Tapatalk becomes social media: Users can create their own website/Forums/Groups

[Alfa1]

https://www.tapatalk.com/tapatalk_groups

Tapatalk now offers people the opportunity to create their own Forums & Groups. With a few clicks people can open their own website or Tapatalk group. Completely free or for 5 or 10 bucks a month depending on how advertising revenue is divided and what features are wanted.

This is an interesting step which does change the forum landscape. Its appealing to people who can open their own groups or sites without technical knowledge. It does directly compete with traditional forums.

There should be little doubt that Tapatalk will advertise their new service to the many millions of members of the 250k forums that are currently using the Tapatalk App.

Personally I am very glad that I abandoned Tapatalk years ago, as this was to be expected. But on the other hand its nice for people who want to create a website without the hassle. Tapatalk is truly becoming a social media platform.

 

[LeadCrow]

Looks like turning into another Proboards.

They appear to be in direct competition against forums now - especially those already using its addons since users could start their own monetized forums instead of staying active on yours.

 

[Alfa1]

This might turn out quite disruptive to forums that use Tapatalk. Imagine the typical sour grapes drama members being able to invite all your members over to their Tapatalk Group, all within the same ecosystem. If a member plays their cards right then it could easily lead to an exodus.

Mind that Tapatalk still advertises similar communities to members of your community.

 

[datio]

Free PhpBB forum hosting is always nice to have, but I'd probably use Facebook Groups if I wished to be subjected to some forum-as-a-service lock-in.
I feel that Discourse would be a better fit, but it's probably not selected as it'd require beefier servers and their developers are more familiar with PHP than Ruby.

They will need better discoverability (e.g. a list of the most popular discussions across all the non-NSFW groups) to get the slightest chance of competing with, say, reddit and its numerous subreddits.
Better moderator tools for inter-group management could also probably help (e.g. move thread from group A to group B, merge groups etc.) selling the service to community builders.

 

[haqzore]

I have no clue why anyone would run Tapatalk these days.

It's like taking heroin because you're bored...
"Hey, this could **** my entire life up, but let's go for it!"

 

[Alfa1]

Since moving over to XenForo and adding a mobile friendly custom skin with PUSH I had 0 requests for Tapatalk. I did have a few requests from a custom App, but when looking into it members just wanted to have a button on their home screen or being able to easily upload pictures/video. A button on home screen can be done with browser.

 

[R0binHood]

iOS users are still missing out on push though this way.

 

[haqzore]

Since moving over to XenForo and adding a mobile friendly custom skin with PUSH I had 0 requests for Tapatalk. I did have a few requests from a custom App, but when looking into it members just wanted to have a button on their home screen or being able to easily upload pictures/video. A button on home screen can be done with browser.

Exactly my experience.

 

[Matthew S]

I notice Tapatalk are also sending thread digests from forums now, too. The email is sent from "Forum Name (via Tapatalk)" <trending@tapatalk.com>. A forum I haven't visited in years suddenly started sending these. I don't recall having visited using Tapatalk, but I may have (haven't used Tapatalk in years, either).

 

[Danielx64]

I was silly enough not to save the email but I got an email saying that Tapatalknow owns ipbfree and other software like that.

 

[LeadCrow]

Are you sure about that? Yuku's confirmed but it seems ipbfree uses Topic'it as their mobile app.

 

[Pete]

The relevant quote from their email:

We also welcome CrowdGather, Myfreeforums.org, ProphpBB.com, InvisionFree.com and other network’s decision to join us and migrate their platform to Tapatalk Groups.

 

[Danielx64]

Are you sure about that? Yuku's confirmed but it seems ipbfree uses Topic'it as their mobile app.

Woops, been corrected by Pete it was InvisionFree that I was thinking of.

The relevant quote from their email:

Thank you for that, I knew that I read that same email but sadly nuked it

 

[R0binHood]

Using some of that sweet VC money to acquire and grow I see. These guys mean business, while all the other commercial forum platforms feel like they're completely falling behind when it comes to being truly accommodating to mobile.

 

[Dubbed Navigator]

I’m still getting mails from these guys despite parting ways with them years ago.

They wouldn’t delete my account as the mail came from a domain other than what it was registered with. There’s logic to that, but difficult to do when you’ve got rid of it.

The appeal of TT to users is simply the app craze IMO. Seems to me it doesn’t matter if the app doesn’t do as good a job as inbuilt features, if it’s an app - it’s got to be better in some eyes.

 

[pierce]

I’m still getting mails from these guys despite parting ways with them years ago.

They wouldn’t delete my account as the mail came from a domain other than what it was registered with. There’s logic to that, but difficult to do when you’ve got rid of it.

The appeal of TT to users is simply the app craze IMO. Seems to me it doesn’t matter if the app doesn’t do as good a job as inbuilt features, if it’s an app - it’s got to be better in some eyes.

The problem is that forum vendors are not making their stuff progressive web apps.

Mainly because apple "thinks different"..

Many tech people think that apps for mundane tasks are pointless.

 

[zappaDPJ]

I’m still getting mails from these guys despite parting ways with them years ago.

I also left the building some while ago but I still get mail from them even though I unsubscribe every time.

 

[Dubbed Navigator]

I also left the building some while ago but I still get mail from them even though I unsubscribe every time.

They outright refused to delete my account if the request didn’t come from the same domain.

They held real details, so just went to spam from then on. I’m actually quite interested to see why they’ve reared their head all of a sudden.

 

[Alfa1]

I also left the building some while ago but I still get mail from them even though I unsubscribe every time.

That seems to spell bad news in regard to them holding on to member data from sites that no longer use TT. I would not be surprised if they are emailing forum members who have never used TT simply because they still have a copy of the databases.

 

[zappaDPJ]

That seems to spell bad news in regard to them holding on to member data from sites that no longer use TT. I would not be surprised if they are emailing forum members who have never used TT simply because they still have a copy of the databases.

Similar thoughts crossed my mind.