Zetaboards is going

[Livyjr]

With that post, RobinHood, you spurred me into clicking on buttons all over the screen, and yes, I finally found a way into the admin control panel for Tapatalk, which has a convoluted path to get there.

On Zetaboards, at the top of my screen as site owner/administrator, there was a button I could click on labeled "admin cp."

That button is now gone.

To now get to the "admin CP," which path I just discovered, I have to go to the bottom of the face page, where it says "administrators," and if I click on that, it takes me to another page where my name is shown.

If I then click on my name on that page, I come to yet another page with my name on it, and under my name on that page is a button that says "control panel."

That, however, is not the "control panel" for the forum, which is part of my confusion here.

All that "control panel" allows me to do is edit my own settings.

The other button on that page next to "control panel" says "administer user."

Clicking on that finally brings me to an actual control panel, which not called a "control panel," but instead is called "user administration."

In there is a button for "manage forums," and clicking on that brings me to a place where I can in fact delete a forum from the board or lock the forum, or make them "read only."

So thanks to help from this board, which I greatly appreciate, along with the patience with my ignorance, that problem is solved.

I can leave Tapatalk and be sure nothing of The Livyjr Files is left behind.

Now, onward and upward to the creation of a new site on a server that is truly secure.

Thanks again, Robin Hood, you have truly lived up to your name, helping the poor and weak in here.

Clicking on that button brings me to yet another page that says "edit profile."

On that screen, there is a bar which says "board preferences."

That takes me to "edit global settings."

 

[Livyjr]

It's not the first time we've heard the woes of someone who relied on "free" forum services only to learn there isn't any such thing as a free lunch.

By way of further apology to you, mysiteguy, when I first read this above statement of yours, I thought it was on the condescending side of the street, as well as sort of callous.

In retrospect, I will admit that I must have been mistaken.

 

[doubt]

Now, onward and upward to the creation of a new site on a server that is truly secure.

In your earlier posts I saw that it's a "private" server.
What kind of server is it?
Is it from a friend of yours or is it some free to use from some company?

 

[Livyjr]

It's not that I'm unsympathetic to your situation, but forum owners there have had ample opportunity to migrate out.

Between the time Tapatalk acquired Zetaboards, their numerous announcements they would eventually migrate all the forums, and their finally doing it, was months.

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.

We have been working on a major series of updates to ZetaBoards.

These upgrades will now be happening on the Tapatalk forum platform.

We want the upgrade to be as smooth as possible for all ZetaBoards' communities.

-Brandon Kopetzky

I think we have had closure on this by demonstrating what was in those "announcements," which promised us a glorious new day at Tapatalk.

That announcement by Brandon Kopetzky was false, misleading and deceptive.

Such it is, mysiteguy.

And while your message, which I apologize for mistaking and perhaps mischaracterizing, was not stated as "suck it up, fool, we screwed you over big time, because you were so stupid and gullible as to believe that a secure server was really secure," which message really should be attributed to Brandon Kopetzky and this Huang Dongri, who calls himself Winter Wong, CEO of TAPATALK, the fact of the matter us that all of us at Zetaboards who believed that crap were in fact fools, stupid or gullible.

You never said any such things, but I just did, because it is true.

We were gulled and taken for a ride by a slick salesman.

Sheep to be sheared!

Here is hoping that that admission straightens out the record, and I appreciate all the advice you have given, mysiteguy.

And here's hoping you have a glorious day out ahead of you, not only today but each and every day yet to come.

 

[Livyjr]

In your earlier posts I saw that it's a "private" server.
What kind of server is it?
Is it from a friend of yours or is it some free to use from some company?

First, thank you for being a positive part of this discussion.

And consider my ignorance here when I use terms.

No, it is not a free server.

And I do not know what kind of server it actually is.

It is a server, supposedly secure, although I have come to doubt that the word "secure" actually has meaning anymore after this Zetaboards fiasco.

As far as I know, it is located somewhere in NYC and a good friend pays for the use of space on that server.

That is where my site is temporarily moved to, although right now, it is only a Wordpress face page.

The next question is whether there is room on that server to bring in phpBB.

