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Dear Members,
As mentioned earlier, Mustang6G will no longer be supporting Tapatalk from today forward.
This decision has not been made lightly as I understand it affects more than a few members. However, we, along with a growing number of other forums feel that over the past years Tapatalk has become increasingly more intrusive, ignored member privacy, provided poor technical and customer support and engaged in several dubious business practices.
Why have we decided to drop the application?
Unfortunately, over the years the company's business practices and the development direction they have taken have been to the disadvantage of not only webmasters and forum hosts, but also forum members.
The full site is completely functional in all mobile browsers. We have also added a new Mobile Style that automatically adapts to the screen size of the device used. We will continue to make refinements and improvements to both the desktop and mobile versions of the site.
For all those that use Tapatalk, the reason we have removed it is due to the security and privacy concerns the application poses and the company's questionable practices which are well documented. All of the above info can easily be found through an online search and is reflected by their app's low user ratings and negative feedback from other webmasters.
Downside
The only potential downside of removing Tapatalk is the lack of instant push notifications. The forum does send out notification emails, however, they are not always instant. If this is a concern to some of our current users we shall be glad to look into the possibility of installing add-ons that allow us to send out push notifications.
As mentioned earlier, Mustang6G will no longer be supporting Tapatalk from today forward.
This decision has not been made lightly as I understand it affects more than a few members. However, we, along with a growing number of other forums feel that over the past years Tapatalk has become increasingly more intrusive, ignored member privacy, provided poor technical and customer support and engaged in several dubious business practices.
Why have we decided to drop the application?
Unfortunately, over the years the company's business practices and the development direction they have taken have been to the disadvantage of not only webmasters and forum hosts, but also forum members.
- Tapatalk has in the past opened several possible security holes without alerting webmasters of the vulnerability for months. This vulnerability could have allowed attackers to gain access to members' credentials.
- By default, Tapatalk uploads images to their own servers, hijacking ownership of the content from the forums where they rightfully belong.
- All external links clicked on by members passes through Tapatalk's proxy servers instead of directly to the destination URL. This opens the possibility to track and analyze your activity.
- Tapatalk seems to be keeping a copy of each forum's content in cache on their servers. They have not asked permission for this and we do not condone it.
- Tapatalk started to divert users to login through their own instead of the forum's login function.
- Forum registration via Tapatalk (turned on by default) bypasses the forum's spam filters and is a potential gateway for spammers.
- Tapatalk keeps removing/disregarding usergroup permissions.
- Tapatalk keeps adding annoying popups to the site which have to be taken care of after each upgrade.
- Tapatalk support is poor and slow. Critical threads on their own support forum are frequently ignored, closed or deleted.
- Updates are inconvenient, infrequent and paid versions have shown with Tapatalk's own advertising content.
- Many site features (iTrader, Pictures and Albums, Social Groups, Calendar/Events, Wiki, MOTM, etc) can not be accessed through Tapatalk.
- Tapatalk is owned by a Chinese parent company that (as rumored) previously partnered with the Chinese Government. Most of their employees are based in China and they have a satellite office in the U.S. While this in and of itself is not a deal breaker, we recently discovered that we blocked the company's IP address years ago on Mustang6G due to suspicious activity. We only discovered the IP address was Tapatalk's own offices when they requested it be unblocked in order to assist with a technical issue.
- Over the years Tapatalk has transformed from a pure forum reader to an app geared towards piggybacking on the investment of site owners (even inserting their own content), marketing to our membership base, diverting traffic away from the forums, funneling discussion and content onto their own servers and adding intrusive/invasive features, many of which serve to dilute the forum's branding and independence, all without prior consent from the site owners.
The full site is completely functional in all mobile browsers. We have also added a new Mobile Style that automatically adapts to the screen size of the device used. We will continue to make refinements and improvements to both the desktop and mobile versions of the site.
For all those that use Tapatalk, the reason we have removed it is due to the security and privacy concerns the application poses and the company's questionable practices which are well documented. All of the above info can easily be found through an online search and is reflected by their app's low user ratings and negative feedback from other webmasters.
Downside
The only potential downside of removing Tapatalk is the lack of instant push notifications. The forum does send out notification emails, however, they are not always instant. If this is a concern to some of our current users we shall be glad to look into the possibility of installing add-ons that allow us to send out push notifications.
Sponsored
Thanks for looking out for us and the heads up.
;)