Forum migration

[Ascendancy]

All:

It seems that zetaboards and their parent company zathayus, have been acquired by Tapatalk. There will be a migration process to take place soon for our First Age forums. The following are some informational emails I have received about this process for those interested in the nitty gritty of the techy details.

In summary, here are some benefits to the migration to tapatalk:

Some of the benefits of the new platform include:

• <li style="display:none">
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• Revenue Sharing of advertising revenue
  
  
  
• Full mobile support including native iOS/Android App, a
  
• responsive mobile theme as well as AMP support out of the box.
  
  
  
• The option to accept donations for your forum
  
  
  
• The option to Premium memberships to access designated forums
  
  
  
• Single Sign-on support for multi forums.
  
  
  
• Robust GDPR support for European Union visitors.
  
  
  
• Enhanced spam detection and removal.
  
  
  

Here is a preview of our future boards.

Please note this is only a beta testing site for ouroriginal forum. Changes made on this testing site will not impact our forum in production. Any changes made on this site will not be migrated in production migrations. Feel free to play around with the new set-up and send us feedback to support@tapatalk.com

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Nitty gritty details:

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Dear Zetaboard Admins,

As you might be aware Zetaboard is currently transitioning to Tapatalk Groups and you might have received a Site Preview invitation to test your forum on Tapatalk Groups.

To communicate the migration plan better, here is what we have done so far and the steps we will take to transition the entire Zetaboard forums to Tapatalk.

We’ve sent the Preview Invitation to all forums with more than 300 posts to preview the new site.

Active forums with less than 300 posts will soon receive our Preview Invitation email.

Today we have enabled CSS customization for all Zetaboard forums. If you have access to the Preview, you can now login to the your Tapatalk Groups as admin. In Manage Settings &gt; ACP, you will be able to further customize your forum including changing the look and feel, and more.

JavaScript availability is still pending but is progressing well. We want to assure you that if you are currently using the JavaScript insertion feature in Zetaboards, you will be able to do so in Tapatalk.

Forums that are not using CSS or JavaScript will soon be receiving the Production Migrations from us, with no less than 14 days after you received the Preview Invitation.

There are confusions among Zetaboard forum admins about certain features that are being grandfathered and how it works in long term since CSS, Custom Domain, Favicon and Javascript features are reserved for Basic or Premium Tier customers on the Tapatalk Groups. If your Zetaboard forum is already using certain features, the same features will be available for you in Tapatalk Groups free of charge, you will be able to make changes just like before and rest assured there will be no expiry date for the grandfathered features.

We also want to welcome you to the Tapatalk Groups - there are also features that you will be able to enjoy that were not available in Zetaboards, including the availability to Accept Donations from your members, to set-up Premium Memberships, to receive Advertising Revenue from our Revenue Share Program, Ability to Mass Email to all Members, and more.

We’re excited to have you onboard, and we are almost there.

Regards,
Tapatalk Team

[Ascendancy]

AN UPDATE ON FEATURES BASED ON BETA TESTING:

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Dear Zetaboard Forum Admin and Moderators,

You might have received an email from us in past few weeks to participate in the Beta testing of the Zetaboard to Tapatalk conversion (If you haven’t, you’ll hear from us really soon). We received tons of great feedback and made many updates to address the issues raised during the Beta testing. Based on your feedback, we’re in the process of adding the following features to make sure your forum transition will be as smooth as possible:

Customizable forum templates with enhanced BBCode, including div (with class), span (with class), iframe, form elements.
Customizations via Javascript-like scripting feature to admin admins to further customize the user experience.
Custom pages:
Enhanced BBcode, embedded iframe or html in iframe.
Form handling for custom pages. Forms can be created to submit responses into a post.
View permissions for custom pages.
And Custom smileys!
These upcoming features will be part of the Tapatalk Premium Tier but If you had JS or CSS on your board prior to the conversion, they will be grandfathered into the converted site. Also - if you already have a custom domain with Zetaboard, your domain will also be grandfathered. Some of these features will be rolled out on your preview board in the next few days so you can play around with them before the production migration.

