Mobile version of the forum

Klatonia

Klatonia

Former Mayor of the City Council (in 2010)
Citizen
Pronouns
He/him
Hi,

I surf the forum regularly, but I noticed something different from the past... oh, gosh, two years, already.

I come on the forum more often using my smartphone than my computer. The loading time is a hassle, the image always has to be resized and the presentation is far from optimal.

Can the Invisionfree forums have a text-only, mobile version?
 
It -is- possible, lots of the time, to actually disable images. It's not ideal, but it does help, and makes my non-smart phone cope.
 
I'm going to try that.

The question was also related to the format. Instead of having a click-and-point navigation, mobile sites often offer a navigation environment in which the content is limited to a list of links. It usually done so you don't have to zoom in and out all the time.

Anyway, I was just asking. I'd like to keep up (I'm not that often in front of a computer anymore) but navigating a forum is a pain, seriously.
 

I wouldn't hold your breath, Klat.

The folks at IF have been saying for months that they're "working on" a solution, but nothing seems to be forthcoming. Even if they do come up with something, I wouldn't be surprised if it's only made available on ZetaBoards.
 
Alright, thanks for the answers, everyone. Here's to hoping IF drags its feet to the 21st century.
 
I've occasionally stumbled into "low-res" versions (that's what they're called) of some IF forums, which would basically do what you're after, but as my smartphone can handle these forums as normal without much issue I never bothered to figure out how to deliberately use the low-res version.
 
There is an "archive" version, but it can only view what the guest mask can see.
 
I don't think this is up to the admins, as it is something that needs to be offered by IF.

One thing we could look into, though, is whether the various scripts that have been installed lately make it hard to access the forums from cell phones. It may be possible to selectively disable those, based on what one uses to access the forum (I mean automatically disable them on the forum side, and not the use disabling them himself).

Has anyone noticed any increased delays or difficulty handling the forums due to any of these?
 
No. The only issues I have are related to my chosen setting of 90 posts per page (as opposed to the standard 20 or 30 that most people use). Depending on which browser I use, sometimes this can cause issues when approaching 80 or so posts, but that's on any forum, not just this one.
 
r3naissanc3r said:
I don't think this is up to the admins, as it is something that needs to be offered by IF.

One thing we could look into, though, is whether the various scripts that have been installed lately make it hard to access the forums from cell phones. It may be possible to selectively disable those, based on what one uses to access the forum (I mean automatically disable them on the forum side, and not the use disabling them himself).

Has anyone noticed any increased delays or difficulty handling the forums due to any of these?
Click to expand...
My PSP struggles with the image-changing one up the top, but the forums are slow as hell on that anyway.

I will go check how my phone copes with them, I've not tried these forums on it since... last summer.
 
The image-changing one is problematic for the reason that it makes caching of the banner useless. If the banner is constant, then it can be cached (saved locally) and loaded quickly as you load pages around the forum. However, as the banner keeps changing with every page you load, this cannot be used.

It may be possible to slow down the rotation, to only happen say once every 10 loads or something. Alternatively, it is possible to assign banners to different parts of the day (say a morning banner for morning, a night banner for evening, etc.).
 
I'm of no use, as I never use my phone to access the forums unless I'm using my divinely-ordained account.
 
As a note, I've had to disable javascript as it's crashing my phone's browser out with "unsupported features". That's more my phone than anything though.
 
No, that's actually bad programming style on my side. Javascript allows you to provide an "alt" function for each script, that is specify what to do if a browser doesn't support javascript. However, specifying an alt function is optional, and if no alt function is provided, the browser just crashes whenever a javascript feature is not supported.

Due to my laziness when coding for NS, I haven't included alts in all of the scripts I've installed, which is generally considered bad programming practice. I will try to rectify this at some point.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top