[Rant] Tapatalk

[Matt C.]

I’m excited to start this thread as I’m anxious for the heated replies.

What’s everyone’s opinion of Tapatalk?

IMO Tapatalk is the worst thing that’s happened to the forums industry PERIOD.

From their horrible support, excessive vulnerabilities, to their mismanagement of their premium service, forcing ads on every forum, and buying up (almost) all the free forum providers and absolutely butchering Zetaboards.

Tapatalk is cancer and I can’t wait for it to go disappear.

Rant over.

 

[Cedric]

My experience with Tapatalk isn't great either. Due to taking over Zetaboards it ended a creative and active community in a heartbeat. Sure Zetaboards was slightly declining but the take over killed it rapidly. We lost many good forums, many friends, many great resources, homes, etc. The list goes on. No other free software was as good as ZetaBoards. We often referred to it as our snowglobe where everyone knew each other and that was definitely not a bad thing.

Zetaboards is not the only service Tapatalk killed though. They acquired many other hosts and never has there ever been a positive word about it.

 

[Arantor]

Oh boy, where do I start?

First up, let's begin by pointing out that I know at least one of their integrations actually violated the licence of the platform it was for - the SMF 1.1.x integration straight up violated the SMF licence because SMF prior to 2.0 was not truly open source and they were shipping copies of SMF files, strictly against the licence. I don't know if they just quietly discontinued the 1.1.x version or if SMF had to "remind them" about it with lawyers but it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.

Then there's the whole premise of their app. I get the convenience factor, especially when it first came around and it wasn't viable to do push notifications to a phone without a dedicated app (because browser notifications didn't exist, and they're only just coming to iPhone later this year, apparently). But it did what I've been telling people about for years whenever the 'but we want an app' argument comes up: it means your site is reduced to the same thing everyone else's is, and none of your customisations mean a thing. If you happen to be in a world where your site is in any way interesting for features beyond 'just the forum', none of that is exposed. Nada. Which is a serious turn-off for a surprising number of sites. You get the lowest-common-denominator feature set (which is also why none of the forum vendors are in any hurry to build an app because for it to ever make sense you have to interoperate, and none of them are going to reduce their own offering)

Then there's the fact that when they did offer a product in this lowest-common-denominator format, it was frequently buggy, demonstrably disregarded security settings (e.g. SMF sites set to registration disabled or admin-only approval would find new members registered and able to post by way of the app)

Then of course you have their little directory which is just crying for 'I don't really like this forum but for minimal effort I can find others that might be better'.

But I will absolutely give you that their virus like take-over of various of the forum hosts (not just Zetaboards and InvisionFree but also plenty of smaller ones that just slid by)... was the worst. It's the sort of thing Internet Brands (the vB owner) or VerticalScope (owners of Threadloom and TAZ) would do, except somehow scummier, like they were actually pretending it was for the forums' benefit.

Just ew. THOU SHALT NEVER DARKEN MY DOOR, HEATHEN APPLICATION. BEGONE WITH YOU.

 

[Bluezone777]

The process of Brandon selling ZN to Tapatalk from the perspective of the people who used the host....

 

[Aaron]

Tapatalk =

 

[Kale]

The process of Brandon selling ZN to Tapatalk from the perspective of the people who used the host....

Yes, exactly..

Tapatalk =

Tapatalk is pure garbage indeed.

 

[Matt C.]

It's the sort of thing Internet Brands (the vB owner) or VerticalScope (owners of Threadloom and TAZ) would do, except somehow scummier, like they were actually pretending it was for the

I wouldn’t be surprised if VerticalScope bought Tapatalk.

 

[Arantor]

They haven't yet as far as I know - though I could possibly see it. For some of TT's platform offerings, going to the weird mutant XenForo that VS has would probably be an upgrade. Even though it's weird and mutant.

 

[Cory]

I actually used Tapatalk for a short period just because I liked the convenience factor of their app and how simple it was to find relevant forums and use the in-app features to do minimal tasks. I never actively owned a Tapatalk board and I never wish to. It's all about the money, buying out forum software in hopes of building the overall network to a degree that makes them even more money is obviously one of the key factors in acquiring that forum software.

I'm very sad that ZetaBoards died because of its sell-out, but it seems Brandon wasn't making many updates to it for a while, possibly because he knew it was just going to be sold off. It was still an amazing piece of software that I'll miss dearly and where I met so many like-minded people and learned so much about the ins and outs of forums and how to run them.

Killing off good forum software out of greed is what leads to the demise of that software. It's a win-win situation for the owner of the forum software and the owner of the sold software seeing as both benefit from large chunks of money, but it's a lose-lose situation for the userbase of the forum software that was sold seeing as they lose all the hard work they put into their message board and the dedication they provided to the service overall.

 

[Strawberry]

I can't really add much to this discussion as I have honestly never used Tapatalk. The last time I was really into forums, it was still ZetaBoards.
I've had a quick look at what it offers and I jumped onto the support forum and I must say it looks very bland and does not look user friendly at all.

 

[Arantor]

Well, you're not really meant to use Tapatalk through the web, it's an app and the web's bland and generic presence is mostly there in passing. But it's not a thrilling or particularly pleasant app experience either.

 

[Ravenfreak]

Tapatalk absolutely sucks. It took over quite a few awesome free forum hosts such as prophpbb and of course Zetaboards. You have to pay to be able to access css files to modify the look and feel of your board which is absolutely ridiculous, this feature is free on pretty much every other free forum host on the net! They should have just stuck to working on the app, but I guess they knew deep down the app would probably become useless one day, so they decided to buy out some free forum hosts and be able to keep customers...