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Re: You havent forgotten our anniversary have you?...

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 4:27 pm
by White Exec
Tapatalk had a following on FCF too, but there were on-going compatibility and security issues with it in combination with phpBB, I recall.
Mike is the expert on this.

Re: You havent forgotten our anniversary have you?...

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 6:26 pm
by xantia_v6
As someone who runs a couple of phpBB forums, and an occasional developer of phpBB styles and extensions, I have to say that Tapatalk was a real pain as it integrated well with phpBB 3.0, but does not work well with the architectural flexibility (extensions) introduced in phpBB v3.1.

There are also some commercial practices of the Tapatalk organisation that have trapped some forum owners into losing control of the the contents of their forums.

Native phpBB before v3.0 did not work well on small screens and Tapatalk was a useful fix for that. Since phpBB 3.1, it is possible to get good scaling of phpBB on small screens (if an appropriate style is selected). I think that this forum could do better on that count, but this topic is not the place to discuss that.

[edited to remove some stuff that does not belong in this topic]

Re: You havent forgotten our anniversary have you?...

Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2019 9:05 am
by djg
If there is another topic to deal with it, let's move there, of course.

I know of the animosity between the two communitites and, at one time, I tried (completely in vain, for sure) to provide a user's perspective to the question on the phpBB forum. I gave up after a few tries. No, the forum appearance on mobile has practically nothing to do with it, although I know that this is the main argument phpBB developers now dismiss it with. I know full well that both sides are to blame, Tapatalk has their own interests for sure, but phpBB never provided a clear and reliable API for such services to hook into. And instead of collaborating to benefit their users, they decided to antagonise.

For me, lack of Tapatalk is the single reason while I now only log in very sporadically, maybe once a week or less often. With Tapatalk, I checked the forum every single night. It's not about website style on mobile. It's the same analogy as using a mailer instead of going to the webmail solution of all of your e-mail addresses. I never used webmail and never will, I use a single mail application that handles all my addresses, and allows me to read and write all I want from a single app, in a completely uniform way, without the need to go and log in to each of them in turn, and use whatever UI they have. Tapatalk, for me, is the mailer application of forums, it's that simple.

Re: You havent forgotten our anniversary have you?...

Posted: Wed Apr 24, 2019 11:28 am
by Ciaran
Hi guys,

Well of course I missed this, by 10 days, but the board start date was Tuesday 14th April 2009, at 10:59pm.
Hard to believe its been 10 years, the time has flown by, although now I can't remember a time when the forum didn't exist.

Its a great resource and I'm honoured to run / host it, but to be honest the forum is only a website and a database, its greater than the sum of its parts, i.e its the great minds, technical expertise and personality of our membership, that make this site what it is.
I'd like to say we're probably one of the most comprehensive collection XM resources on the planet at this point.

It's all about the people, and as Dean says we've sadly lost some along the way; Ray, Jaap (Captain Haddock), Bob Halliday to name but a few, gone but never forgotten, their immense contributions, personality and wit will live on for as long as this site exists, I hope.

Speaking of that, I have a lot of work to do on the site with regards to future proofing, backups, planning for the years ahead, as well as day to day usability stuff such as implementing HTTPS (including for images - finally, Mike :lol: ), and of course sorting out the TapaTalk situation. Unfortunately I've again been very busy with work this past several months, but am hoping to put some some aside a few days soon to do an overhaul of the site.

Gábor, I understand your frustration at the lack of TapaTalk functionality. I have also seen the other side of the argument which Mike has raised, a very valid concern.
The only thing I can think of at the moment, is creating a second instance / virtual directory of the site, into which to install the TapaTalk plugin, and live with the incompatibilities / functionality loss within that particular instance, as it would only be for TapaTalk use. The URL to access it would be separate from the main one, of course.
The security concerns remain an issue which needs investigated before committing to this, but I'm certainly willing to give it a try if it's in any way possible.

Ciarán