Installing a mobile compatible forum would solve the issue. It can’t be to hard to do.
If I would be a free guest, I would not even think to comment. But I pay the yearly fee, so I may expect better reply than a shut up and via PM arguments which are apparently an aberration of the truth.
Don’t understand me wrong, I’m not in place to dictate requirements, but I’m entitled to get honest feedback on questions about the site that I financially support even it’s only a little bit.
Gentlemen,
Allow me to chime in and inject some much needed facts into a quickly deteriorating conversation.
Ivo, there is much more to running an online forum that sees tens of thousands of visitors every day, than simply "Installing a mobile compatible forum". It would actually be harder to accomplish than you think, and making a new system compatible with the 1,000,000+ posts and 50GB+ of photo/image attachments would be a huge challenge, if doable at all without shutting the forum down for awhile and spending significant time resources that are much needed on just as important other issues.
Some mobile-responsive changes could be made with the right investment, several of you are correct, and we are looking seriously at the steps needed to do that, but we are also very cautious about making any changes to the existing structure, theme, and familiarity that members have with the current forum. Changes can cause more problems than they appear to fix sometimes.
Political matters did not cause the shutdown of the TapaTalk forum, nor was it instigated by the management for any reason. Frankly, it became disabled during the migration to our new servers in February 2019, and when reports of this began to sporatically come in, we investigated it. We found some serious security flaws in the forum software and how TapaTalk or hackers were able to access the site content, and we disabled the possibility of it coming back online, and attempted to close the bug/hole. In the intervening time, TapaTalk was unable to reach our server, and after a specified period, they delisted our account and disabled our forum from their system. Attempts to gain access to that account or create a new one to re-instantiate the LuLa forum have been fruitless thus far. We will continue to contact TapaTalk and validate our server once again, to restore the ability to activate the features they offer to many of our users.
Perhaps a larger discussion would be apt, albeit censoring the insults or personally aimed comments, regarding the value of TapaTalk in our community and how input from that venue may affect the content or governance that is maintained in such a good balance here. You all have a richness of experience with the forum that I do not yet have, and your views and preferences are of the utmost interest to the LuLa management, Josh, Irene, et al.
Perhaps a series of polls may be offered here to have a structured way of getting everyone's (who is interested) opinions and experience, so we can made judicious and prioritized changes and improvements.
We have lots coming in the pipeline by the end of the year, including some surprises (good ones), and it is for the community that we do these things and offer the LuLa service every day.
Thank you for your collective input, and we are looking forward to more.
Chris Batt
Webmaster