It appears from what I am being told here that it was a mistake to go with Wordpress.

So it is a question of the domain name now being attached to Wordpress, or is it, etc.

As I ponder all of this, which is overwhelming right now, as I just had abdominal surgery which is sapping my mental capacity to deal with these things, I am also exploring what would be involved in getting my own server, and bypassing all of these "web-hosting" companies, which I no longer trust.

And yes, doubt, right now, you may well be answering a fool according to his folly.

 

[doubt]

I am also exploring what would be involved in getting my own server, and bypassing all of these "web-hosting" companies, which I no longer trust.

Do not get your own-dedicated-VPS, they are difficult to manage.
Get your webspace on a shared server from a trustable "web-hosting" company.
Learn how to make a backup of your site to feel safe.

 

[Livyjr]

Yes to that last, doubt, very much so.

As to the server, knowing my friend very well, who has a computer-based MBA, and IT field experience, I would believe it was a co-op, where a group of people who actually know they can trust each other, and most important, the person in control of security and integrity.

A question I will pose to you right now is this:

Whatever the actual status of the server, the relevant point is that on that server, there is a Wordpress face page which identifies it as The Livyjr Files.

That is there, that exists, that functions as a site anyone with a computer could reach, and the domain name is registered to me.

Since that exists, I would like to make that the portal that would get you to the phpBB part, which would be my re-creation of the InvisionFree platform used way back in 2004 by the John Kerry Forum which was owned by someone named Michael Sullivan, who subsequently owned CommonGroundCommonSense and then walked away, and allowed the forum to be thoroughly trashed.

How do I open the Wordpress to a place to download the phpBB, which is not part of Wordpress, but is directly linked?

 

[Livyjr]

With that post, RobinHood, you spurred me into clicking on buttons all over the screen, and yes, I finally found a way into the admin control panel for Tapatalk, which has a convoluted path to get there.

On Zetaboards, at the top of my screen as site owner/administrator, there was a button I could click on labeled "admin cp."

That button is now gone.

To now get to the "admin CP," which path I just discovered, I have to go to the bottom of the face page, where it says "administrators," and if I click on that, it takes me to another page where my name is shown.

If I then click on my name on that page, I come to yet another page with my name on it, and under my name on that page is a button that says "control panel."

That, however, is not the "control panel" for the forum, which is part of my confusion here.

All that "control panel" allows me to do is edit my own settings.

The other button on that page next to "control panel" says "administer user."

Clicking on that finally brings me to an actual control panel, which not called a "control panel," but instead is called "user administration."

In there is a button for "manage forums," and clicking on that brings me to a place where I can in fact delete a forum from the board or lock the forum, or make them "read only."

So thanks to help from this board, which I greatly appreciate, along with the patience with my ignorance, that problem is solved.

I can leave Tapatalk and be sure nothing of The Livyjr Files is left behind.

Now, onward and upward to the creation of a new site on a server that is truly secure.

So, to clarify a point here, those of us who were site owners at Zetaboards who were also listed as site administrators remain as site administrators.

We can close our forums to the public, and we can destroy all our files, and thus, deprive Brandon Kopetzky and this Huang Dongri, who calls himself Winter Wong, CEO of TAPATALK, of a revenue source, which will put a dent, hopefully a big one, in their business model which is based on BAIT-AND-SWITCH and OUTRIGHT DECEIT AND DECEPTION, with a touch at least of EXTORTION thrown in.

So anyone from Zetaboards wandering the convoluted and mystifying mess presented to you with your Tapatalk board that I too was wandering on, in the fog over there, as you try to find your administrative control panel, there is the path I was finally able to use to find it laid out for you right above here.

You would have thought it would have been so simple, since we already had the "admin CP" button on our Zetaboard site administrator screen is to have left the "admin CP" button on our screens in Tapatalk.

But that would have made it too easy, and besides, that is something that goes back to 2010 or earlier, so it is too old-fashioned for the Tapatalk team, who know tomorrow's Tapatalk users want stupidly complicated as opposed to merely simple, which is too retro.

