Shirotsume said:
You literally just pulled so much out of your ass just now that you probably can reschedule any colonoscopies for a later date.
Sure, I'll play...
It's not a non-issue because the site doesn't work for people. The font is too small even for a web-kit derived browser, the links are derped, and hovers are, of course, broken.
A pre-rolled theme, a mobile-specific plugin, or some CSS can fix the fonts. The links all work fine on everything I've tried here. (More devices than I care to admit to owning...)
There are hovers?... Oh, look; mouse over forums and they show thread counts. Delightful. Am I missing anything?
And that's only half the userbase- the other half AREN'T on smartphones. The 'bad old days' of WAP are still here, and to just blow off the people still dealing with it is a massive mistake for a website.
In search of a non-representative sample, I perused my carrier's selection of non-smart phones. Of the 10 models (ignoring cameraless variants), I see 3 with the full Opera browser -- 1 of those Flash-capable, apparently -- 3 with Opera Mini, 2 dumbphones, and 2 with non-specific "mobile web".
For shits `n giggles, I downloaded Opera Mini to see if it was up to the task. Ironically, it actually renders the forum more consistently than Chrome on Android. CSS themes worked exactly as they should. The only significant problems I found in it are that the WYSIWYG post editor is very broken, and the UserCP can be fiddly to get into. Oh, and I'm sure multi-quote doesn't work, but since it appears to be broken in the default forum theme, we couldn't fairly hold that against it. Everything else appears to just work, even if it is very(!) tiny. Full Opera should obviously work even better than the Mini version, so I feel no need to test it.
That leaves the remaining 2 WAP phones out of 10 feature phones. And those WAP users have obviously
not once attempted to access the forums, because every WAP device that I've ever seen on any carrier has a screen resolution of no more than 400x240, and your posted metrics show that nothing under 480x320 has even attempted to cross the threshold. I guarantee that has nothing to do with the usability of the site on WAP, and everything to do with WAP's fundamental unusability. It's serviceable for Googling phone numbers and addresses, and little more -- it takes a special breed of masochist to attempt to do anything more substantive on the platform.
So, low bar remains: Opera Mini @ 320x480, though I don't know how much need there is to focus on that specifically, as any improvement in handheld layout should trickle down to that platform. What mobile needs is a content-centric layout with large touch-targets and proper font scaling.
Incidentally, having the user information in headers between posts is much better for handheld devices; it avoids bolting a mostly-empty column onto the side of the actual content, and scrolling an extra inch is no great hardship.
If you could just make a theme where the CSS defines the font-size in scalable units, rather than px, it'd do wonders for allowing mobile browsers to manage scaling on their own. At least then it would stop looking like this in both Chrome and Firefox for Android when they attempt to scale things for mobile:
(actual size: about 3" on diagonal)
