Moving a forum from Tapatalk to IPS

[Alexander Newman]

I'm new here, and also have relatively recently become an admin along with a few other forum members after the Tapatalk-based forum concerned was taken out of mothballs in an emergency. The forum appears to be hosted by Tapatalk - it is certainly on the Tapatalk website. A number of us, however, are very uncomfortable with Tapatalk: their polices, the speed (or lack of it) of their servers, their overall opacity in terms of how they run things (there is no online help that I've been able to find), plus, as I have noticed on reading a number of threads here on Technical support and the General IPS forum, an apparent and distinct lack of security.

I set up a test forum on IPS last week after making a trial membership, as a possible replacement for the Tapatalk one. So far, I am amazed at the speed and functionality of Invision Community - it's all that we need and much, much more. It is, of course, running at full throttle during the trial phase - this would no doubt change if I were to select the 'beginner' tier (for example) once the trial period has ended. I had the site set up and running with as complete a forum structure as I could manage, in around 24 hours (not continuous work, either) with the admins invited and logged in. I also set up a similar phpBB test forum on my own domain, and have found that much more difficult to set up, and am having intractable problems with permissions (so far) for the same admins that I invited over to it. I could invite the people in InvCom as admins ready-made, but not with phpBB, and in the process of the latter, appear to have made some errors with their permissions. Not so with IPS, which was a breeze and all fully functional.

After further discussion between us, the other admins decided to take a wait-and-see approach to changing things like host and domain, although I am going to continue developing both test sites. As our current Tapatalk forum is starting to gain more users and their posted works (i.e., lots of photos), it will become harder with each ensuing day to to make any changes with regard to moving the forum to somewhere safer and more comfortable.

The most obvious choice for us would be to move the entire forum to IPS servers from Tapatalk if that can be done. I haven't found anything about such a move in the forums here, just the cancellation of the Tapatalk app subscription. As our almost 100% of our members are using the web interface, Tapatalk - and its app - has limited application in any case. And, as mentioned, it has significant drawbacks. Given that Tapatalk doesn't have any external access (e.g., by sftp) it seems to me that moving the forum to IPS might in fact not be possible.

Has anyone here had any experience of successfully escaping from Tapatalk's grasp, and any advice about how it might be done, if it is in fact possible at all?

Best regards, alex1n.

[Marc]

If you are looking to move to us from tapatalk and would like to transfer your data, it may be worth contacting our sales team on this to see what we can offer in terms of data transfer. In terms of getting hold of  your data, you should contact tapatalk on this to see if you can get a backup of your data

[Driven 2 Services]

Unfortunately, Tapatalk does not provide exports.  Their entire model is based around locking you into their platform and their support forums have countless complaints about it.

I've been able to successfully extract Tapatalk forums including email addresses (which are not public facing) with an admin logged in scrapper in an MySQL database, which I then import into a destination forum.  This includes pulling images into the forum attachment store.  It took some work, but it's doable.

[Alexander Newman]

14 hours ago, Marc Stridgen said:

If you are looking to move to us from tapatalk and would like to transfer your data, it may be worth contacting our sales team on this to see what we can offer in terms of data transfer. In terms of getting hold of  your data, you should contact tapatalk on this to see if you can get a backup of your data

Thanks @Marc Stridgen, I’ll contact them. And thank you and the moderator team for approving my post so rapidly :). From what Drive 2 Services says below, a backup retrieval may not be possible. I’ll investigate that, though.
 

4 hours ago, Driven 2 Services said:

Unfortunately, Tapatalk does not provide exports.  Their entire model is based around locking you into their platform and their support forums have countless complaints about it.

I've been able to successfully extract Tapatalk forums including email addresses (which are not public facing) with an admin logged in scrapper in an MySQL database, which I then import into a destination forum.  This includes pulling images into the forum attachment store.  It took some work, but it's doable.

Thanks, @Driven 2 Services. I had been afraid that we’d be irretrievably locked in, but I will investigate your method, too. I know a small amount of PostgreSQL, which might be a help (or not!).

Historically, the forum was originally on Invision, then it was moved to Zetaboards, then Zetaboards was taken over by Tapatalk and after that, it was apparently rapidly downhill from there until that forum collapsed. The forum owner tried to tweak it as much as he could using CSS, but Tapatalk’s support of CSS is also opaque and difficult to manage, like everything else there. It would seem that a fair amount of resource coordination would be needed for your approach - I’ll give some thought to planning that. Suitable disk space will be the most problematic. I’d be quite happy to never have to hear of TaT ever again!

At least we have a couple more options to consider, which doubles what we had before (abandon the current forum completely or stay there).
 

Thanks once again,

Alex.

[Alexander Newman]

On 2/24/2024 at 5:29 AM, Driven 2 Services said:

Unfortunately, Tapatalk does not provide exports.  Their entire model is based around locking you into their platform and their support forums have countless complaints about it.

I've been able to successfully extract Tapatalk forums including email addresses (which are not public facing) with an admin logged in scrapper in an MySQL database, which I then import into a destination forum.  This includes pulling images into the forum attachment store.  It took some work, but it's doable.

Hello @Driven 2 Services, would it be appropriate to ask further questions about your methods here, or via PM, if you are happy to do so? There are some things that I don't fully understand - I’m assuming that by ‘scrapper’ you meant scraper, for example.

Cheers, Alex.

[Driven 2 Services]

Yeah, it was a misspelling.  

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