You know how people say “I’m not a racist, but there’s this black guy, an asian…” when telling a clearly racist joke? And the same thing pertains to disability. So you’ll have to forgive me (or simply move on to another blog) when I tell you that this made me laugh:
Oh and talking of laughing at disability, a friend of mine who’s wheelchair-bound refers to parking spaces for the disabled as “spazz spaces” which I find very amusing indeed. I like her and her sense of humour a lot…
Now we all know that (l)users are very thick people indeed, so it came as no great suprise yesterday when an e-mail came through from Apple yesterday welcoming a “Stephanie Burke” - oh, the irony - to iTunes Store and saying:
“Your account is set up and enables you to purchase and download immediately.”
And that’s precisely what she then did: buying a load of music files from Apple’s iTunes Store.
Now if there were to be any comeback about the purchases (for example, if the payment method was with a stolen credit card or similar), I don’t really want the shit hitting the fan here. So I changed the password on the Apple account just in case and have now gone looking to find a way to close the Apple ID but to no avail.
Changing the password required me to click a confirmation link sent by e-mail to the spurious e-mail address, so that made me wonder why, when setting up the Apple ID, did they not require a confirmation link to be clicked to confirm the e-mail was indeed theirs?
That’s a pretty basic concept: for example when users sign up to the vBulletin message boards I operate, they have to confirm their e-mail addresses before they can operate their account.
One of the slowest-appearing and most-requested features for Yuku was chat. This is something that worked fairly well on ezboard and was a key feature as far as many customers were concerned.
Now the chat system - when it does work… - is a nice feature to have and of course, there’ll be those who say “there’s no chat in vBulletin, so there!” but then that’s why you can easily add a rather nice chat feature pretty easily to your self-hosted vBulletin installation that doesn’t require a separate chat server (especially a Yuku Yoyo special) and that does integrate and work very nicely with vBulletin.
Maybe one day those poor unfortunates who battle on with that shower at ezboard, Inc. will wake up and smell the coffee…
Every so often, I buy a ticket for the National Lottery, aka the tax on the poor and stupid.
So with my present degree of arsedness* being pretty low, I decided to register and play online. Here’s part of the confirmation e-mail I received when I signed up:
“Dear `Firstname`,
Thanks for opening a National Lottery Account and welcome to The National Lottery online service.
Your username is: `Username`. Please keep this email handy; you may find it useful to refer to if you forget your sign-in details.”
Yes, I’m sure that will come in handy…
*the extent to which I can be arsed to do something
“Thanks for your email. The “Mark as Spam” feature is there to help us recognize messages which are spam. If you see any comments which are spam, please click on “Mark as Spam” and the comment will be removed from the site. This helps us keep the site clean and spam free.”
Now, maybe it’s just me, but when I upload videos I allow comments but only if they’re approved by me, i.e. I get a notification of a comment, go to the video and approve or delete them or indeed mark them as Spam. In my case, the reply that “the comment will be removed” doesn’t appear to be correct. When I mark a comment as Spam, it shows as being marked that way, but as soon as I reload the video page or log out and log in again, the comment is still there awaiting approval and has to be manually deleted.
So what’s the point in marking the message as Spam, especially as they’re almost exclusively from “fire and forget” YouTube accounts? All it does is make more work for me.
Good grief! “Silent” Rob Labatt has finally broken his near nine month silence to post on Yuku - maybe he has to give birth to each post?
Of course, it’s a tad lacking in factual accuracy, but no change there:
“…Well done to the entire Yuku team for a fantastically smooth release…”
Who knows? Maybe having every single Yuku message board offline all morning is smooth by their standards?
Well it’s all very well and good being able to easily upload videos and set various options for comments and the like, but what happens when there’s a feature you don’t understand?
Some of my videos on an alternative profile are quite popular and as a result of that a lot of people are subscribing to the video ‘channel’ which I presume is partly responsible for introducing more subscribers viral marketing stylee.
But with that comes the issue of Comment Spamming, mainly for those tacky webcam pr0n sites. Now, all comments for my videos are moderated so they don’t actually get seen until I go along and approve them or otherwise. There’s also a “Spam” link which seems to hide the content but the username is still shown, at least to me, but reloading the video page shows the full comment to me again, so I then have to delete it. So what exactly does the Spam link do? Try searching for “spam” or “comment spam” or whatever in the Help Centre and you’ll see there’s nothing at all about that.
I also had to raise a query about “Bulletins”: do they go to all your subscribers or just your friends? I’m still not entirely sure, but I suspect the latter.
Maybe they should spend some of those billions of a proper, full FAQ?
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