Hey everyone, Rob here. I’ve yet to meet many of you, but for the past year I’ve helped run Operation Sports as General Manager.
I wanted to take a moment to update you on everything happening behind the scenes at Operation Sports. This year has been a big one for us. We’ve built a larger editorial team to cover more stories and more games, launched a Discord as a second hangout spot, and we’ve done a ton of cool things. But we know the experience hasn’t met the standard you deserve, especially surrounding the forum and the new app.
When we launched the OS app three weeks ago, it wasn’t where it needed to be. The design was a mess and most importantly the forums didn’t work. Over the past few weeks though, we’ve worked hard with new developers to fix the issues you reported. This time I promise you’ll be able to log in!
We learned a lot of important lessons upgrading the forum and launching our first app, but those lessons came at the cost of worse experiences. Now we intend to make it right. Our intention for this app is to give you the mobile experience on the forum, the latter of which has always needed a solution outside of Tapatalk.
And I have great news! The “real deal” OS App is launching by the end of this week, and it’s the version you should have downloaded three weeks ago. I really think y’all are going to love it.
Beyond all of the app improvements, I also have news regarding the Operation Sports Forums about fixes you’ve been asking for, for months. And, we are looking for testers in the community to help us make you the best experiences possible to avoid launching anything broken in the future. Check it all out below:
Operation Sports App — 1.0 Update Notes
Overall
- Sleeker, cleaner UI/UX throughout the entire app
- Core Operation Sports game hubs added to the top of the app for fast access to the content you care about
- News tab and Forum tab transferred to the bottom of the app
- Account + forum account login issues fixed
News Tab
- News feed loads faster and behaves consistently
- Infinite scroll added to the News homepage
- Chronological sorting now works across all content types
Forums
- Forum account logins now work reliably
- Creating topics and replying works without errors
- Threads load significantly faster
- Subforums load faster and are now fully accessible
- Post-reading experience redesigned for smoother scrolling and clarity
To be clear, this is just the start for the app. The goal is to give you complete functionality of the website and forum, but we want to make it bigger than that. You can expect additional future updates with new features and we plan to shoot a survey in the Discord asking what you want added to the app. Stay tuned.
Forums — Major Fixes Incoming
Earlier this year, we upgraded the forums to the latest version of vBulletin. While it pushed the forums to the newest version of vBulletin, it also introduced a long list of issues that made the overall experience worse. You wanted an upgrade, but not at the expense of what worked, and we’ve heard you loud and clear.
We are actively working on a major series of fixes, and the first step is reverting the forums back to the original Operation Sports theme. After the theme is restored, we will begin working on the known list of issues, like the slow loading speeds, broken search, and the inability to change your profile avatars.
We’ll share more details later this week or early next week.
Help Us Test — Calling All Supporting Members
We’re opening up testing for new app updates (and soon, forum improvements) to our supporters.
If you’re a Premium Newsletter subscriber, we’d love your help to test the Operation Sports app before major updates go live. Your feedback is incredibly valuable as we:
- Identify bugs
- Flag issues
- Prioritize future features
- Improve UI/UX and navigation
- Shape the roadmap of OS products
Supporting members will also get first access to future forum updates and other product testing opportunities. If you’re in the OS Discord, I’ll reach out in the Supporter’s Club channel with the test links for iOS and Android.
In general, the feedback all of you send on the forums and Discord is enormously helpful, and we’ve read all of it, and now we’d love to include you in the development process going forward.
Thank You
This year has been full of change and experimentation as we pivot away from relying on Google to keep the lights on. It’s been a bumpy road figuring out what’s next for Operation Sports, but I think we’re ready to make 2026 a really exciting year for all of you, and your patience has meant everything. We’re committed to being more transparent with the community, and you can consider this update as the first of a much more open line of communication with all of you.
More soon, and as always, thank you for being part of Operation Sports.
— Rob
