# Why is this Board Unfriendly to My Cellphone?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-this-board-unfriendly-to-my-cellphone/361961
**Category:** About This Message Board
**Created:** [June 24, 2006, 8:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-this-board-unfriendly-to-my-cellphone/361961 "2006-06-24T08:11:59Z")
**Posts on this page:** 8
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2006, 8:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-this-board-unfriendly-to-my-cellphone/361961/1 "2006-06-24T08:11:59Z")
I can browse nearly every board I visit with my phone, but this one. If I follow a link from an email, everything’s fine, but if I try to navigate anywhere but inside a thread, the pages don’t fit my browser window very well, and it eventually crashes the browser. I visit boards with the same version of VB that have ads, and they work just fine, so there’s something about _this_ board’s settings that just beat the crap out of my browser.
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### Author:  [@China\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/China_Guy)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2006, 9:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-this-board-unfriendly-to-my-cellphone/361961/2 "2006-06-24T09:02:15Z")
What device and o/s are you using?
I have a i-mate jam windows mobile 3.0 pda/phone and the boards work fine.
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### Author:  [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2006, 10:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-this-board-unfriendly-to-my-cellphone/361961/3 "2006-06-24T10:11:57Z")
It’s a Kyocera K10 with the Open Wave browser. I _ **cannot** _ change the browser in the phone. It is not designed to download things like browsers, trust me, I have tried.
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### Author:  [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2006, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-this-board-unfriendly-to-my-cellphone/361961/4 "2006-06-24T13:35:23Z")
This BBS software, called vBulletin, can have its appearance customized with “skins”. I think the problem is that the skin being used for SDMB employs a lot of JavaScript which I have found often doesn’t play well with mobile devices.
If TPTB so desired, there are free VBB skins that are cell-phone friendly with minimal visual design and no JavaScript. They could install such a skin and then enable the option to allow users to choose their desired skin. However, something tells me that if they were agreeable to the ideas of letting users pick their own skins, they’d have already enabled it.
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### Author:  [@xash](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xash)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2006, 6:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-this-board-unfriendly-to-my-cellphone/361961/5 "2006-06-24T18:15:02Z")
Try using the Google Mobile Internet Proxy. Go to the following url on your device browser:
[http://www.google.com/gwt/n](http://www.google.com/gwt/n)
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### Author:  [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2006, 6:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-this-board-unfriendly-to-my-cellphone/361961/6 "2006-06-24T18:28:43Z")
I get a 502 error when I try to go to the Dope via the proxy.
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### Author:  [@ultrafilter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ultrafilter)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2006, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-this-board-unfriendly-to-my-cellphone/361961/7 "2006-06-24T19:33:06Z")
That might be temporary. I just tried it from my computer and it worked fine.
In case you were curious, [here’s what 502 means](http://www.checkupdown.com/status/E502.html).
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### Author:  [@glee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/glee)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2006, 9:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-this-board-unfriendly-to-my-cellphone/361961/8 "2006-06-25T09:51:40Z")
Oh.
I just popped in to see who the poster ‘My Cellphone’ was, and why we are being nasty to them. :eek: