No More Tapatalk on TBS

[Eric]

Hello. I've never been a fan of Tapatalk's service,  but I have grudgingly offered it because some folks wanted to be able to use it. In a time when few message board sites had decent mobile interfaces, their services made sense enough, but that time has long since passed. Any modern site using a decent commercial quality software can offer a very nice mobile interface on their own. I think that TBS views very well on phones and is simple to use. Tapatalk is simply not needed.

On top of that, they have frequently been the source of security and stability issues to the site. The Tapatalk plugin has been throwing errors for some time and the updated plugin crashed the site, over the weekend. On top of that, there is a feature on their system that is causing a really annoying issue for some members using Android phones. Tapatalk tells me that I can turn that feature off, but only if I pay them $10 a month to do so. I've had enough.

I apologize to those of you that are regular users of their system, but I will no longer run their service on this site. I hope you will give the site a look in your phone's browser and see how easy it is to navigate and read. I didn't make this decision lightly and I regret that it will inconvenience some of you, but I believe that Tapatalk's service is irrelevant today and I am tired of having to deal with the issues that hosting their service entails. I hope you all understand.

[LostinTexas]

All the above are reasons I dumped TT, along with the fee they demanded. Security was a joke.

Almost every site now looks much the way TT did back when, and works a lot better.

Sorry you are having the mayhem with them.

[crockett]

Never used TT. Heck I often use the desktop version of sites on my cell phone.

[Eric]

4 minutes ago, crockett said:

Never used TT. Heck I often use the desktop version of sites on my cell phone.

As I'm sure you know, the designed ability of a site to render itself to suit various types of devices is called responsiveness. Building responsive websites is pretty much mandatory these days. This software has its failings, but it excels at being responsive. TBS renders beautifully on phones, in my not-so-humble opinion.

[crockett]

16 minutes ago, Eric said:

As I'm sure you know, the designed ability of a site to render itself to suit various types of devices is called responsiveness. Building responsive websites is pretty much mandatory these days. This software has its failings, but it excels at being responsive. TBS renders beautifully on phones, in my not-so-humble opinion.

When responsiveness / multi-device platforms became a major thing, I started to fade out. I used to work with osCommerce, had my own fork developed over many years, sold that shop system many times, and started using it for my own shop.

Then I switched over to the developer version of Magento and the ******* code base is so big, you could fill a library with it if you would print it all out. EVERYTHING is linked down into countless classes. They not only used the massive Zend framework, they included several other frameworks as well. That was the milestone when developers overdid everything to the point that no single coder could oversee an entire project anymore.

While I mastered that damn shop system, I refuse to upgrade to Magento 2 or any other system.

 

[Eric]

15 minutes ago, crockett said:

When responsiveness / multi-device platforms became a major thing, I started to fade out. I used to work with osCommerce, had my own fork developed over many years, sold that shop system many times, and started using it for my own shop.

Then I switched over to the developer version of Magento and the ******* code base is so big, you could fill a library with it if you would print it all out. EVERYTHING is linked down into countless classes. They not only used the massive Zend framework, they included several other frameworks as well. That was the milestone when developers overdid everything to the point that no single coder could oversee an entire project anymore.

While I mastered that damn shop system, I refuse to upgrade to Magento 2 or any other system.

 

I worked a lot with osCommerce. It was a good system, for its time. Groundbreaking, really. There were some really expensive shopping carts on the market that would require every bit as much customization to get online as a free osCommerce system would and the osCommerce system usually had better features and functionality. I sold a lot of clients osCommerce-based e-commerce sites , customized to order and then built features for them to streamline and automate the backend of the system. I could save a customer dozens of man-hours a week, by automating the scutwork of running an e-commerce business. Also, the less Human hands interact with the orders, shipping, etc, the less error gets introduced. People screw everything up.

After osCommerce, I built a number of ZenCart sites. I've worked some with WooCommerce as well, but ZenCart is a better platform.

 

[Maser]

What exactly was the positive aspect of TapaTalk?  FireFox on my phone works just fine. 

[Eric]

1 minute ago, Maser said:

What exactly was the positive aspect of TapaTalk?  FireFox on my phone works just fine. 

Back when few sites rendered well on phones, they made those sites accessible on such devices. In my opinion, today they are like screensavers: An anachronism trying hard to stay relevant and failing.

[Maser]

29 minutes ago, Eric said:

Back when few sites rendered well on phones, they made those sites accessible on such devices. In my opinion, today they are like screensavers: An anachronism trying hard to stay relevant and failing.

 

Flying toasters was the greatest screen saver ever! 

[Eric]

4 minutes ago, Maser said:

 

Flying toasters was the greatest screen saver ever! 

After Dark. They made a lot of money, back in the day.

[tous]

Back in the dark ages of Windows 3.0 - 3.1, I wrote a screen saver that had a giant Barney character stomp all over the screen until it was all non-active and in saver mode and just gave it away  It was fun making it.