And that is the end of that segment of the story, except to say that those of us who were site owners on Zetaboards are no longer site owners on Tapatalk; we are merely site administrators.

Tapatalk now owns our forums, and their corporate rules now govern our use of what used to be our forums on Zetaboards.

 

[Livyjr]

There are people in technology you can trust.

As you noted is there are also many you can't.

I got burned badly by a company, cost me a lot of money, and it's why I suggested (maybe not as tactfully as I could have) not venting on the forums.

Being screwed over sucks, big time, and I understand completely why you're upset.

Over the years, as ugly and byzantine online forums like Reddit and Yahoo Groups have prospered, many startups have tried to improve the user experience for public online conversations.

Sometimes, venture capitalists give these people a lot of money, especially when they say they’ll be more dramatically different — more mobile, more visual, more intelligent about the so-called “interest graph.”

But it’s hard to bring people together in a new place, so many of those new sites and apps fail to foster actual discussion — and the legacy of text-heavy page load after page load in piles of sub-folders persists.

Except now there’s a startup, Tapatalk, that seems to have carved off one corner of online discussions and made it work.

“Our approach is always to respect existing content that has been around since the beginning of the Internet,” said Tapatalk co-founder and CEO Winter Wong.

Five-year-old Tapatalk originated in Shanghai and moved to Los Angeles recently as part of MuckerLab.

After making its app free and starting to pursue an advertising strategy, the company has now raised $5.8 million in seed funding from Floodgate and IDG-Accel.

Tapatalk has 2.5 million active monthly users and works with some 70,000 sites that have added its plugin.

But that’s still a very small slice of what’s out there; Wong says by his calculations, there are 375 million global users of online discussion communities.

No matter how much you try to find loopholes, complain, get angry, etc... that line makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to get them to reverse course or force them to change.

As you so correctly state, mysiteguy, whining and mewling about being screwed over and joining the "victim's club" America has become would indeed be a waste of not only my time, but this forum's as well.

And if that was my sole purpose, I seriously doubt that The Sandman would have allowed the discussion to become public.

But that is not my purpose.

Part of my purpose, of course, beyond salvaging what I can of my site, is in analyzing HOW it was that we Zetaboard site owners got deceived and led down the garden path by Brandon Kopetzky at Zetaboards and Huang Dongri, who calls himself Winter Wong, CEO of TAPATALK, which in my blogging experience, is a watershed event that may prove to be a bombshell blowing up in cyberspace, given the number of persons impacted here by whatever it was that just happened, which still is not entirely clear.

If you go down to the bottom of Tapatalk facepage right now, and look on the bottom right corner, under partners, and click on the word Zetaboards, you will get:

Want to Build a Community?

Already have one that needs a place online?

ZetaBoards offers free forum hosting that serves as the perfect site for growing an online community.

end quotes

We now know, thanks to this continuing discussion, that that is false, misleading and deceptive advertising intended to send people over to Tapatalk where they will have to pay to get back some of the features they had for free at Zetaboards.

Without this discussion, we wandering souls from Zetaboards would remain quite ignorant of that reality, and we would be angry without understanding the real cause of our justifiable anger so we can take positive action to redress our grievance, but more importantly, to hopefully timely warn others who might get sucked in by this ruse being played on us by Brandon Kopetzky at Zetaboards and Huang Dongri, who calls himself Winter Wong, CEO of TAPATALK.

Right now, as I type these words, there are 3 viewers listed as guests, which is how I came here, following a bunch of angry fish flooding into cyberspace from Zetaboards to complain about the takeover.

These guests coming now will have the benefit of these discussions to inform them, so that is a purpose fulfilled.

As to how many potential people are I the "affected and aggrieved class" here, the Zetaboard page accessed above states as follows:

Our forum software has been used by millions of people looking for a place to gather, discuss and share.

end quotes

In my limited experience of being a blogger, that is unprecedented, that a once-trusted web-hosting site, which is exactly what Zetaboards still falsely identifies itself as, has screwed so many people at the same time in so public a manner at a time when a venue like this exists where in real time, how we were screwed can be discussed, analyzed and dissected.

