Eternity RPC Board
06-11-2018, 01:43 AM
(This post was last modified: 06-11-2018, 06:37 PM by Seperallis.)
Archived Forums and You!
The Zetaboards conversion to Tapatalk
Hey kids! I'm back. So are you. Sport shoes ready?
Skip to the bottom part labeled "TL,DR" if you can't be arsed. For everyone else, read on.
Today we're going to talk about the impending migration Zetaboards is taking to Tapatalk software. Luckily our community is not hosted on Zetaboards, so the migration will not have any effect on our current operations. However, but our two archived community forums, Oracia (Caprecian Continents) and Eternity on Zetaboards obviously are hosted under Zetaboards by Zaythus Networks, and this change will affect them. Some of you might not care, but I have noticed that posts have been made on the old forum as recently as 6 months ago, and several people still use, link to, and reference the old threads for MTRP stuff, because copy-pasting everything to the current forum would be silly when it's all sitting there for us, right?
Well, I thought that too, until the recently.
The Problem!
The developer of Zetaboards made an announcement a month ago, notifying Zetaboards users of the migration. Not much info was given, and it is almost entirely the same info that was given to forum admins via email. I will quote the entire announcement below:
In the email, a link was given to a very early look at a possible preview of what the forums might look like under the Tapatalk software, though things are expected to change as Brandon makes edits to create a "hybrid" of ZB and Tapa software to which ZB forums will migrate, so that they will have much of their identity and functionality preserved. Forum styles, etc. will be grandfathered in and should mostly still work under the new system. Eventually. This sounds nice, but currently the forums look like terrible mobile trash and have very little customization and style options, but such is to be expected from a mobile-first forum provider like Tapatalk.
In any case, for you own curiosity, you can look at the preview forum here: https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/eternityrpc
Users and admins have been scrambling to figure out exactly what is going to happen to their forums, and have raised concerns both in Zetaboards support, and with Tapatalk. Now, I heard a lot of doom and gloom with people on NationStates about this move, as if Tapatalk is the worst thing ever and forums are going to implode left and right I was one of them at first, and while they're right that Tapatalk is actually terrible as a company, the actual fears of exploded forums are greatly exaggerated: the migration is still very early in the process, and nothing has been finalized.
Actually, that's the important bit. The greatest fear, and the main problem I wanted to come here to announce was that Tapatalk has a policy of removing abandoned forums. According to the Tapatalk Terms of Use section 13, "Website Inactivity and Abandonment, Tapatalk has the policy of removing the site from the service after 30 days of no posts. There is also the option of setting the forums into a read-only archive format, but Tapatalk will not allow links to outside forums (such as this one) for forums in the read-only format...which is bullshit, but they also pretend that we do not have ownership rights to the data (Section 10 in their PoS ToS), so hey, what can you expect?
In any case, support staff assures us that they will not just outright remove a forum for a lack of activity without first warning the forum owner that it is about to happen. They also assure us that they do not currently delete inactive forums, but you never know when they might start, or whether they do like ZB and just decide to contradict their support staff on a whim.
There is, as yet, no date on when the actual migrations will begin to take place, and I assume Lines will receive and email when it begins to happen.
Furthermore, while they will migrate over data, it seems custom pages, javascript and other html will not migrate, meaning that the old Eternity board will inevitably still see some old loss of data, though it shouldn't be too much. I could go on at length about all the different things, but the threads I link have all the information I would tell you, and I'm trying to keep it brief. In any case, the possibility of forums being deleted if deemed inactive is the main reason for this announcement, anyway.
The Solution!
When we your admin team first receives the announcement that Zetaboards is beginning the migration to Tapatalk, or at least when we get a definite date on when it'll happen, we are going to begin making regular activity on the old forums, to keep them active. We will do this for an undetermined amount of time, but it will probably not be longer than a year; when we settle on a specific date or timeframe we will make an updated announcement to let you know. After all, there isn't even a set date yet on when this will all happen.
