Tapatalk holds your members?

[Gio]

Someone mentioned on here that Tapatalk will hold your members and that they’re not part of your site, how does that work?

 

[Smokey]

First issue: Tapatalk.

My guess is that they aren't really a part of your 'community' but instead thrown in a pool of 'members' on Tapatalk, which then just displays them on your 'forum' to look like members of your forum? I'm not entirely sure if this is accurate or not but it being Tapatalk, nothing would surprise me.

 

[Katrina]

I looked up some stuff about this and read that a couple years ago Tapatalk bought freeforums.org and yuku.com and then developed their own type of forums. Those freeforums and yuku forums were turned into Tapatalk owned forums. That meant that the owners of those forums no longer owned the intellectual property of the threads/posts from their forums and those forum owners could not just take their forums and leave.

Site owners who had their forums integrated into Tapatalk (not the same thing as a standalone site using the app for mobile) should be concerned for the future of their forum...it really isn't theirs anymore. Sad.

 

[NeoMetallix]

This is what happened to my Forum. We started out with Invisionfree and moved to Zetaboards which was by the same developers. Then Tapatalk bought them out and converted everyone to their software. I gave it a shot but they lacked basic customization which they later amended but it was very very limited in nature.

So we had to switch to self hosted because design and custom nature has always been a part of our DNA.

 

[Gio]

My question though is that if a member signs up on my forum using Tapatalk, and I later remove Tapatalk, will that hinder my members in any way?

 

[Katrina]

My question though is that if a member signs up on my forum using Tapatalk, and I later remove Tapatalk, will that hinder my members in any way?

I doubt it could remove their account from your forum's database. If they only log into your site using Tapatalk they might not want to visit if you remove that app.

 

[Ghost]

My question though is that if a member signs up on my forum using Tapatalk, and I later remove Tapatalk, will that hinder my members in any way?

Yes, it's entirely possible
It's easier for your site to connect with the Tapatalk database for member info than it is for Tapatalk to send your database (and all the other sites that member has joined) information every time the user updates their profile / stats.

There's one great way to find out though - Your database.

If you want me to take a look, I can. We'll just need to look at your users table, and check out the code for the Tapatalk removal to see if they have any odd code in there to remove member profiles that joined using their network. Even if they do, that can be removed, and you can always generate a new account with all of their posts/threads/info on your site if Tapatalk does hold the info on their own servers. If it turns out that Tapatalk is holding member info hostage I can probably whip up a simple plugin to safe-remove the Tapatalk stuff without losing data.

I wish I was here when all of the Tapatalk drama went down.
It's not *too* difficult to site rip an entire forum & insert the info into the database - it just takes time. But could definitely be done - You just set up your script to go to every thread/post and take all of the information, then you scrape the entire members list, forums/subforums, and everything else. It's time consuming to write the code but once the scraper is done you can pretty much steal any forum's content and put it into a database. You just have to use a separate scraper for each forum software

 

[NeoMetallix]

Yes, it's entirely possible
It's easier for your site to connect with the Tapatalk database for member info than it is for Tapatalk to send your database (and all the other sites that member has joined) information every time the user updates their profile / stats.

There's one great way to find out though - Your database.

If you want me to take a look, I can. We'll just need to look at your users table, and check out the code for the Tapatalk removal to see if they have any odd code in there to remove member profiles that joined using their network. Even if they do, that can be removed, and you can always generate a new account with all of their posts/threads/info on your site if Tapatalk does hold the info on their own servers. If it turns out that Tapatalk is holding member info hostage I can probably whip up a simple plugin to safe-remove the Tapatalk stuff without losing data.

I wish I was here when all of the Tapatalk drama went down.
It's not *too* difficult to site rip an entire forum & insert the info into the database - it just takes time. But could definitely be done - You just set up your script to go to every thread/post and take all of the information, then you scrape the entire members list, forums/subforums, and everything else. It's time consuming to write the code but once the scraper is done you can pretty much steal any forum's content and put it into a database. You just have to use a separate scraper for each forum software

In my case the scraper kept failing after days. Scraping 1.25 million posts takes A LONG time. Also Tapatalk has measures to prevent this. They make it very hard to scrape forums from their servers.

 

[Gio]

I’m not talking about hosted forums. I’m talking about members who sign up through Tapatalk to a self hosted forum.

 

[Ghost]

In my case the scraper kept failing after days. Scraping 1.25 million posts takes A LONG time. Also Tapatalk has measures to prevent this. They make it very hard to scrape forums from their servers.

Yeah, that's a lot. If they have preventative measures, you would need to do it gradually, probably with an IP/user agent swapper, and not too fast either. That's annoying that they took over the forums.

I’m not talking about hosted forums. I’m talking about members who sign up through Tapatalk to a self hosted forum.

Yeah, I know, but there's still the possibility that any Tapatalk plugin or feature has a removal protocol to get rid of connected accounts.
It depends on their terms of service & code though, so I really don't know.