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TUAW's Daily iPad App: Tapatalk
Although Internet forums are the illegitimate offspring of the old dial-up Bulletin Board Systems and the Web, I find myself using them a lot. Whether I'm checking with fellow cruise enthusiasts over at Cruise Critic or looking for tips about hardware issues over in the MacRumors Forums, these online discussion groups can be a lot of fun and educational as well. Tapatalk (US$2.99, universal) works with all of the standard forum software, including the big two names, vBulletin and phpBB, to bring iPad ease of use to forum participation. Since the iPad first shipped last year, I've found it difficult to use many of the forums because of some incompatibilities with Safari. For example, I had to discover by accident that I could scroll a text entry field by using a two-finger swipe, a "feature" I then passed along to my forum-frequenting wife. That still didn't make using forums a pleasure... The way I found out about Tapatalk was through the aforementioned Cruise Critic forums. As I entered the forums one day, a pop-up appeared telling me about Tapatalk, which I promptly purchased. Since then, I've been using Tapatalk to easily navigate my way around forums and I think it has actually resulted in an increase in my forum activities. %Gallery-127922% Tapatalk requires that the forum operator enable mobile access from the server, but once they do (and over 16,000 forums worldwide are already set up this way) you can use the app to enjoy your forums. Not only does the app include a way to automatically log into forums that you frequent, but there's a search tool for finding new Tapatalk-compatible forums. Once you're found them, it's easy to register from the app to participate in a new forum. If you're a forum moderator, Tapatalk includes a way to delete, unapprove, lock, or stick posts. For the rest of us, it's a breeze to add photos from the iPad's Photo Library, maps, or links to any forum post. Tapatalk has very good ratings on the App Store and for good reason -- it's a well-executed app that makes forum participation from an iPad easy and fun.
New Aion forums coming April 5
If you're a member of the official Aion forums, you've probably already heard the news that they're moving the forums to a new and improved vBulletin format. This means the addition of quite a few features, from the fun ones like custom titles and signatures to the more functional things such as a private messaging system and user control panel, but there's another important thing to remember during the transfer. "Remember to save all your important threads! This way you can help us by transferring over anything in the current forums that has helped you so that when the new forums arrive, those threads and posts can help future members," is the message from the Aion community team. So while you prepare to enjoy the new features, keep in mind that April 5th is the big day and back up your important posts before then to help jump-start the new forums.
How to put WoW Insider on your vBulletin Board forum
In an ongoing series of articles we'll show you how to put WoW Insider on your own blog, guild website, personal website, or even on your computer's desktop. For a complete list of the software that's covered, check out our guide's index.About vBulletin Board vBulletin Board is a very advanced piece of software that has to be installed on a website. It uses backend technology to make a very nice forum website. Ask your web provider if they have a vBulletin Board system setup for you already. If not, you might have to go through installing it and setting up the basic functionality. While this process is not too hard, it is beyond the scope of this guide. However, once everything is all setup, getting WoW Insider syndicated on your vBulletin Board site is easy. How to syndicate WoW Insider on your vBulletin Board website 1. Log in as an administrator. 2. Scroll down the left side administrator tools until you see "RSS Feeds". Expand that topic, and select "Add New RSS Feed". 3. Fill in the information as shown above, and select the options that fit your needs. 4. Scroll down and click the "Save" button at the bottom of the page. 5. That's it. You're now syndicating WoW Insider on your vBulletin Board site! Give it five to ten minutes to grab the news from WoW Insider, and you'll soon see it on your site's forums.
Second Life versus BBCode - an open letter to Philip Linden
Second Life user Jesse Barnett today posted an open letter to Philip Rosedale (aka Philip Linden) in the Second Life forums, with copies in the Public JIRA issue tracker, and in the Second Life developer mailing list. 'Well actually there is one thing we have asked and that is for bbcode to be reenabled and yet the official linden response is that "Sorry, we don't have 5 minutes to answer that question."' It all pretty much boils down to the vBulletin-based official forums (or what is left of them) and the fact that BBCode support for them is either broken or disabled (it was disabled in response to a cross-site scripting vulnerability, but why it remains off is an open question). While there are some workarounds, such as using GreaseMonkey to modify pages on the fly, those few users who use the official forums since the forums' fangs were pulled, find the issue vexatious.