And it also states below that as of this time 133 users have read this thread.

So what I am doing is making a case, gathering my thoughts, bouncing them off the members of this forum, so the case becomes concise.

It would be great if some senator's son or some Cujo-like lawyer were to have been among those screwed by Brandon and Huang, and was also one of those reading this discussion and taking notes.

It would be great to see Brandon and Huang sitting before some Senate sub-committee investigating foreign influence in our domestic political process which most definitely includes citizen use of a free and independent, explaining to the sub-committee just how it was that this Tapatalk Company managed to get to here from Shanghai in China so as to be able to take over and then limit the liberty of thought and speech of American citizens during a critical election cycle that they have just accomplished with the take-over of Zetaboards.

mysiteguy, who I consider an industry expert with inside knowledge of how the IT INDUSTRY operates, says "No matter how much you try to find loopholes, complain, get angry, etc... that line makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to get them to reverse course or force them to change," and yesterday, that was probably true, and today, who knows, it still might be true, but if we all just accept that at face value because that is the way it has been, then we simply are giving up and quitting, at least in my book, which means we accept being second-class citizens in our own country because a Chinese technology company says that is the way it is going to be.

There is the question I would like to hear a Senate panel pose to both Brandon and Huang.

What's up here, dudes?

The American people would like to know.

 

[Livyjr]

There are people in technology you can trust.

As you noted is there are also many you can't.

I got burned badly by a company, cost me a lot of money, and it's why I suggested (maybe not as tactfully as I could have) not venting on the forums.

Being screwed over sucks, big time, and I understand completely why you're upset.

Over the years, as ugly and byzantine online forums like Reddit and Yahoo Groups have prospered, many startups have tried to improve the user experience for public online conversations.

Sometimes, venture capitalists give these people a lot of money, especially when they say they’ll be more dramatically different — more mobile, more visual, more intelligent about the so-called “interest graph.”

But it’s hard to bring people together in a new place, so many of those new sites and apps fail to foster actual discussion — and the legacy of text-heavy page load after page load in piles of sub-folders persists.

Except now there’s a startup, Tapatalk, that seems to have carved off one corner of online discussions and made it work.

“Our approach is always to respect existing content that has been around since the beginning of the Internet,” said Tapatalk co-founder and CEO Winter Wong.

Five-year-old Tapatalk originated in Shanghai and moved to Los Angeles recently as part of MuckerLab.

After making its app free and starting to pursue an advertising strategy, the company has now raised $5.8 million in seed funding from Floodgate and IDG-Accel.

Tapatalk has 2.5 million active monthly users and works with some 70,000 sites that have added its plugin.

But that’s still a very small slice of what’s out there; Wong says by his calculations, there are 375 million global users of online discussion communities.

No matter how much you try to find loopholes, complain, get angry, etc... that line makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to get them to reverse course or force them to change.

As you so correctly state, mysiteguy, whining and mewling about being screwed over and joining the "victim's club" America has become would indeed be a waste of not only my time, but this forum's as well.

And if that was my sole purpose, I seriously doubt that The Sandman would have allowed the discussion to become public.

But that is not my purpose.

Part of my purpose, of course, is in analyzing HOW it was that we Zetaboard site owners got deceived and led down the garden path by Branden Kopetzky at Zetaboards and Huang Dongri, who calls himself Winter Wong, CEO of TAPATALK, which in my blogging experience, is a watershed event that may prove to be a bombshell blowing up in cyberspace, given the number of persons impacted here by whatever it was that just happened, which still is not entirely clear.

If you go down to the bottom of Tapatalk facepage right now, and look on the bottom right corner, under partners, and click on the word Zetaboards, you will get:

Want to Build a Community?

Already have one that needs a place online?

ZetaBoards offers free forum hosting that serves as the perfect site for growing an online community.

end quotes

We now know, thanks to this continuing discusssion
Our forum software has been used by millions of people looking for a place to gather, discuss and share.

Perhaps

Except that there is no way at Tapatalk to close or delete a forum, which remains a great concern of mine, as I am rightfully concerned about the integrity of my files.

All control of our forums has been stripped from us.

