Zetaboards announced this a while ago, but I wanted to wait until it was closer to reality to make an announcement here about this.
However, Zetaboards (the service that hosts our boards) is being transitioned to another service called Tapatalk due to a buyout/merger between the services. The process of migration started a few months ago, but for a couple of reasons, our board was classified as one of the ones for later migration.
So, what this means is that some things will change, but the extent to which things change and when exactly those changes will happen are unknown to me at the time. But here are some bullet points about the migration that kinda sum up what I know right now.
Things that will not change:
– Our content. All of the content of the board is being migrated and should be completely lossless. So, we should not be missing any threads or posts when things move.
– Our domain. Because we host our domain separately, we will still be at forums.port-haven.com. When the change happens, I will have to update our hosting and domain settings and that may take some time to work all the way through to populate. In advance of when that happens, know that I will try to keep everyone updated on our Facebook and Twitter accounts if you don’t already follow us there. When it happens, you may also need to delete your cookies and things like that too.
– Anything not part of the boards. Our blogsite, social media, and Youtube accounts will be completely unchanged by this.
Things that will (probably) change:
– Themes. One of the reason that our board got slated for later conversion was that we have a lot of custom themes. I know that Tapatalk does allow CSS changes like the themes that we have, but I’m not sure if they are converting these things or if we will have to do it ourselves. So, be prepared for things to look not quite as pretty initially after the merger just in case. Additionally, I don’t know if there will be limitations to the number of themes and things like that either. So, I can’t make promises on what that will look like.
– Other codes. Over the years, James and I have added a lot of custom codes to the board software that give us additional functions (the “like” system for example) or that otherwise make things run smoothly. Again, we know that Tapatalk will allow custom codes, but I also know that that functionality won’t be 1:1 where we can just copy and paste them over. So, you’ll have to bear with us as we figure things out there too, especially since I work two jobs and James spends most of his time in hot air balloons Turkey these days.
– New functions. Tapatalk may have different features that Zetaboards does not. So, there may be cool things that we don’t know about yet. However, one of the things that I know about Tapatalk is that they offer a lot of app support for forums, and that has been their main feature for a long time. So, it may be possible that we can create a dedicated Port Haven Forums app even to allow for more/easier posting on mobile devices.
Again, I don’t know all the details about this and haven’t been able to see any previews of what our boards might look like after the transition.
I also don’t have a firm date of when the change will happen, but the most recent email that I received (today 8/30) says that the migration of all Zetaboards forums should be complete by 9/27.
Hopefully the transition will be easy, quick, and still leave us without a lot of differences.
I haven’t mentioned things yet, not because I was keeping things from you, but just because I didn’t have (and still don’t have) a ton of details. But, you deserve to know that change is coming and within the next month.
But, Port Haven is not going away, even if it takes us some time to get what you know to be full functionality restored.
Feel free to ask any questions that you have, but know that I may not have an answer for you just yet.
