Tapatalk media recovery?

[Clover13]

Shot in the dark but any chance anyone else made the mistake of installing Tapatalk only to realize Tapatalk took those Tapatalk using members uploads and saved them to their Tapatalk servers instead of your site's?  Anyone subsequently built a set of scripts to download the media from Tapatalk, save on the site's storage and update all DB references?

 

Edited November 18, 2022 by Clover13

[AtariAge]

This is interesting, so what you're saying is anyone who uploads files using the Tapatalk application ends up saving those files on Tapatalk's servers instead of your forum's server?  That's pretty terrible, and that alone will prevent me from reinstalling Taptalk.  I was running it on my self-hosted forum, but I moved it to Invision's cloud servers recently and hadn't yet re-enabled it, even though members have been asking for it back.

Did you ever find a solution to this?

[Clover13]

41 minutes ago, AtariAge said:

This is interesting, so what you're saying is anyone who uploads files using the Tapatalk application ends up saving those files on Tapatalk's servers instead of your forum's server?  That's pretty terrible, and that alone will prevent me from reinstalling Taptalk.  I was running it on my self-hosted forum, but I moved it to Invision's cloud servers recently and hadn't yet re-enabled it, even though members have been asking for it back.

Did you ever find a solution to this?

Yep, they require you to pay them $10/month to upload to your server instead.  Wild huh?

I actually just finished recovering all I could from Tapatalk servers on my sites and then moving them to my IPS storage (S3 in this case) and then ran SQL updates to update the corresponding links in every post.

Tapatalk actually lost a bunch of the images, many were returning 404s even in the same post (post not topic, i.e. from the same member) where some images did work, i.e. this wasn't a case where the member deleted some of the images themselves as the links/embeds were still there and the images were all part of a "story" post and relative.  So I recovered what I could, pushed it all to my servers and updated the DB.  Then happily deleted Tapatalk from my sites.

[AtariAge]

Thank you for the additional information, I appreciate it.  I was paying $5/month for Tapatalk, and at the time when I first started paying this fee, I thought it was to remove ads, but it seems you need to pay $10 now for that (not sure if that was the case earlier).  I don't see any file storage settings, though, do you have a link on Tapatalk's site where this is mentioned?  Here's all I see:

Also, I laughed at the, "please submit a support ticket, we'll answer your inquiry ASAP."  Not in my experience!! 

Given the various security issues Tapatalk has had over time, plus this business about having to pay them even more to use your own server storage instead of having attachments uploaded to Tapatalk, and I'm very unlikely to re-enable this app on my forum (and I need to cancel my subscription!)

 ..Al

[Clover13]

They've definitely changed their wording.  Maybe it is the $5/month plan that does it, it isn't clear in their description but I thought it was the $10/month plan that said it specifically at one time.

Here's a screenshot for the Branding control where Image Hosting is set to enabled (they make it seem like uploading to them is good).  You'll be prompted to pay for one of the plans to Disable this setting. 

You get to this by logging into your account, going to your account setup, then Manage Groups and then Manage Settings of one of your groups (sites).  From there you'll see Branding Control in the left menu.

[AtariAge]

I do see those same options for the $5 tier.  I don't recall seeing that Image Hosting option before, but it's been a while since I've looked at these.  All three options are enabled for my forum, so now I'm curious how long they've been doing this and how many files I have hosted on their servers.

[Clover13]

1 hour ago, AtariAge said:

I do see those same options for the $5 tier.  I don't recall seeing that Image Hosting option before, but it's been a while since I've looked at these.  All three options are enabled for my forum, so now I'm curious how long they've been doing this and how many files I have hosted on their servers.

 

Run this on your database via phpMyAdmin and it'll give you a rough idea (number of posts that have images but not the actual number of images).  I did an ugly iterative approach to fix these since it was a one time fix.

SELECT fp.*
FROM forums_posts fp 
WHERE fp.post like concat('%','uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com','%')
ORDER BY fp.post_date DESC;

You're just looking for posts that have reference to uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com