Yuku for Cocoa Puffs

My favorite message board, where I spend an inordinate and possibly illegal amount of my workday, has just switched over from EZboard to yuku.

For those who don't know what those words mean, they're both simply formats of message boards. EZboard is in the process of converting all its communities to yuku format, and my little corner of the interweb finally succumbed this week.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. As I've mentioned in previous posts, I'm kind of internet-dumb and ludditey. I like my webpages simple, to the point and easy to understand -- excessive visual content confuses me, and excessive features frighten me. I don't want to have to *learn* how to use a given page -- I want to be able to just sit down and use it. And change ... oh sweet Jesus how I fear change.

So I've been poking around my new yuku-environment with some trepidation. Some things remain the same, which is good, but there's a whole host of new features, add-ons and alterations that just keep tripping me up. A friend of mine who runs an ezboard was told by an acquaintance that his newly-yukuized page looked "like it just got hijacked by a pack of wild Japanese teenage girls", and that's not totally inaccurate. The new board has much more visual information -- banner signatures, quick-reply boxes, colored kudos buttons, pop-up menus under people's usernames, and "silhouette avatars" for everyone that hasn't picked one. And tag lists. So many tag lists.

Remember what I said above about visual information?

I guess some of the stuff is potentially useful, but I find a lot of it unneccessary and cluttery. Do I really care how many "kudos" some user has gotten? No I do not. It's not even slightly relevant.

And I don't really see the need to have an expanded profile that resembles Facebook, right down to friend requests and movable feature boxes that include mapping your location via Google Maps.

And then there's the transition, in the Reply and New Post fields, from excodes to WYSIWYG text and html coding. (I guess it was fortunate timing that I just took this class, then!)

Oh well. Apparently yuku's been in beta testing for years, and their website happily supplies an ezboard/yuku comparison page to help n00bs figure out where all their old features went. And I'm not the biggest fan of tags (another web development that I still don't completely understand or trust), but I gather they're the way of the future -- so I suppose their inclusion here is for the best. And hey, cool, we're no longer limited to 20 pages of threads before they vanish into the ether. So it's not all bad.

But it says something that the "how do I adjust my yuku settings" thread on my favorite board is nine pages long in only three days.

I don't know. I'm figuring out how to use yuku, yes. I'm re-establishing my footing and re-learning how to do all the little things I used to do on the old board (inserting images, using smilies, quoting text,etc). But I'm not liking it. I'm not saying "wow, this yuku is fantastic and much better/easier/more fun than ezboard!" I'm tolerating the experience, and getting through the teask of posting -- in the same way that I'd tolerate and feel my way through using a foreign operating system on a friend's machine.

They may call themselves "message boards 2.0", but I'm just not seeing how the yuku format is an improvement. At the moment, it feels to me kind of like a small step backwards.

I guess I'll give it a few weeks.