Zetaboards and Tapatalk

Important news and update announcements regarding Advanced Robot Combat.
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That Kode Guy
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Zetaboards and Tapatalk

Post by That Kode Guy » Mon Jul 02, 2018 10:57 pm

Okay, it seems we're in for some changes unfortunately.

http://support.zathyus.com/topic/7021172/1/

Moderator Hooray For Lexan pretty much clued us all in what's really going on:<blockquote class='quote_blockquote'><dl><dt>Hooray For Lexan</dt><dd>&nbsp;</dd></dl><div>As all of you know our previous hosting company, Invisionfree, was purchased by TapaTalk. As part of this conversion process the company announced last year that all Invisionfree boards were required to either convert to Zetaboards (which has existed since 2008 or so) or to their proprietary TapaTalk format. We admins examined both potential systems and of the two Zetaboards was by far the best suited to this forum - with customizable skins, good spam controls, good desktop support, and other features. In contrast, the TapaTalk platform was quite cumbersome with an obscene amount of advertising, a lack of customization, poor desktop support (it is mainly a mobile system), a lack of skin support, insane TOS conditions which could threaten roleplays and the promotion of charitable causes, and even the charging &#036;5 for a support ticket to resolve forum issues. Under these conditions we chose Zetaboards with the understanding (and promise from TapaTalk) that we would be able to stick with the Zetaboards system.

Well, they lied. TapaTalk totally screwed us over...

Now after countless days of work and troubleshooting to get the Zetaboard forum to work, TapaTalk has informed us that the forum is now required to convert to their TapaTalk platform. The TapaTalk platform does not support CSS coding at the moment and is made for mobile devices, and though they promise such support will come later, well, we have already seen how reliable their promises are. They couldn't even be bothered to inform us directly - instead they made a post about it on their support forum and have failed to answer questions from concerned and panicked forum administrators. Many other forums are considering leaving their platform altogether, but this has been made difficult as TapaTalk is not giving anyone the option of buying their own databases. This was an option that Invisionfree had offered, but we lost it when we converted to Zetaboards. Which explains why TapaTalk forced that initial conversion to Zetaboards or TapaTalk. Now they have this forum and others trapped with the only options being sticking with TapaTalk or deleting their forums and starting over.[/quote]More news: http://support.zathyus.com/topic/7022133/1/

As many of you know, ARC was forced to convert from Invisionfree to Zetaboards in either 2013 or 2014. Now it seems, if we move forward with the new Tapatalk format, we will get... this atrocity.

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/drowning_city_forums/

On top of that, we will have to pay for a ton of features that were previously free to use. Who wants that?

There has been talk about creating an entirely new forum, hosting it on somewhere like Jcink... making a sub-reddit for ARC... or even merging it with GameTechMods.

We want you, the users, to raise your voices and tell us what you think of the issue. You are important to us, so your voices should be heard. It's your forum too.
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Wolf51-50
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Zetaboards and Tapatalk

Post by Wolf51-50 » Mon Jul 02, 2018 11:16 pm

May I be the first to tell Tapatalk to politely go fuck themselves.

Getting that out of the way, I feel like this is where we should start packing from the start. What I mean by that is to find a way to archive some of this stuff if we really are going to have to leave it. We managed to do it with some of this with the missing photobucket images, now we just need to do something about the forum itself. I'm also not sure how much we'll lose from this transition to Tapatalk. Cause iirc, this place lost a whole bunch back in those 2013-14 years.

I feel like our best bet is becoming a full time hermit on Reddit. I like GTM, but merging this with them sounds awful ngl. And with using Reddit, we can ensure that this moving shit isn't going to happen anytime soon unless someone decides to to make a giant ass purchase and buy Reddit. It already has most of the things were looking for right into the rproomfbb website, so it's a good long term solution.

Long story short: archive some zetaboards stuff, think of Reddit as a long term option.

Might be the insomniac high I'm in rn, but that's my take on this
Alpha Robotics - Embrace the carnage!

