Admin Talk has Been Sold

thanks

 

I just checked out Chaos Reads, I like the look and feel of your site. The background image is really nice.

 

I disagree that they are "detrimental changes". They were not intentional, regardless. With the upgrade to 1.4 Beta 2 the style was reinstalled, which reverted some settings. I will revert it back to the way it was before, while we figure out our goal for the new direction (and possible look) for the site.

Things don't just get better over night and we are aware that this will be a long term project. There is a lot of good information here and a lot of good members. I plan to invest quite a bit of my time into making this place a great, fair resource for forum owners and community managers.

 

Every issue will be handled on a case by case basis should it arise. I can't comment on how things were handled in the past.

 

Personal attacks on people won't be tolerated. I think a lot of us are tired of going on admin forums and reading the same attacks on certain people over and over again. If you have a problem with someone then it should be dealt with privately or they should be added to your ignore list.

 

Rearranging some things. Its an outdated notice that I need to replace.

 

Tapatalk had some growing pains this past year as they switched from paid to free. I agree they released some features where the they stumbled over the default settings and the security update notice arrive tardy. That being said, I've communicated with Winter (CEO) and he's aware of these issues and 100% committed to bringing value to participating Tapatalk communities. They understand it's going to require a symbiotic relationship with their partner forums for everyone involved to be successful.

In the past year Tapatalk had to manage a massive amount of changes and they made some mistakes along the way. Going from a paid app and cutting off your revenue stream was a big decision for them and meant they had to focus on raising some money to survive. Along with running the day-today operations of Tapatalk Winter participated in a tech accelerator program to help position the company for outside investment. Part of that process was moving the company from Hong Kong to the United States and tons of other little details. During the same time they released a major version upgrade (version 4) which introduced lots of new features but also had the inherent bugs that any new set of code contains. I am fairly certain that Winter is happy to have that all behind him and grateful to the folks who can understand how much work it took for them to accomplish what they did. Yes, there were mistakes but looking forward they can focus more on the product and support while not being distracted by fund raising.

In 2013 we used branded Forum Runner apps for each of our sites. In 2014 we switched to Tapatalk's BYO apps and suffered through the same issues everyone else did. Now as we approach 2015 we are looking at moving away from having so many apps for each site and moving many of them to simply be inside Tapatalk. Some of our apps rank highly in the app store and we get tons of new members (and posts) via those apps. Others don't rank anywhere in the app store and cost more to maintain then they generate. As Tapatalk grows we plan to move the sites who did not perform well in the App Store into Tapatalk in hopes that being part of that network will help those communities to be discovered and grow.

Yes, that was a concern. I've never been fond of "flippers" and take our role of managing communities very seriously. Online forum communities are very special places and need to be treated with care. In the case of the forum I sold in 2007, I was comfortable with the plans of the buyers. They actually reduced the number of ads on the page since they were able to get a much higher CPM. They also invested heavily in content creation (articles) and did a terrific job turning "just a forum" into a more well rounded experience. In case you are curious, the name of the site is www.TheFashionSpot.com, I'm sure you can see the evolution on Archive.org.

Basically I was making money with AdSense and a few other other ad networks. They were an ad sales agency and sold direct so they got to charge higher CPMs and retain 100% of the revenue (no revshare). So they were able to make an offer that motivated me because I didn't have the same tools at my disposal to monetize the site. They've done a great job and I feel the members were well taken care of.

That's because I mentioned the ownership change to some forum owners I know. I've asked them to post here if they get a chance.

One thing I've noticed about forum management communities is that they should not be ranked based on the quantity of posts, rather the quality of posts. I also own BigBoardAdmin.com which is a small private forum where about 50 forum owners hang out. There are times when posting activity is very low. That's okay, there might not be a lot to talk about.

This was because of a change that @BamaStangGuy made. He responded to this above.

@BamaStangGuy, can you remove that ad?

As for how we will manage Admin-Talk, we'll get some Community Rules posted soon. In the meantime you can read an example here. I don't have any baggage from what happened in the past and each case will be handled on a case-by-case basis. One thing that is for certain is we won't be banning people without communicating with them first. I feel strongly that the proper way to manage online communities is to outline the rules, then communicate with members when they break a rule and try to resolve issues so they no longer break rules moving forward. Once we are acutely aware that the user understands our rules and they continue to violate them then we enforce a three strikes policy. On the third strike we move to issues them either a part-time or full-time ban.

Let me know what other questions or concerns you have.

Andy

 

I've removed the ad on each style I could find. Hope to have a custom style soon. Never was a huge fan of UI.X personally.