Chinese-forums.com Mobile! Now with Poll!

[roddy]

We've had a mobile / PDA friendly option for the forum for some time, but it wasn't fully functional and I never really promoted it very much. I've now just installed a much more functional version which will allow you to read new posts, search, reply, post new threads, read and send private messages, etc. A quick trial run hasn't shown up any issues with it, but it's possible that things will go wrong when more people start using it and finding problems. Let me know.

To get to the mobile style you can

a) use the style chooser at the bottom left of every (normal style) forums page.

B) Click on the 'Mobile' link in the footer

c) Point your browser to chinese-forums.com/m and you'll be redirected automatically

To get back to the full style, click 'Full' in the footer of the Mobile style. If you have a particular page you want to bookmark in the Mobile style, just add styleid=5 to the end of the url. Please note that the portal page, index.php, is not really mobile friendly.

Hope this is useful, I'll certainly be making use of it. And plz, dnt B mkin pstz lk diz juz cz u iz on ifone.

Take a Look

[ipsi()]

Looks fantastic. Loads so much faster on my poor Treo (Oh for an EDGE network...).

I think I might be spending even more time on Chinese-Forums.com now .

[skylee]

i'm using it and it's good. the index page is good too. thank you.

[roddy]

Excellent, glad to see it's getting some use. It's very light on bandwidth, so I'll probably also make it the default style for guest members also. No point in maintaining two light styles.

Mobile use is only going to become more important, so if you notice anything that might be worth changing or improving, let me know and if feasible I'll see what I can do.

Skylee, when you say index, do you meant the forums listing or the home page / portal? On my smartphone the portal isn't very usable, lots of scrolling to get anywhere. But it will be different on different devices.

Edited July 19, 2008 at 08:19 AM by roddy

[ipsi()]

The forum listing is great, and the main page requires a bit of scrolling (not that I use it, ever).

One thing: The main page is missing an encoding declaration in the header, which doesn't seem to make a difference for Firefox, but it makes a huge difference for, say, Blazer, which assumes that it's not UTF-8, and therefore doesn't tell CJKOS it's UTF-8, and CJKOS assumes it's GB2312... Not pretty.

The rest of them seem fine, it's just the main page that's having issues there.

Also, your link has a typo - remove the [/url bit from it.

[roddy]

Meh, encoding declarations are for wimps

Will fix that - Mobile Opera, Firefox and IE7 didn't seem to mind so I didn't notice, but there obviously should be one.

[roddy]

Done that now, and while I was at it validated the mobile pages - there was nothing major, but fixed a few minor errors and now the main pages at least are fully compliant.

[roddy]

Made a few changes today - nothing that should show up for logged in users, but let me know if you notice anything untoward.

[skylee]

just want to say that the text-only version of the home page before logging on is imho very unpleasant on a pc - lots of words all jammed together and difficult to read. i think it might drive away potential new members.

ps - could you include the edit option in the mobile mode?

[roddy]

Good point about the home page, have added a little hack so that the text-only view won't be forced on guests for that page. However you will still get it if you've actually requested the text-only view.

Have also added edit options to the text-only view - there should be a little (e) next to your username and the date above your posts. Let me know if there are any issues.

Going to regret all these changes next time we upgrade and I have to do them all again (sh)

[tester]

Let's test the mobile edit thing.

I edited this in.

And this too, after deleting and undeleting the post.

And this.

And once more to check edit records.

Edited July 22, 2008 at 08:42 AM by tester

[roddy]

Seems to be working fine. I'm not sure how much posting and editing people are going to want to do on mobile platforms, but it's there . . .

[roddy]

Slight hiccup last night means that you may have seen ads where there shouldn't have been any last, fixed now.

Will also be doing some A-B testing on a few things (primarily impact of text vs full version for guests on registration, ad income and bandwidth) over the next couple of weeks, so you may notice some changes if you're not logged in.

[roddy]

Text version for non-logged-in users is back for a while.

And while I'm here - is anyone using the mobile version suffering from XML errors? I get them on Opera Mobile on a number of sites, but not with Pocket IE, and only ever over China Mobile's network. If it's a problem for anyone I'll look into it, but if nobody else has noticed . . .

[imron]

It would be nice if the mobile style had a "most recent unread post" link when viewing the list of threads with new posts.

[roddy]

Done, I think - see if it works or not.

[imron]

Seems to work fine.

[roddy]

Could anyone with Opera Mobile 8.65 (or indeed any other version of opera) try and use it to access the forums and tell me if they can or not.

[character]

I checked it out in the new version of Opera Mini 4.2.13582 for the Android OS. I was able to see the list of forums, messages, and log in. Looks OK, though you may want to:

- Put more space between Forms Today's Posts and also Logout Search Full

- Change the display of Sponsored Links. They are a huge block to scroll past; I don't know if you can afford to have fewer or make them smaller or something.

- Separate the end of one post from the header of the next with some space. Right now it's like:

may notice some changes if you're not logged in

roddy 07:32 AM Today

Could anyone with Opera Mobile 8.65 (or indeed any other

[roddy]

Sorry for the delay in responding.

With reference to 1&3, does anyone else find that a problem. On the mobile browsers I have access to those elements are different colours and I've never found them confusing. Or is it an issue of not being able to hit them accurately with the stylus? Edit - ignore, I see what you mean. Will put a dash or something between them.

For 2, agreed and this is something I've been meaning to deal with - that was a consequence of occasionally using the mobile version as a text-only view for guests to limit bandwidth. The mobile view now no longer includes that ad block, and it's been replaced with a much smaller ad for long-standing site sponsor and mobile dictionary gods, Pleco.