Our site, bareefers.org, has a plug-in installed to integrate with Tapatalk. Tapatalk is a 3rd-party app that is intended to improve people’s experiences accessing forums, especially for people who access many forums.
In the past there were some distinct advantages to using Tapatalk over accessing forum websites directly, like ease of uploading images, ease of getting alerts, new posts feed, username/password management, and other technical improvements. When we upgraded the BAR site last year, we improved it in many important ways, and arguably none of these features are better on Tapatalk than direct access on bareefers.org now. Many of us who have been around for a few years and used to use Tapatalk have ditched it.
There are also some specific reasons why having Tapatalk integrated with our site is not good, even for people who don’t use it:
For those of you who use Tapatalk and haven’t tried accessing BAR directly through the website recently, please give it a try for a few days and see what you think. Feel free to ask questions about how to do whatever is unfamiliar.
At the upcoming Board meeting, I’d like to discuss removing the Tapatalk integration, like many other forums have done, including reef2reef. This would resolve the above problems, but would create a new problem of upsetting our members who prefer to use Tapatalk since they wouldn’t be able to anymore. Please answer the poll according to how you personally feel about your use, not how you feel about how it will affect others. Of course that is a huge consideration, but we need to find out how people feel about it as individuals first.
Note to Tapatalk users: Please access this page through the site (https://www.bareefers.org/forum/threads/poll-keep-or-remove-tapatalk-integration.26987/) so you can vote in the poll (this is getting too meta).
In the past there were some distinct advantages to using Tapatalk over accessing forum websites directly, like ease of uploading images, ease of getting alerts, new posts feed, username/password management, and other technical improvements. When we upgraded the BAR site last year, we improved it in many important ways, and arguably none of these features are better on Tapatalk than direct access on bareefers.org now. Many of us who have been around for a few years and used to use Tapatalk have ditched it.
There are also some specific reasons why having Tapatalk integrated with our site is not good, even for people who don’t use it:
- Privacy/Security- There has been discussion that the integration exposes to Tapatalk members’ username, password, personal account details, interactions with other members across multiple sites, viewing history, sites visited before and after using. Unfortunately Tapatalk earned a not-stellar reputation a couple years ago with some breaches of trust with this data, the details of which I don’t personally understand well but sound bad enough to be of concern.
- Privacy Policy- Our privacy policy says we don’t share any information with outside parties, and it is true that we are not actively sharing any data with Tapatalk. But it could be argued that since Tapatalk can learn a lot of personal info about our members even without our active participation, that we should be disclosing this if we keep it. I don’t know how to word this in a revised Privacy Policy, and quite frankly I’d rather not have to.
- Annoying- Many times when someone accesses our site, including newcomers, the integration triggers a hard-stop popup that suggests that they access through Tapatalk, including encouraging downloading the app (which itself may be a security risk, as above).
- Breaks BAR features- There are several Xenforo BAR site features that are useful, expected, and community-building that Tapatalk breaks when people access through their app. Polls, signature lines (which often have links to tank journals and people’s names), and mention calls vs @ calls when you want to alert a member. I remember when I was new and I was using Tapatalk a lot of the time I had no idea what people were talking about when they referenced polls or other things hidden by Tapatalk. I notice that it still comes up frequently on here that someone has some confusion or a poor experience because of this.
For those of you who use Tapatalk and haven’t tried accessing BAR directly through the website recently, please give it a try for a few days and see what you think. Feel free to ask questions about how to do whatever is unfamiliar.
At the upcoming Board meeting, I’d like to discuss removing the Tapatalk integration, like many other forums have done, including reef2reef. This would resolve the above problems, but would create a new problem of upsetting our members who prefer to use Tapatalk since they wouldn’t be able to anymore. Please answer the poll according to how you personally feel about your use, not how you feel about how it will affect others. Of course that is a huge consideration, but we need to find out how people feel about it as individuals first.
Note to Tapatalk users: Please access this page through the site (https://www.bareefers.org/forum/threads/poll-keep-or-remove-tapatalk-integration.26987/) so you can vote in the poll (this is getting too meta).
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(not that would happen)
