I should add to and clarify what David has said.
Firstly, none of this is any reflection on David, other than in a very positive way. I have to thank him for his enthusiasm and for volunteering to get Tapatalk on board.
When we had this site built for us a year ago, none of the lifeboat crew were (and I guess still are not) competent or experienced in the implementation or maintenance of SMF as the basis of our forum.
If this is not still the case, speak up at the back, we need your experience now!
So, even Martin, who built the site at my request, in record time and at almost no cost, is not an SMF-competent person. What he is is a very experienced builder and host of websites for his customer base. I was able to prevail upon him because he is a long-time friend of PaulC and at that particular time, it was Paul, TomL and myself against the world. If any of the three of us had any pretentions to be a software implementation geek, we all hid it well!
The one big negative of this new site is the lack of a competent Admin who fully understands and is experienced in the use of SMF. We saw this when we tried to get better Smilies installed. Failed!
We are seeing it now with this Tapatalk stuff.
To fully implement Tapatalk, David (or any of us) would need access to the FTP Login, something which none of us has! The FTP Login is essentially the key to the engine room of our site and if any of us ignorami got loose in there, all hell would probably break loose with wheels and gears and cogs and things flying all over the show! Understandably, as the person who is our sole de facto means of technical support, Martin keeps the key down his trouser leg.
Now, Martin is more than happy to give us the key, but from that point on his support for the site would be compromised; remember, he is NOT an SMF expert and if 'we' cock it all up, then 'we' is sunk and it is back to the bloody Faceache Lifeboat for those who can swim that far.
To further complicate matters, the SMF admins themselves (the ones who own and maintain the template on which our site is based) do not recommend nor support the use of Tapatalk on their platform.
Whilst lots of forum admins have asked about this, it is not forthcoming at the platform level. This is a weakness in the end customer experience of a forum built on SMF. Things might well be different if we were using vBulletin, as did the old site.
The SMF admins are however, working on a more mobile friendly gizmo which is, apparently, not too far in the future.
So, in the absense of a truly SMF-competent support person from within our own ranks, I am left with no option but to scupper all of David's good work and dash the hopes of those of you who would have used the Tapatalk wotsit.
To sum up.
David did a great job and I thank him for that.
Until and unless we either grow or kidnap an SMF-competent person to support our site, third-party add-on's like Tapatalk are a no-no.
We live and learn!
Brian (who never wanted it in the first place and is only being pig-headed because David is a 'murrican and worse than that, from Texas
)