We plan to start the production migration for everyone within next few weeks. If you find any data or formatting issues on the preview board and would like to have a migration support specialist to look into the issues, please reply to this message.

Looking forward to welcoming you all to the Tapatalk Groups!

Regards,
Tapatalk Support Team

[Nox]

interesting.

[Thalia]

It looks very social media-ish. And the teeny tiny avatars are super annoying. HOWEVER, I absolutely love love love the "unread" and "participated" options, which will make keeping up so much easier than the current active topics feature.

I noticed Thalia's profile info has migrated incorrectly (apparently she's military class, it doesn't list she's a channeler/dreamwalker and her channeler experience level is NA) -- is that likely to just be a snaggle in beta?

Also, is the option for multi-login still there? I couldn't see it.

Looks good though! It loads nicely on my mobile too.

ETA: FYI, the profiles are showing full birthdays (currently you can pick how much is shown, if anything). I can't remember if you had to input something when you joined originally? Anyway, for anyone who input their IRL birthday who doesn't want that information public you might need to change it, as it's overridden any privacy settings for that.

This especially makes me laugh since they noted GDPR compliance XD


Edited by Thalia, Jul 4 2018, 02:48 PM.

[Ascendancy]

Some of that may be the beta version as this isn't the actual final migration product.

For instance, they warned us that if we make changes to settings of this new migrated forum, they wont stick because this isn't the actual final version, mand to wait until the official migration takes place for real tweaks. So its more to play around with and provide them with feedback.

I also dislike the avatar thing. Ours in zetaboards were originally tiny and i was able to go into the admin board and increase the size of our profile pics maximum dimensions. Hopefully there's something similar in this one. Otherwise, i can provide that feedback that we would like to continue to have the size/shape/dimensions of our profile pics.

multi login is also a great idea too.

[Nox]

no multi login is gonna suck... I didn't play with it. Looked at the neatness and that was about it. taptalk isn't my favorite but then neither is zetaboards so not a big deal I'm sure we'll deal though multilogin was a very nice thing!!!

[Thalia]

Hopefully there's a way to tweak it then. I don't particularly like that they're round either *pouts*

The birthday thing might be worth feeding back too, unless that is also a beta issue. If current profiles have set something to private a migration shouldn't change that default. I don't know how much of an issue that is or isn't for others here (it isn't for me) but on general principle I don't think it's very good.

[Ascendancy]

I just sent them a feedback email listing three things (and describing it)

1. round pictures
2. size of pictures
3. birthday privacy

we will see.

[Ascendancy]

Shoot I forgot to include multi login.

[Thalia]

Ooh, it looks like the new boards will support email notification of things like PMs (and mentions, among other things, which might prove useful)!! I've really missed that. Still can't PM multiple members, though I wonder if it might be an admin setting since it looks theoretically possible (it just tells you you've added too many recipients or something).

(ETA: I tried it, and email notifications for PMs works. The email went straight into my junk folder though)

You can change text colour like you would in a word processor, there are more generic choices than we currently have, though the bbcodes still work too. There's a choice to see the code, or view as 'what you see is what you get', which I kinda like too. It looks like formatting will be easier/quicker, especially on a phone.

Another potential snag -- you can't reuse email addresses when registering a new account, so multiple characters going forward might be an issue. I can't remember if that was something you were able to alter here at the start though. I couldn't complete a new registration atm as there was nothing to input for 'class' and 'abilities' and it registered that as an error, but you definitely don't have to input a DOB or any other info beyond username, email and password now. I imagine that's why birthday privacy settings haven't translated well, there's no option for it because giving the info is optional in the first place (you can take it out entirely).


Edited by Thalia, Jul 5 2018, 06:41 AM.