Guess what?

Lyric Studios (the creator/owner of Barney) threatened to sue me.

I took it off the public spaces and I still do not know how they tracked me down.

Mebbe Barney was an NSA agent. 

 

[tous]

1 minute ago, Eric said:

After Dark. They made a lot of money, back in the day.

And when folk had problems with their Windows install, the first thing we did was have them stop using After Dark.

I swear that that software was the first malware.

[Eric]

1 minute ago, tous said:

Back in the dark ages of Windows 3.0 - 3.1, I wrote a screen saver that had a giant Barney character stomp all over the screen until it was all non-active and in saver mode and just gave it away  It was fun making it.

Guess what?

Lyric Studios (the creator/owner of Barney) threatened to sue me.

I took it off the public spaces and I still do not know how they tracked me down.

Mebbe Barney was an NSA agent. 

 

Barney ruled his empire with an iron fist.

[Maser]

Just now, Eric said:

After Dark. They made a lot of money, back in the day.

 

Aw the memories of the early 90s with me in just a tshirt and diaper playing on my parent's 386 with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 and me making autistic drawings in the Paintbrush app.  Or program as it used to be called back then. 

[tous]

1 minute ago, Eric said:

Barney ruled his empire with an iron fist.

He did.

Lyric and Disney sued anyone and everyone for trademark violations and still do.

 

 

[Eric]

1 minute ago, tous said:

And when folk had problems with their Windows install, the first thing we did was have them stop using After Dark.

I swear that that software was the first malware.

****. I was writing programs to screw with other people back in the eighties. I a almost got kicked out of school for it. I wrote a BASIC program that mimicked all the screens someone would see if they were formatting their hard drive. All the times on each screen were right on. I even used a read command on a loop, so that the drive read light would be lit up and the drive spinning for the right amount of time. When that completed, a screen with a command prompt would appear. The only input it would accept was 'dir' and if you entered that, it would show you the directory output for a blank drive.

I snuck into the C lab, which was the only computer room with PCs that had hard drives and copied it on every one of them. I then called it in their autoexec.bat files. This was about a week before the end of the semester and some C students freaked the hell out. Absolutely no harm was done, but that really got some undergarments in some knots.

[Eric]

5 minutes ago, Maser said:

 

Aw the memories of the early 90s with me in just a tshirt and diaper playing on my parent's 386 with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 and me making autistic drawings in the Paintbrush app.  Or program as it used to be called back then. 

I bet you are sitting there in a t-shirt and diaper right now, aren't you? Don't lie.

[Maser]

1 minute ago, Eric said:

I bet you are sitting there in a t-shirt and diaper right now, aren't you? Don't lie.

 

Wish I was in a diaper right now because I have been drinking beer all evening and my bladder isn't exactly happy with me. 

[DAKA]

Keep talking guys, I don't understand one work of what you said...( always wondered what tapatalk was...?   ?)

Be kind, I'm an old guy,,,one of the reasons I retired from Architecture in 89 was the office was starting to use CAD, I had no desire to learn that so....retired   moved to FL adopted a GSD that had been lost during Andrew,,,,4 years later met the now MrsDaka and have lived a happy life since....?

[MO Fugga]

6 hours ago, tous said:

Back in the dark ages of Windows 3.0 - 3.1, I wrote a screen saver that had a giant Barney character stomp all over the screen until it was all non-active and in saver mode and just gave it away  It was fun making it.

Guess what?

Lyric Studios (the creator/owner of Barney) threatened to sue me.

I took it off the public spaces and I still do not know how they tracked me down.

Mebbe Barney was an NSA agent. 

 

Never trust a chomo in a purple suit. Irregardless of how it's shaped.

[railfancwb]

No loss

[jmohme]

I never saw the point in Tapatalk anyway.

I tried it once and got annoyed with it quickly and deleted it.

[gwalchmai]

10 hours ago, Eric said:

Barney ruled his empire with an iron fist.

Mihn the Enforcer kept everyone on the straight and purple.

[Historian]

10 hours ago, Eric said:

After Dark. They made a lot of money, back in the day.

There's a memory!

[railfancwb]

10 hours ago, Eric said:

****. I was writing programs to screw with other people back in the eighties. I a almost got kicked out of school for it. I wrote a BASIC program that mimicked all the screens someone would see if they were formatting their hard drive. All the times on each screen were right on. I even used a read command on a loop, so that the drive read light would be lit up and the drive spinning for the right amount of time. When that completed, a screen with a command prompt would appear. The only input it would accept was 'dir' and if you entered that, it would show you the directory output for a blank drive.

I snuck into the C lab, which was the only computer room with PCs that had hard drives and copied it on every one of them. I then called it in their autoexec.bat files. This was about a week before the end of the semester and some C students freaked the hell out. Absolutely no harm was done, but that really got some undergarments in some knots.

Your survival of such hijinks into mature(?) adulthood speaks well of your acquaintances.