Tapatalk, RSS, or anything else mobile friendly for the forums

[ninthbit]

I was about to post a new thread requesting that RSS feeds be enabled (at least they don't work for me, comes up blank), but I saw this recently locked thread on Tapatalk. I would have liked to add to that thread instead, but it was closed.

Looking back, I read the mentioned year old thread HERE,asking about a mobile platform. The main thing I took from that thread was this:

I would not even consider spending one minute or one dollar on such a product unless I myself had a smartphone with which to check that it was satisfactory. As I am a borderline-technophobic luddite who avoids everything that was built after 2000 or so and does not even own a regular cell phone, the probability of that happening anytime soon is just about nil.

That aside, right now we don't have the time or money to make badly needed changes to the CMS here on the web. Developing a second one is just out of the question.

And this:

The site owner/admins could always look at http://www.tapatalk.com/ to implement this...{abbreviated by Ninthbit}

Problems here include server load, security, stability, privacy, testing, and the forcing of users to pay for a third party app to use these features.

To The Giants post, with his talking about a “Content Management System” It seems he was addressing the original request for a mobile site (the main site). I don’t think he was really addressing mobile access to the forums. The main site isn’t that much of a concern. It loads fine on any modern smart phone. It’s the forums that are a disaster.

For Rawhide’s later reply about Tapatalk on the forums, I have to ask; considering that I see the following error every single day, wouldn’t a mobile option help alleviate some of the load?

The server is too busy at the moment. Please try again later.

I’m sure I’m not the only one out there that compulsively presses F5 all day long on his forum control panel, just waiting\hoping for a subscribed thread to update (mostly PbP games). Be it my phone or my PC, I’m refreshing these forums at an insane rate. Every time I do that, the entire page has to process. With Tapatalk or RSS feeds, that load should be lower since I’m not pulling the full page and all its associated CGI required content. I would only need to load the full page when a thread has updated, if at all.

To the element of cost to the users... shouldn’t that be our concern not yours? Many of us already have the app. Even if we don't and didn’t want to purchase it, we could still use the free version to read and receive update notifications.

From the recently locked thread I first mentioned, Rawhide ended the discussion with this:

There is absolutely no plans for tapatalk or anything similar. A mobile friendly version of the site is planned for sometime in the future.

I would have to say that the main page is mobile friendly with current smartphones. We don't need a mobile friendly version of the comic pages. It’s the forum that desperately need help. I constantly lose posts I’m working on as I resize the screen (often involuntarily) and accidently hit a random link on the page. I would really like to see Tapatalk enable, or at least RSS support working. Any kind of mobile friendly forum tool would be appreciated. I don’t think you guys really know\appreciate how many people want this and how much it could help with server load. Looking at the Tapatalk page, it's free to GitP and easy to setup. If for some reason it didn't work with the site's customization to the vBulletin code, you could at least say "We tried and it didn't work, sorry".

[Roland St. Jude]

Sheriff: Please don't restart locked threads. Please do review the Forum Rules.

Also, we're well aware of the current issues with accessing the forum. Rawhide, in particular, is extremely well-informed on our problems, technical options, resource limitations, and policy preferences regarding resource allocation.

As usual, we are not seeking public input on our technical options at this time.

[Rawhide]

To reiterate, and I will use red text here to make this absolutely clear, we are definitely not going to introduce Tapatalk or anything similar. It has been considered and decided against. And, as Roland said, we are not soliciting advice, especially when a thread has just been locked about it.

And, as I said in the previous thread, a mobile friendly version of the forum is indeed planned, making this thread entirely redundant.