Good afternoon,
As I am sure many of you suspected when we posted our previous announcement, there have been some unexpected developments behind the scenes at the forum. Due to the nature of what has been going on, I think that it is important that you all are fully informed of the forum's situation, the actions that we admins have taken, and the steps ahead for the forum. Please take the time to
fully read this post so that you are informed of what is going on. We will be consulting with all of you for recommendations on how to proceed from here.
What has been going on: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 $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.
Oh, and just to show everyone how utterly incompetent the people at TapaTalk are, what they have for our conversion preview board is this:
https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/thegangoffive/index.php . So, yep. It appears that post-conversion they were going to replace this board with Pathlight's board.
What we have done:Thankfully, however, there was an option that provided a way out from this trap. Since TapaTalk would not provide us with our forum database we had to acquire it through other means, as we are unwilling to let 14 years of forum history go down the drain due to one company's greed and arrogance. The technique that we used allowed us to capture the forum topics, sections, posts, and member information. It, however, does not allow us to capture the avatars, member signatures, or forum skins - so each member would need to re-input those after any migration and we admins will need to create new skins for whichever new forum home we decide to move in to.
We will not get into the exact details of how zero-point obtained our data until the movement to a new home is complete. Suffice to say, that is a saga in itself.
What still needs to be done:So this brings us to the situation today. The forum is about to take a major step by migrating to a new hosting company. This will not be easy. In fact, it will be messier than the initial conversion to Zetaboards. However, with the other possibility being stuck with an untrustworthy company who values money above all else, we admins feel that the forum has no other choice. To stay with TapaTalk would mean a downgrade to the forum and the loss of its uniqueness in a limited system made only for mobile devices. It is much better for us to migrate elsewhere and to keep the community that we have all worked hard to build over the years.
With that in mind, here is what each of YOU need to do over the next few days and/or weeks:
1) Copy the necessary information for your signatures – especially the urls for any pictures and links. Signatures will not transfer over and will need to be put in manually to whatever new forum we migrate to.
2) Copy the urls (or files) for your avatars. These also will not transfer and will need to be put in manually after the transfer.
3) You may receive a new password by PM over the next few days – RECORD THIS IN A SECURE PLACE SOMEWHERE. You may need this to access the new forum when we migrate over.
4) Bookmark this website: https://goftestforum.icyboards.net/. This is one of the test boards that we have set up. But we will use this to post migration announcements in the event that the current forum is taken down by TapaTalk due to the actions we admins have taken.Here is what we admins will be doing:
1) We will be looking for a suitable new home for our forum. At this point in time the most promising candidates seem to be phpBB software, but we are looking at forum hosting options. We will be examining the features and merits of the various options and, if one is especially suitable, begin preparing a proper skin for the new forum prior to the transfer of forum data.
2) We will be welcoming recommendations from each of you. If you have experience with other forum systems then please let us know. We are currently assessing our options.
3) And finally we will be keeping you informed throughout this process. Please keep in mind that this might be a rocky journey – but that the forum’s data is now safe. Regardless of what happens from here on out, this forum will continue to survive in one form or another.We understand that this is upsetting news. We were absolutely furious when we got this news and feared for the future of the forum. However, now that the data is secure, we have the option for a more hopeful future. We hope that you all understand that this situation has been forced upon us, and that we are doing our best to make it right. This company has screwed us over twice now, and we will not permit them a third opportunity.
If you have any questions or comments then please leave them in this topic, and we will respond to the best of our ability. In the meantime, good luck everyone. Much like the characters that we all know and love, it is now time for us to make our Great Migration. And, like them, we are sure that we will find a greener valley in the end.
~ Gang of Five Administrative Team