After that date, unless we make some other arrangements in the meantime, we admins will end our official campaign to keep the old archives active, and thus it will be up to lady luck (or you all, even) whether they stay up and "active."
Your Responsibility in the meantime, if you care to, is to find all the info, posts, data, etc you want from either of the old forums that you want to keep and either save it somewhere for your personal use (such as a Google Drive or Dropbox, et al), or fully migrate it to these forums with copy-pasting goodness, though keep in mind that copying posts from Zetaboards to here will be a lot of work, as most of the formatting code is different; if you can handle that, or just decide to not format, then I personally prefer copying the data to this forum so that others can have it as well.
I won't pretend to know anything for sure, but anything not saved here or elsewhere runs the risk of being lost forever when we stop attempting to keep the archives alive. You've been warned, I guess. It sucks, but nothing lasts forever, especially anything digital and on the internet.
. . : : TL;DR : : . .
Zetaboards is migrating all its forums to Tapatalk software. Tapatalk has a policy where they """"may""" remove any forum that has sat 30 days or more without any new posts, which of course threatens our two archived forums:
Oracia (Caprecian Continents) and EternityRPC (the ZB version)
Your admin team will keep you posted on when this migration may occur, and we will do our best to keep the forums active and available for a certain amount of time (to be determined) after the migration takes place, though we will not be able to do this endlessly, and these forums may eventually be lost forever when efforts cease. It is Your Responsibility to copy, migrate, repost or otherwise save your work from either of these forums (or more, if you can think of any of your old communities) at your earliest possible convenience to guarantee that you'll still have the information available to you in the future, for whatever posterity's sake.
I know this is inconvenient, but that is the way it will be regardless of how we feel.
Thank you for your time; that is all.
The Zetaboards conversion to Tapatalk
Hey kids! I'm back. So are you. Sport shoes ready?
Skip to the bottom part labeled "TL,DR" if you can't be arsed. For everyone else, read on.
Today we're going to talk about the impending migration Zetaboards is taking to Tapatalk software. Luckily our community is not hosted on Zetaboards, so the migration will not have any effect on our current operations. However, but our two archived community forums, Oracia (Caprecian Continents) and Eternity on Zetaboards obviously are hosted under Zetaboards by Zaythus Networks, and this change will affect them. Some of you might not care, but I have noticed that posts have been made on the old forum as recently as 6 months ago, and several people still use, link to, and reference the old threads for MTRP stuff, because copy-pasting everything to the current forum would be silly when it's all sitting there for us, right?
Well, I thought that too, until the recently.
The Problem!
The developer of Zetaboards made an announcement a month ago, notifying Zetaboards users of the migration. Not much info was given, and it is almost entirely the same info that was given to forum admins via email. I will quote the entire announcement below:
Code:
ZetaBoards has been working with Tapatalk to create a free forum hosting platform that is a worthy upgrade for ZetaBoards.
As a result, ZetaBoards will begin an upgrade process to move all of its communities to Tapatalk’s platform.
Some of the benefits of the new platform include:
- 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.
We have been working on a major series of updates to ZetaBoards. These upgrades will now be happening on the Tapatalk forum platform. The development resources that Tapatalk can provide to the platform means more feature updates, more feature testing, and more frequent updates. And we will be adding some ZetaBoards features and functionality to Tapatalk in the coming weeks.
We want the upgrade to be as smooth as possible for all ZetaBoards' communities. If you have a specific concern or question we would be happy to answer it.
Live previews of ZetaBoards forums’ on Tapatalk’s platform will be made available soon for testing the migration process.
-Brandon KopetzkyIn the email, a link was given to a very early look at a possible preview of what the forums might look like under the Tapatalk software, though things are expected to change as Brandon makes edits to create a "hybrid" of ZB and Tapa software to which ZB forums will migrate, so that they will have much of their identity and functionality preserved. Forum styles, etc. will be grandfathered in and should mostly still work under the new system. Eventually. This sounds nice, but currently the forums look like terrible mobile trash and have very little customization and style options, but such is to be expected from a mobile-first forum provider like Tapatalk.