I was on the support forum asking how to close and lock my forums, and in response, Tapatalk simply closed the support forum.

 

[Livyjr]

Except that there is no way at Tapatalk to close or delete a forum, which remains a great concern of mine, as I am rightfully concerned about the integrity of my files.

All control of our forums has been stripped from us.

I was on the support forum asking how to close and lock my forums, and in response, Tapatalk simply closed the support forum.

As was clarified above, if you were a site administrator at Zetaboard, this post above is incorrect.

By following a convoluted path through a mystifying maze at Tapatalk, you can eventually find a control panel called "administer user," and you can close and lock your files or totally delete them.

 

[mysiteguy]

Thanks for clarifying that I mischaracterized you, mysiteguy, I can accept that if you say it is so.
My apologies are extended.

As an aside, you do talk a lot like a corporate lawyer, as an authoritative voice, and those are the voices I like to hear from, as they cut to the chase and tell things the way they are, not how people like me think they are or how they should be.

I've dealt with a lot of legal issues with some of the forums I've had the past 20 years. Infringement threats from a Fortune 10 company. Screwed over by another due to a nit-picky clause in a contract. Buying sites, selling sites. Personal threats made by psychopaths on a forum. Plus a lot of client work in forum and non-forum fields.

Most people and companies I've dealt with are reasonable, want to work things out and aren't ill-intentioned. The company in the Fortune 10 is one such company. Others, however, though what they did was legal, and even contractually correct, it wasn't ethical.

I've learned to pay very close attention to contractual details, unfortunately, sometimes it was a hard lesson.

I have learned a lot from you in a short amount of time, and I value that learning.

As to Zetaboards, I actually had a thread started on 22 August 2010 entitled "I don't like this Zetaboard" where I did voice my complaints with Zetaboard, this right after I switched to there from Invision Free:

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/the_livyjr_files/i-don-39-t-like-this-zetaboard-t59.html#p2049

To somebody's credit, a serious effort was made by management to upgrade the board, and they did, and they were still doing so up until recently.
If there were any glitches, and there occasionally were after a server outage, I put in a service ticket which was responded to in a timely manner, and the glitches were fixed, so in my estimation, Zetaboards was a good landlord, until the moment it decided the contents of apartment in their house were theirs to sell if and when they wanted.

To me, that was a stark betrayal of myself, but as you say, such it is.

NEVER TRUST ANY "FREE BOARD" AGAIN!

NEVER TRUST A SERVICE AGREEMENT!

NEVER TRUST A WEB-HOSTING COMPANY!

NEVER TRUST A CONTRACT TO BE A CONTRACT - THEY AREN'T!

These are all lessons that a multitude of people in America just learned in this last week, and I am curious how far the waves from that pebble being dropped in the pond are going to spread.

Far, I would hope, and I hope some corporate boats get overturned and swamped in the process, starting with Tapatalk.

In my opinion, Tapatalk originally grew because of mutually beneficial partnerships with independent forums. Then the more successful they became, the more they forgot how they got where they were, and treated forum owners poorly. Unfortunately, their leadership doesn't seem to know the meaning of the saying "you dance with the one that brung ya".

 

[mysiteguy]

mysiteguy, in the hypothetical case that someone experienced like yourself were to scrape my files from Tapatalk, would they then be gone from Tapatalk?

From what I can tell, you might be able to disable the "group" on Tapatalk. The forum would still be there, but the content effectively locked out.

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/tapatalksupport/closing-my-forum-t39086.html

I believe they also shut down a forum/group when it becomes inactive, but what level of inactivity triggers this I don't know. I would see if they can give you details, without disclosing which forum/group you want to shut down. Maybe create an account here https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/tapatalksupport/ using a throwaway email address.

 

[Livyjr]

You are a valuable asset to this discussion, mysiteguy, with your knowledge of an industry that most of us have absolutely no knowledge about.

Am I wrong in thinking this is a new development, a perhaps historic development, a company like Tapatalk seeking to monopolize the blog-o-sphere so as to be able to impose control over our speech and thoughts?

