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| ZB is great, but can have flaws | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Feb 21 2017, 10:13 PM (1,802 Views) | |
| Link2013 | Feb 21 2017, 10:13 PM Post #1 |
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Scientist
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I see that the ZetaBoards team has done a great job hosting services for people to use to make their own masterpieces. However, ZB can have flaws though. One of the flaws such as the email confirmation systems which can be improved. Other than that, I think the system is working great and is usable. |
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| Cory | Feb 22 2017, 12:33 AM Post #2 |
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Sorry to be the one to complain, but you mentioned flaws, so I thought I would chime in:
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| Stephen | Feb 22 2017, 01:58 AM Post #3 |
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Twilight is upon me, and soon night must fall.
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Not to sound like a broken record, but this all comes down to money really. A free service still costs money to run. And features, while great, are no good to anyone if the boards can't run. The servers have sucked up two years of development time thanks to malicious attacks and the hassle of domain name directing. Honestly if we cut the ability to have your own domain, we'd probably have had features that are nearly done released by now. But because of all the Cloudflare domain pointing issues, that's where developer time was spent. Mobile. There are two: the app in development and the tapatalk app. One has more in it and the other was supposed to be quicker- due to a security flaw it wasn't. I was last told that Tapatalk had reconnected with us and we were close to resolving that issue. zIFBoards is not in active development and will never return to active development. It is software that is well over ten years old. Even Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 7. I would strongly encourage board owners to upgrade to Zetaboards. Bug fixing still occurs but it is difficult and time consuming with this software. The Resource Database, API and several other features took a backseat to (in order) the server upgrade, Cloudflare protection for the servers, and mobile support. Would we like to see faster results? Of course. But without another full time developer, progress is slow. As to the staff team- most are more active than they appear. But we've mostly been removing spam, answering tickets and trying to more quickly resolve abuse reports because those are things we can do. We can't develop. So we've directed our energy into other areas of the service. No one disputes these issues. However, short of a paid development team, this is the reality for the moment. We hope to at least make it easier for our part time developer and certainly my view is the API will allow more self development. But these are the realities we face. |
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| Link2013 | Feb 22 2017, 02:16 PM Post #4 |
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Scientist
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My mistake, there wasn't a flaw in the email system. It was because I typed my email address wrong. The email systems are working fine. So I still give five stars to the ZetaBoards team for hosting a great service. However, I did encounter viruses on someone else's board located in the menu. Viruses will make the business look bad.
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| Helena | Feb 22 2017, 02:53 PM Post #5 |
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M is for Mod
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If you can give details about the viruses you encountered, please open a new support ticket so that it can be investigated. |
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| Link2013 | Feb 22 2017, 03:11 PM Post #6 |
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Scientist
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It's not my board, so I can't open a support ticket. I would love to post the url to the board here, but that would be against the rules since I'm not supposed to advertise outside of This is... forum. |
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| DaPizzaMan | Feb 22 2017, 03:29 PM Post #7 |
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#TeamSupport
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You can create a Personal Support Ticket, which only the staff will see so we can look into the issue for you.
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| Chelonian | Feb 26 2017, 02:02 PM Post #8 |
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I think there needs to be more in the paid service to make it appealing. As is, the premium service adds very little in the way of enhancing the forum. From the free 6 months premium given for the downtime (probably not the best idea financially in hindsight) I have not used any of the features as they aren't really enhancing forum or admin cp experience in anyway. Perhaps ad free bundled in with premium may be more enticing? As well as something that makes premium seem worth it. I'm not sure what that would be. A custom domain name? There must be something good that can be added to premium to encourage more users to buy it. As for other avenues of money, you can always have a donate button. Even a small amount of donations is something. Plus maybe someone out there who knows coding etc may be willing to offer their services for free like some of the coders here. Or a smaller amount of income. There's also looking at other advertising options - maybe there is a higher paying advertising service than you are already on. Another idea would be to allow users to add their advertisements to the rotation for a fee. I know a few other board providers do this. Or it could be a feature for premium. Lastly, if your time is being stretched on the things you mentioned, I would recommend recruiting a member who is on regularly for spam removal - I've noticed that spam can sit there for a few hours or more before it is removed. That at least would free up more time, albeit a little, for other things. Edited by Chelonian, Mar 9 2017, 07:19 PM.
