tapatalk and security, convos, etc.

I got to meet Winter this past weekend and was very happy with what he showed me and others in Austin, TX. He was very eager to listen to what we all had to say and I think the direction they are going in is the right one. I brought up concerns about spam and a few other issues. They have 20 engineers working on Tapatalk and went into what it takes to actually keep up with Android and iOS updates. There are bound to be mishaps but I came away from the meeting feeling really good about their future.

Here we all are discussing Tapatalk. Winter is in the blue shirt. I'm on the far right in the hat.

winter.webp
 
It's a shame they don't share with the rest of us!

Still no response to the various questions I've put to them which have come from various people:

https://support.tapatalk.com/threads/explanation-of-plans-to-tapatalk-users-and-forum-owners.21005/

I disagree with the direction they are going in being the right one. All they seem to have done in recent weeks is upset a lot of users and forum owners with what they have been doing.

BTW it was Winter who I quoted in my last post. They weren't very forthcoming about removing the ability to disable guest access - they sneaked that one through without mentioning it until I raised the issue. No consultation with forum owners, just tough luck, you can't have it any more even though you want and use it.
 
I agree that their communication hasn't been the best when it comes to things like this. That is something that was brought up as well and something Winter admitted. They are still a relatively small company. If you don't feel comfortable using them then remove it. I'm not sure what else you want from me. I'm just giving my opinion and feedback from having met Winter and like what I saw. You are more than welcome to disagree.
 
I got to meet Winter this past weekend and was very happy with what he showed me and others in Austin, TX. He was very eager to listen to what we all had to say and I think the direction they are going in is the right one. I brought up concerns about spam and a few other issues. They have 20 engineers working on Tapatalk and went into what it takes to actually keep up with Android and iOS updates. There are bound to be mishaps but I came away from the meeting feeling really good about their future.

Here we all are discussing Tapatalk. Winter is in the blue shirt. I'm on the far right in the hat.

View attachment 59186

Where was this?
 
Bama, what is their take on why forum owners would want to skip their own advertising banners, etc. and promote TT?

Did they have any comments on why TT doesn't show up in google analytics, quantcasts, etc. (if this is true?).

These are major issues for the forum owners. The simplicity of TT is just great, but they don't seem to have their monetizing thing down yet. I'd rather my users pay $5 for the program and then be allowed - on my end - to put special sponsor or banner ads or messages.

Or, maybe they could get a small amount of banners/ads and I would get the rest, etc.
 
These are all things they are actively working on improving. There was a large discussion around how it hurts us financially to install the Tapatalk plugin because we don't get anything out of it, other than the new users and content.

They are addressing it and they are a small company employee wise with a very popular software. Winter gave me no impression that they were not wanting to listen to forum owners. They are simply a bit overwhelmed right now with how popular they have become and how hard it is to keep up with the mobile operating systems.

That is what I got out of it. Don't shoot the messenger. I have no problem using them going forward and many of us came out of the two days of meetings feeling a lot better about using Tapatalk going forward.
 
Despite removing it from my forums, it remains the only app that currently unifies the forum experience across multiple platforms, and as such I will continue to keep an eye on its development (and Tapatalk as a company).

Never say never! (y)
 
Well I've got my response from Tapatalk to the various questions I asked them - they deleted the thread!

https://support.tapatalk.com/threads/explanation-of-plans-to-tapatalk-users-and-forum-owners.21005/

For any who are interested, this was what I asked them:

Thank you for the response regarding the Android app confusion in recent days.

Although you have begun to explain your strategy for Tapatalk, you are a long way from fully explaining your plans and the roadmap for the future.

For years Tapatalk has been a purchasable app, and now you are suddenly giving a version away for free to users. The other version you have stated above just has a built-in photo editor and tablet support. What you haven't mentioned here is the watermarking when using Tapatalk image hosting (which I believe is removed for the Pro version?) nor have you mentioned adverts. It does make me wonder if there is anything else you're not telling us.

Regarding the adverts, it seems to me as though your plan is to display adverts on the free version of Tapatalk (I mean, you've got to make some money from the app, you aren't giving it away out of the goodness of your hearts?!). What is unclear is whether Pro users will also see these adverts and whether or not forum owners have any control as to whether or not any of their users will see adverts or not. You have stated elsewhere that forum owners can choose to opt-out of displaying adverts. However, you deleted two threads where forum owners raised their concerns about this and now you're claiming that they were deleted because they were in the wrong place (which seems a strange thing to do when you can simply move the threads to the correct place instead). You've now conveniently put up a guide showing forum owners how they can switch off these adverts and state that they will remain switched off unless we choose to switch them on. However, in recent weeks when you began testing the adverts, you did switch on these adverts in our forum panels without our consent (and several forum owners will attest to this).