 

[Livyjr]

From what I can tell, you might be able to disable the "group" on Tapatalk.

The forum would still be there, but the content effectively locked out.

Thanks to the help I have received in here, mysiteguy, I finally managed to navigate the stupid, convoluted, mystifying maze that a Tapatalk site is, and I found a real control panel, although it is not designated as such.

With that control panel now accessed and accessible, I am back in control of the forums, in that I can make them read only for right now, which protects them in the immediate future from being vandalized.

So that is a worry or concern now gone, and thanks for researching that on your own.

And using that administrative control panel, which for inexplicable reasons is called "administer user," when I finally have my new site up and running, and assuming I can get my files back or scraped, or not, I can then lock the site and destroy all my forum files.

On Tapatalk, The Livyjr Files will effectively be gone.

That will suffice.

And I own the domain name for The Livyjr Files, so Tapatalk at some future date will be some distant memory of a bad dream come true, and that will be that.

And mysiteguy, in all seriousness, it has been my pleasure to have made your acquaintance in here!

 

[Livyjr]

Thanks to everyone who has participated in this discussion!

 

[Livyjr]

Honestly, I think you're being a little too harsh to mrsiteguy.

He was only explaining that when you put all of your faith, content and data into the hands of a third party to host and power your site, there's a lot that can go wrong and there's not a huge amount we can do when some of these companies get sold and passed over to new management.

It's not the first time we've heard the woes of someone who relied on "free" forum services only to learn there isn't any such thing as a free lunch.

Let me say, Robin Hood, that I was being harsh with the message of mysiteguy right above here, and mistaking mysiteguy for someone associated with either or both of Zetaboards and Tapatalk, I suppose that yes, some of my hostility to the message went past the message to the messenger.

For that, I have apologized to mysiteguy.

The reason I was harsh is that I thought he was trivializing the process of becoming a site owner on Zetaboards as if it was a case of THE CANDYMAN (Zetaboards) saying, "C'mere, kid and get some candy in the form of a free website, no strings attached," and me saying, while sucking my thumb, "oh la, how nice!"

I never considered becoming a site owner to be trivial.

To the contrary, I read all the rules and considered it a big responsibility.

As an actual site owner, I have come to realize in here that I have a different understanding of the process than would an observer like mysiteguy.

Hence my apologies to him.

 

[Livyjr]

From what I can tell, you might be able to disable the "group" on Tapatalk.

The version of WordPress I have now is WordPress 4.9.8.

There is where I now have to shift my efforts.

And I still would love to see Brandon Kopetzky at Zetaboards and Huang Dongri, who calls himself Winter Wong, CEO of TAPATALK, who came here from China to feed off the American people as if we were fatted cattle, have to appear before Congress or the Senate like Zuckerberg had to, to explain exactly what game it is that they are playing here with their SCAM.

 

[salem]

...Since that exists, I would like to make that the portal that would get you to the phpBB part, which would be my re-creation of the InvisionFree platform used way back in 2004 by the John Kerry Forum which was owned by someone named Michael Sullivan, who subsequently owned CommonGroundCommonSense and then walked away, and allowed the forum to be thoroughly trashed.

How do I open the Wordpress to a place to download the phpBB, which is not part of Wordpress, but is directly linked?

You don't , it goes into a separate folder in your public_html (part of the hosting control panel) adding a link to the forum to the wordpress header ,
You might find that the board editor might need extended , this can be done fairly simply by adding custom bb codes or even adding the https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/extension/advanced_bbcode_box/ extension depending on which formatting you 'll actually use ,
Personally I'd use either simple portal or phpbb pages instead of wordpress to reduce the learning curve depending on where the main content is placed , I'm assuming the forums will hold the main content .
Also reduces the upkeep of updating two different softwares and hoping the bridge still works on updating .

 

[doubt]

How do I open the Wordpress to a place to download the phpBB, which is not part of Wordpress, but is directly linked?

As salem said:

You don't , it goes into a separate folder in your public_html (part of the hosting control panel) adding a link to the forum to the wordpress header ,

You have to become familiar with both scripts' control panels to do that.
Don't rush, take it easy.