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| skyline. | Feb 28 2017, 02:06 PM Post #9 |
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Is there no option to remove some of the old forums which no longer serve any purpose for years now? And the hundred thousands test boards which have no use. Should save some money, no? |
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| JamieMN | Feb 28 2017, 02:32 PM Post #10 |
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I do agree with Chelonian regarding the Premium. It does come down to money, and that the majority of the Zetaboards Staff (Well, all except one) are volunteers (Which do a cracking job at that). I do think a revamp of the Premium features would make Zetaboards much more appealing and get up to scratch with competitors. Just for some examples, as per the documentation, this is what Premimum has:
That's just my thoughts on the premium features. I did intentionally miss two off, because they're the only reason I think I'd pay (aside from actually trying to support ZB). The viewing PMs and Edit History is the biggest reason my board paid for premium. Even though we know there are competitors who do it for free, we've been with ZB for 6 years now. We can't really knock it as we have little downtime, it's easy to run and manage. I personally think -- make Premium more appealing, more interest and money comes in, more time can be put into updating it. I do think as well that focus should actually be looking to the Zetaboards homepage. The first thing anyone sees when loading up Zetaboards is the "Latest News" which was from 2015. But I was looking earlier and checked Testimonials and most the forums don't even exist. If I was looking to start a forum, it's little things like that I'd look for (That's just me, personally). I do have to also say that, without people like (Cory/Helena/DaPizzaMan/Joe/Quozzo) and others (They're the ones from the top of my head!), that Zetaboards may not be that appealing in itself because of the time they put in to answer coding requests/graphic requests. Without the Resources that premium offers (I do recall it didn't have much anyway) but the people who volunteer on the board and complete requests are probably helping Zetaboards continue in that perspective as people who don't really know code, or haven't got the means to do graphics. Can ask for help, and get it (Although they'll probably all be sick of seeing my name with requests. ). I actually saw a thread on the RPG-D (Directory for roleplays) which had someone asking "Why does everyone hate Zetaboards?" -- I know everyone uses zetaboards for different reasons, but I do think it's missing out on a big community type by looking into what people who run roleplays want (Again, down to money and time. I get it!) with replies talking about features it misses compared to other free hosts. That's it, really. I just thought I'd drop my opinion in. Zetaboards is a perfect host for me, but I can understand why it doesn't appeal to a lot of people.
Edited by JamieMN, Feb 28 2017, 02:33 PM.
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| Moonface | Feb 28 2017, 04:29 PM Post #11 |
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I'd actually find that an advertisement that's useful and worth caring for, and probably the only time I would ever click on an ad on this service. |
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| Stephen | Feb 28 2017, 05:35 PM Post #12 |
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Twilight is upon me, and soon night must fall.
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To be honest, that really wouldn't solve the cost issue. We stopped expanding the number of machines several years ago. Also while some may have a different number, they share the same machine. Deleting test boards could delete hosted codes, themes and graphics so that is not something we would risk. |
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| spiiike | Feb 28 2017, 08:18 PM Post #13 |
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A bug I ran into today, but you got 4 years to fix ![]() Apparently, Zeta doesn't recognise leap year birthdays? It didn't show up for one of my members today and theirs is a leap year birthday. |
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| Revillution.net | Jun 15 2017, 10:27 PM Post #14 |
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I like the idea of complete ad-removal for premium boards. If that occurs, perhaps premium powered boards can have adult content on them since there will be no ads in place? Similar to the premium service used by Jcink? I could see this being particularly useful for roleplaying forums on ZetaBoards.
Edited by Revillution.net, Jun 15 2017, 10:27 PM.
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| Ennui | Jun 26 2017, 06:56 AM Post #15 |
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There are a few minor things that need fixing (like pre moderation notification) but I just wanted to say that Zetaboards is great. Since we started using Cloudflare the forum has hardly crashed. If you want a simple reliable forum then Zetaboards is a good choice. |
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