CornSnakes Forum on Tapatalk!!! Thank you, Rich!!!!!

Time for my yearly plea for Tap-A-Talk, along with some interesting statistics.

Global Mobile Statistics Part B: Mobile Web; mobile broadband penetration; 3G/4G subscribers and networks.

25% of mobile web users in the US are now mobile-only. No desktop, no laptop. That's a pretty large chunk.

There are 250 million mobile users in the US. 22% of those access the mobile web at least monthly.

Our user base here on mobile devices is no longer just forum addicts with the latest mobile devices like myself. Nearly EVERYONE [that is going to be on-line anyway] has a Kindle or some other tablet these days. The number of tablet owners in the US doubled to 70 million in 2012.

Actually, I was thinking I might upgrade this site to the latest version of vBulletin, and I believe it might have better mobile device integration. However I found out that vBulletin was bought out by Internet Brands a while back, and some of the programming staff left over a dispute of some sort. I've seen the change in one of the car forums I frequent after IB took it over, and it's pretty much run by the sponsors now. Definitely oriented towards $$ and pretty much to hell with the members.

Anyway, many people are not happy with the latest version. Maybe their programming expertise has taken a toll from the brain drain that took place. Apparently the break-away programming staff have created their own message board system (which says a lot right there about the reasons for them leaving), and are, of course, now involved in a lawsuit with IB.

I talked to my programmer about this and his recommendation was to stick with the current version until there is an absolute need to move. But I will ask him about this again, and see if he has had to address this with other clients or even his own message boards that he runs himself.

If I recall correctly, he was very concerned about adding the complexity of a modification like Tap-A-Talk to vBulletin. Since neither he nor I use mobile devices, then there would be no way to test the code, address problems, or even SEE any problems anyone was having with the interface. We felt that it might do more harm than good, on a lot of levels, but especially if the code introduced an exploit into vBulletin that hackers could use to hack into my server and toast it.

So, let me ask you this. Can you read this site NOW without the Tap-A-Talk interface? If this were your site, would you find the risks acceptable to do this change you ask for? And if the risk is acceptable to you, how about it being acceptable to everyone else?

I do not have Tap-a-Talk on my phone and I am mobile quite often. I do have to double tap my screen frequently to zoom in, but I seem to have no other issues and have been able to access anything I have tried to access. I have an Android based touch screen phone if that makes any difference??

I would really like a mobile version of this forum, but not necessarily Tap-A-Talk. It would be easier to browse and take up less data. But other then that the way it is, is OK too.

I have a bunch of screen shots that compare, maybe I'll have time to post this weekend.

I brought this topic up again with my programmer, and come to find out that it was darn lucky that we didn't enable Tapatalk earlier. Evidently one or more exploits in the Tapatalk code got quite a few message board sites compromised and caused them some messy problems from hackers. But from what my programmer tells me, these appear to have been resolved now.

So with that in mind, I asked him to install the Tapatalk interface code here, and it should be working now. But in the admin section, the switch to enable the Tapatalk code says this:

Tapatalk for Mobile Web is our new offering of fast, efficient, cross platform mobile web experience for forums. Currently supports only basic Read-Only feature, with option to open discussion using Desktop version. Enable Mobile Web version of Tapatalk?

Not sure exactly what that means. To me, it infers that the site will be READ ONLY using Tapatalk from a mobile device. But someone else will have to test this. If so, seems kind of silly to me to have even gone through the trouble of installing the code if no one can actually participate via the mobile devices. But maybe I'm just reading that wrong. I can't understand why anyone would even need a "desktop version" of Tapatalk since on a desktop computer I would think most people would just use their regular browser.

Someone let me know, please.

Ooooh, I found Cornsnakes!!! Let me check it out...

I am able to access CS from the Tapatalk app, and reply. Signing in is a little confusing; I didn't want to use my Facebook log-in, so had to choose "use another e-mail" or something, which brought me to the expected CS log-in.

Okay, I'll have to mess around with it after my phone charges up some, and I put groceries away.

Look how nice that looks!! I hope this pic attaches with no problems!