That’s odd, it works differently for me. What type of device are you using?
Come now, the text on phones was small in the old format and the icons were microscopic. They’re more reasonably sized now. Equally important, the SDMB now reads as “mobile friendly” according to the Google page checker (and presumably the Google search algorithm), and before it didn’t. We took a big hit in page views when Google did a new algorithm install a while back, and it’s a safe guess our non-responsive site design was a major factor. Mobile-friendly options for vBulletin are limited; on investigation this seemed the best way to go. Give it time - we’ll get things working OK.
Playing devil’s advocate, right now we’re providing a heap of feedback to improve the new bugs on the forum. If they let us use the old template that dries up.
Now, you might ask why they don’t scrap the whole thing and go back and spare everyone. I’m guessing the hope is that eventually once things are ironed out they’ll have a fully functional board with some mobile browser improvements.
One more bug… Again on Safari on an iPhone 6+ here, but if I do a quick reply I have a bunch of formatting tools. With a full reply I have the “fonts” and “sizes” buttons and nothing else (no bold, italic, hyperlink, etc.).
I don’t see this mentioned previously so thought I’d bring it up.
Ed - if you can use help from anyone, please let us know. There are evidently several folks here with the knowledge and will to tackle this. If nothing else, it would take the time zone issue off the table (and possibly save some $$ as well).
In addition to the coding help, I’ll warrant that you can find a healthy group of us to help you beta any further changes before you roll them out.
Great. I saw this going on and the hassles it was causing and never really saw an explanation (or really even a question) on why the need or the hassle was/is worth it.
I log on, I get a sales site of… something I’ve never heard of. One page opened to Amazon link (not really Amazon) selling me fishing gear, and I’ve never been fishing ever.
A mobile emulator may be of some help in tracking down things that one poster sees and another doesn’t. This one is free and pretty good:
From a desktop computer you can view the pages as if you were on a variety of different phones, tablets and web TVs in portrait or landscape mode.
Just enter the URL and select a device to view it with. Be sure to check “allow scrolling” or it will only show you what fits exactly in the screen of the device you’re testing.
This is very likely true. Google is big on making sites ‘mobile friendly’ but just so you know, if you allow the option for posters to select from the new or old themes, as long as the new theme is the board default that is what Google will see. You would have to have an account and be logged in to it in order to select the old theme.
And making Google happy with a page is actually really really simple if you wanted to have the old version also pass their muster anyway. They don’t actually look for how good or bad a page looks on mobile they just look to make sure you have a Viewportset.
That single line in the head section of every page will get Google off your back even if the page actually looks terrible on mobile.
I think it is a good idea to have the responsive, mobile friendly site that actually looks good on mobile, but none of these things prevent allowing users to select among different themes.
Mine same as Bone’s. No posted last. iPhone tried on both IE and Chrome. The best I can do is go to the last page.
I am sure you’ll get it debugged but FWIW my past experience was that the mobile device version was easy to read and it is now more difficult to use. My experience has been this has made the site much less mobile friendly. No worries, I just use the site less when on mobile.
But I understand that “quality” is defined by the metric and the Google algorithm rating is the definition that counts, not what actual users experience. That’s not snarky, it is simply the way things have to be. The tricky part is to achieve quality as defined by the metrics and actual real world user quality at the same time. Good luck!
Thanks for the feedback. Should I assume from this and your previous fixes list that nothing is going to be done about the gigantic fonts in the main body of posts? That, and the floating “go to top” button on the bottom right-hand corner that just hangs there like a wart on the screen, are currently my two biggest complaints. On the PC it appears as an up arrow in a circle, but on the tablet which has less screen space it’s even worse: it appears as an intrusive box with the name of the forum in it and a “Go” button to the right. It permanently obscures part of the screen while providing no useful function.
But the giant font size is probably my biggest complaint. It’s nice that the site is now “mobile friendly” but that’s no reason it should be desktop* unfriendly*. It just looks ugly, almost comical, on desktop monitors. And the fact that it looks different (and looks just fine) in “preview” mode and then turns into this mess when actually posted is even worse. The text should be the same size as the quotes presently are. There’s also no reason that quotes should be in italics as they are already clearly distinguished by the quote box, but that’s a minor matter.
On desktop, or my tablet (Android 6) in landscape, there is a ridiculous amount of whitespace to the right of the text entry box. In portrait, conversely, the extended part with the smileys butts up against the right side of the screen. It is kind of ugly, and ,on desktop, a pain in the rear, since it puts the box all the way to the left of the screen, which is not where my eyes want to be.
Ditto. I am seeing what Bone sees when using the site on an iPhone. No Last Posted By. No Go To Last Post. All I can do it click on the thread and then go to the last page.
The site was perfectly fine to use on mobile previously, it is now markedly worse on an iPhone.
Ah and a new thing I just found: There is no button to either italicize or bold words when replying.
First, when you hit the “Reply” button (as opposed to using the Quick Reply), the text box is very small, less than half the width of the screen. I believe that this just cropped up; I don’t think it was doing it yesterday.
Second, a low-priority one: Post counts are showing for non-subscribers. Debatable whether this even counts as a bug, but it might not be what’s intended.
It truly is. It’s pretty laughable. They appear able to only to address one issue a day. I see the page numbers are back, but something incredibly trivial like leaving the signature checkbox off by default remains unaddressed.
I hope they’re not being paid for their “efforts”, otherwise the Reader is being seriously ripped off.
Another baffling thing is all the wonderful fixes bigT made with his userscript is all commented, so the fixes could be so easily lifted from that and employed. Just… utterly baffling…
Thanks to the Hamster Lords for fixing the color of the bar between each post! Much nicer to be trapped in an Agnes Martin paintingthan to be wrapped in an unfurling Uruguayan flag(I’d said “Greek” before, but the lighter Greek blue wouldn’t have been so bad).