Recent Tournaments:

ROBOT2
FW: Apocalyptic Peacekeeper (2-3)
LW: Backstab 3 (3-3) [Lifetime 11-8]
MW: Outrage 2 (4-1) [Lifetime 6-3]
HW: Tulta Munille (3-2)

Ruination: The Upheavel
LW: White Lightning (1-6) [Lifetime 4-8]
MW: Diablo Genesis (5-3) [Lifetime 10-5]
HW: Coup de Grâce (2-5) [Lifetime 13-9]
SHW: Fenrir (6-2) [Lifetime 7-3]

Reckoning: The Revival
MW: Vovoka (4-1) [Lifetime 10-3]

tune in next time on ARC when I one-up Boto by posting my vast collection of Thomas The Tank Engine hentai on the Discord :V -HFL

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V900
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Zetaboards and Tapatalk

Post by V900 » Mon Jul 02, 2018 11:23 pm

<blockquote class='quote_blockquote'><dl><dt>That Kode Guy</dt><dd>Jul 2 2018, 10:57 PM</dd></dl><div>or even merging it with GameTechMods.[/quote]

You'd get about 2 or 3 years out of them tops. I think GTM's userbase is apathetic enough at this point to let their domain expire in 2021.

I'm also down for organizing ARChive 2k18 if you lads are willing to help.
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Trihunter
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Zetaboards and Tapatalk

Post by Trihunter » Tue Jul 03, 2018 5:20 am

Personally I'd say the best thing to do is get our own host, if someone can bankroll it, kinda like GTM. Failing that, I'd say set up a subreddit or several. Perhaps a trio of subreddits for hosting individual tournaments, with a single hub subreddit being a general sub for discussion, concepting tourneys, etc?
Accolades
Official participant in ARCcon Europe
ROBOT 2 FW Shitbot Showdown winner
ROBOT 2 MW Shitbot Showdown winner
ROBOT 2 HW Shitbot Showdown winner
ROBOT 2 Most Trophies (Runner-up)
Official voter in OSCARC 2018
Best Meme 2018 (Mimi-Chan)
Trophies
ICEcrown Champion (Steelhead)
CBC3 SHW Runner-Up (Hartmann's Youkai Bot II)
CBC4 LW Runner-Up (Scrapper)
ROBOT4 Sportsman Runner-Up (Split Personality)
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attackfrog
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Zetaboards and Tapatalk

Post by attackfrog » Tue Jul 03, 2018 10:45 am

I like the self-hosted idea. Reddit is honestly a pretty awkward substitute given its lack of subforums (though it's how I got started with this stuff so it can work in theory...)

As we were talking about on the Discord yesterday, domain name registration is about &#036;10/year and you can get cheap web hosting for &#036;5-6/month (the hosting for attackfrog.com is even cheaper than that, as I bought three years at a time.)

phpBB is a good open source forum software: it's well supported and popular. Simple Machines Forum is another one. There's also more options, but those are the two that the scripts I found for scraping the data off Zetaboards can export to. I'm going to give those scripts a try, probably this weekend, to see if they still work (I think they were written 5-10 years ago...) Tapatalk is apparently discouraging such things but fuck that, it's our content.

Kill343gs
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Zetaboards and Tapatalk

Post by Kill343gs » Tue Jul 03, 2018 9:41 pm

Get in touch with me, guys.

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Trihunter
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Zetaboards and Tapatalk

Post by Trihunter » Wed Jul 04, 2018 3:46 am

<blockquote class='quote_blockquote'><dl><dt>Kill343gs</dt><dd>Jul 3 2018, 09:41 PM</dd></dl><div>Get in touch with me, guys.[/quote]Elaborate, please?
Accolades
Official participant in ARCcon Europe
ROBOT 2 FW Shitbot Showdown winner
ROBOT 2 MW Shitbot Showdown winner
ROBOT 2 HW Shitbot Showdown winner
ROBOT 2 Most Trophies (Runner-up)
Official voter in OSCARC 2018
Best Meme 2018 (Mimi-Chan)
Trophies
ICEcrown Champion (Steelhead)
CBC3 SHW Runner-Up (Hartmann's Youkai Bot II)
CBC4 LW Runner-Up (Scrapper)
ROBOT4 Sportsman Runner-Up (Split Personality)
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NFX
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Zetaboards and Tapatalk

Post by NFX » Wed Jul 04, 2018 8:04 am

Oh hey, haven't seen you in a while. =)

Kill343gs was one of the Global Mods on GTM back when I was still there, I'm guessing he stuck around and became more important staff of some kind.
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Mole55
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Zetaboards and Tapatalk

Post by Mole55 » Wed Jul 04, 2018 1:38 pm

I definitely think a forum would be better than reddit, as I highly doubt the ability of a single subreddit to handle all the tournaments that can be in various stages of happening.

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