Also in recent times you changed the say that Link Affiliation worked for forum owners. Previously owners linked their Viglink accounts in Tapatalk. Suddenly that disappeared and we had to register our PayPal email address in the forum owner area instead, yet there was no announcement about this. Why the change? The stats lack any detail and I suspect you made this change so you could skim off some revenue from this link affiliation.

In all, there are an increasing number of forum owners and Tapatalk users who have grown suspicious of your business practices, which seem to put profit first and users and forum owners second.

I would advise you to give a much clearer explanation to both users and forum owners about your plans for the future and you may want to do this in two separate threads. You have many questions that need answering:

Explanation to users:
  1. What are all of the features of the free app? (including any advertising, watermarking etc)
  2. What are the features of the Pro app? (including any advertising, watermarking etc)

Explanation to forum owners:
Advertising

  1. Can a forum owner completely disable adverts for all their forum members?
  2. If adverts are enabled, who sees them? Free app only or both free and pro apps?
  3. Can a forum owner prevent certain types of adverts being displayed (just like you can with Google Adsense)?
  4. Will better stats for this be provided (we get far better stats on Google Adsense)?

Link Affiliation
  1. Why did you change the process for link affiliation?
  2. What percentage of income from link affiliation are you taking and what do forum owners get?
  3. Will you be making it clearer in the forum owners section about adding a PayPal email address when switching on link affiliation (as it is not clear).
  4. Will better stats be provided? The current stats are very poor compared to the detail we get from Viglink.

I, along with other users and forum owners look forward to hearing your answers on all of these questions.

I don't think these are unreasonable questions.

As I have already mentioned, they have also removed the ability for forum admins to disable guest access via Tapatalk and they did so without notifying us.

https://support.tapatalk.com/threads/disallow-guests.21025/


Frankly, this sort of behaviour is appalling from a company who relies on us as forum admins to support their product. Taking away features and silencing our questions by deleting them isn't going to encourage us to help their business grow.

Anyway, I'm now done with Tapatalk. The add-on will be uninstalled this afternoon and mobile users can instead use the responsive design which works very well. :)
 
I found out this morning they've deleted another of my threads too; strange way to run a support forum. :confused:
 
Frankly, I'm tired of providing tech support for their software. When somebody's Tapatalk app stops working, it's automatically my fault from the users's perspective.
 
As y'all probably know, their security certificate expired a few days ago - so I had to deal with users asking me about that (even when not on tapatalk, it apparently spread to the whole forum even in a browser)....

I'm not removing it yet - but unless I feel better by the end of the year, it may go....

The idea of not easily being able to turn off their pop-up ad for tt when users go in via browser is unsettling.

I believe they have a decent product. But what they don't seem to have yet is the proper business model, especially for large (money making) forums.
 
For now, we're dropping Tapatalk off in favor of just relying XF's responsive design.

Primarily, I'm tired of the lack of support in getting our push notifications fixed. Plus, we're pushing out a new ad system which will be only beneficial if people actually 'see' the site instead of a filtered view in Tapatalk. Warnings were given to our Tapatalk user base that support will be dropped later this month, which about when all of the new advertisers will be in place and ready to roll with the new ad system.

I appreciate the function of Tapatalk, the company and how they provide support needs work. When I say support, that also means communication, just basic good old communication.

If we go back to Tapatalk in this case, we will likely go BYO unless a rival product appears to sweep things up a bit. (you never know...)
 
From my understanding it bypasses the restrictions. To me this is one of it's big weaknesses (and will probably ultimately be the reason I remove it from the forums).

This has suddenly become a huge issue. I'm seeing a bunch of new users coming in through Tapatalk and bypassing all of the anti-spam measures, required user fields, etc.

W
T
F....
 
This has suddenly become a huge issue. I'm seeing a bunch of new users coming in through Tapatalk and bypassing all of the anti-spam measures, required user fields, etc.

W
T
F....
The "required user fields" apparently are ignored. I edited the code to disallow registrations through tapatalk - but haven't checked to see if that works yet or not.
 
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