First off, a big thank you to the yuku support team. Our board owner posted in GetHelp right after the migration (because the entire board and every bit of text on it had been centered and we couldn't for the life of us fix it - half-amusing, half-baffling, all-annoying) and the reply was immediate and our centering problem fixed. I honestly have never come across support like it - well done, and thanks for the hard work.
That being said, the actual migration from ezboard has left us in tatters. Although we received the e-mail a while back about the move, we did not - as I've seen members here suggest after problems have been raised - make a test board to see how to deal with the fall-out. Would that have been a really, really good idea? Yes. Oh, yes. Would any of us have had the time? No. We're looking after a busy community and trying to participate ourselves, and that's after real life commitments like work, family, friends... none of the staff are on any other communities because we just can't split the time.
Our board has been a gold community for years. We've had many EZsupporters - I'm not one currently, thankfully, but I have been before - and still do. Because we're so large, our gold fees are nothing to be sniffed at. Why, then, were we migrated when we didn't want to be? I know many people are complaining of this, but it's a valid complaint. We paid. Actual money was given to ezboard and now we're on yuku. Upgrade? No, it's more like a new host. The staff of the board and the members don't LIKE yuku. We're a roleplaying community, not a social networking group. Yuku is like the lovechild of ezboard and Bebo, and there's a reason we don't RP on Bebo.
Our layout has been blown to smithereens. We're getting it back bit by bit, but there are some issues that are taking longer to resolve. Again, from our brief experience with the support team and my endless trawling looking for previous solutions to issues, I've seen the amazing efforts put into helping boards recover, but this isn't a complaint about staff. I know from reading other threads that the typical response from other yuku members is "you can make it virtually identical to ezboard", and that infuriates me beyond all belief. Did we sign up and hand over cash to take on a shedload of work just to get our board to remain the same? Of course not! We've been on ezboard since 2004, and years of fiddling had gotten us to the stage where we were all perfectly happy with the setup of our board - only for it all to be blown away in what seemed like an instant migration. (Not that I'm complaining about the speed, I hasten to add - it's better than the board going down). The blink of an eye and four years of set-up is gone. Most posts from yesterday and several from the day before evaporated - and that's really bad craic on an RP board, though some of the roleplay posts are being recovered from our history caches.
This isn't a rant about change. Some of our members are talking about moving to InvisionFree to start from scratch - so it's not about change. It's about change that was not on our terms. It's about a workload we didn't ask for that could take weeks, months even, for us lowly non-computer-geniuses to get through. It's about having features forced on us that we actively did not want and had not paid for. It's about the entire service changing from community-oriented to social-networking, becoming a site directed at teenagers instead of everyone. It's about popularity contests - kudos? Please! - tramping all over our board because Yuku think Bebo had the "give love!" idea right. It's about paying money and then being jerked around, not because it's in members' interests, but because Yuku wants to be the biggest instead of the best.
*Wheeze* Okay. I feel slightly better. Sorry if this is in the wrong place, but it seemed like the best place to put it. We have bugs and our admin is still working on trying to eradicate things like the omniprescent quick reply and kudos boxes, but I'll post issues and such in the correct forums. I just wanted to air my opinions on our migration and the depths of suck it's plunged us into.
I know a lot of people here will be defensive about yuku, and that's fine. It's good that it's working for them and they like it. But it's not working out for us yet and we don't.
- Shiny