In any case, for you own curiosity, you can look at the preview forum here: https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/eternityrpc
Users and admins have been scrambling to figure out exactly what is going to happen to their forums, and have raised concerns both in Zetaboards support, and with Tapatalk. Now, I heard a lot of doom and gloom with people on NationStates about this move, as if Tapatalk is the worst thing ever and forums are going to implode left and right I was one of them at first, and while they're right that Tapatalk is actually terrible as a company, the actual fears of exploded forums are greatly exaggerated: the migration is still very early in the process, and nothing has been finalized.
Actually, that's the important bit. The greatest fear, and the main problem I wanted to come here to announce was that Tapatalk has a policy of removing abandoned forums. According to the Tapatalk Terms of Use section 13, "Website Inactivity and Abandonment, Tapatalk has the policy of removing the site from the service after 30 days of no posts. There is also the option of setting the forums into a read-only archive format, but Tapatalk will not allow links to outside forums (such as this one) for forums in the read-only format...which is bullshit, but they also pretend that we do not have ownership rights to the data (Section 10 in their PoS ToS), so hey, what can you expect?
In any case, support staff assures us that they will not just outright remove a forum for a lack of activity without first warning the forum owner that it is about to happen. They also assure us that they do not currently delete inactive forums, but you never know when they might start, or whether they do like ZB and just decide to contradict their support staff on a whim.
There is, as yet, no date on when the actual migrations will begin to take place, and I assume Lines will receive and email when it begins to happen.
Furthermore, while they will migrate over data, it seems custom pages, javascript and other html will not migrate, meaning that the old Eternity board will inevitably still see some old loss of data, though it shouldn't be too much. I could go on at length about all the different things, but the threads I link have all the information I would tell you, and I'm trying to keep it brief. In any case, the possibility of forums being deleted if deemed inactive is the main reason for this announcement, anyway.
The Solution!
When we your admin team first receives the announcement that Zetaboards is beginning the migration to Tapatalk, or at least when we get a definite date on when it'll happen, we are going to begin making regular activity on the old forums, to keep them active. We will do this for an undetermined amount of time, but it will probably not be longer than a year; when we settle on a specific date or timeframe we will make an updated announcement to let you know. After all, there isn't even a set date yet on when this will all happen.
After that date, unless we make some other arrangements in the meantime, we admins will end our official campaign to keep the old archives active, and thus it will be up to lady luck (or you all, even) whether they stay up and "active."
Your Responsibility in the meantime, if you care to, is to find all the info, posts, data, etc you want from either of the old forums that you want to keep and either save it somewhere for your personal use (such as a Google Drive or Dropbox, et al), or fully migrate it to these forums with copy-pasting goodness, though keep in mind that copying posts from Zetaboards to here will be a lot of work, as most of the formatting code is different; if you can handle that, or just decide to not format, then I personally prefer copying the data to this forum so that others can have it as well.
I won't pretend to know anything for sure, but anything not saved here or elsewhere runs the risk of being lost forever when we stop attempting to keep the archives alive. You've been warned, I guess. It sucks, but nothing lasts forever, especially anything digital and on the internet.
. . : : TL;DR : : . .
Zetaboards is migrating all its forums to Tapatalk software. Tapatalk has a policy where they """"may""" remove any forum that has sat 30 days or more without any new posts, which of course threatens our two archived forums:
Oracia (Caprecian Continents) and EternityRPC (the ZB version)
Your admin team will keep you posted on when this migration may occur, and we will do our best to keep the forums active and available for a certain amount of time (to be determined) after the migration takes place, though we will not be able to do this endlessly, and these forums may eventually be lost forever when efforts cease. It is Your Responsibility to copy, migrate, repost or otherwise save your work from either of these forums (or more, if you can think of any of your old communities) at your earliest possible convenience to guarantee that you'll still have the information available to you in the future, for whatever posterity's sake.
I know this is inconvenient, but that is the way it will be regardless of how we feel.
Thank you for your time; that is all.