with this, there's been no public announcement at all regarding these issues. People who complained back in October were notified individually via PM when Saturday's so-called "fix" was implemented. That certainly doesn't foster trust.

 

For the time being, I'm going to turn off the ability to contribute both here and at LambeauLeap. I don't think we need to muddle things any worse than they currently are. As things stand, Brewerfan should be good for a few weeks and LambeauLeap should be set for quite a while.

[1992casey]

The worst part about all of this is that the owner of another board has confirmed that Yuku is only addressing these overcharges for communities that submit complaints.

 

It now appears that this conclusion was drawn erroneously. It's likely that ads were turned off system-wide back in October when things first broke down. However, there's no word if they've been turned off across the system due to this weekend's issues.

 

This whole thing would have been made a lot clearer had there been public announcements regarding this issue. That would have prevented anyone from making erroneous assumptions.

[1992casey]

It now appears that this conclusion was drawn erroneously.

 

Upon further review, it wasn't an error. There are boards that haven't had ads turned off and haven't had any attempts by Yuku to correct billing errors. Of course, making adjustments only for communities that complain would be illegal.

 

We've been billed for two out of the past forty-one days. And the two days we were billed for were hopefully wrong. A company can't do business that way.

[1992casey]

We're paying again, but Yuku can't tell us what we're being charged for. Messages exchanged over the past couple of days…

Customer Service:

---

The ad-free pageviews that were used by the views spike in October have been returned to the communities and ad page counting will be turned back on effective 12/01/11. Ad counting will return to the method that was in effect prior to the spike occurring; however, please be aware that we are continuing to evaluate the site's terms of service as well as working through a number of engineering fixes to help improve the site. Stand by for additional updates soon.

 

Should you have any issues or questions, please contact us here at our help desk http://help.yuku.com/submit

 

Regards,

Yuku Team

Me:

---

Exactly which pages are we being charged for?

Customer Service:

---

Hi,

 

The

engineers are looking into the method. If you see any difference in the

way your ads are counted now, over when before Crowdgather acquired the

network, would you mind submitting more information so that it can be

looked at?

Me:

---

The

problem is that our stats only allow us to go back three months, and

the November 19th fix retroactively modified the numbers.

 

As I

mentioned in ticket number [omitted], the last I knew, we were being

charged for thread pages and search pages. I don't recall any

announcement saying that things would be different.

Customer Service:

---

Hi,

 

Ad pages are counted the same way as before. If you feel that your stats say differently, please provide additional information.

Me:

---

Which pages were we being charged for before the goof-up?

Customer Service:

---

Hi,

 

We've forwarded your query to the engineering department, we'll let you know when we have a response.

What we're paying for is certainly something that we're entitled to know, and it's something that Yuku's legally obligated to disclose. It used to be a simple answer to a simple question: you're charged for views on thread and search pages.

 

I can't believe that Yuku has put themselves in this situation. They've messed up badly in the past, but previous disasters haven't involved money. Not being able to tell us what we're paying for is beyond belief.

 

Saying "the same as before" is meaningless when nobody knows what "before" is. This is really the worst mess-up since we moved to Yuku and the worst mess-up since almost all of our data was lost in 2005.