TheSamba.com :: View topic - Mobile-Friendly

Tue Jul 31, 2018 4:37 pm

I access This site frequently when travelling and thought a mobile-friendly interface would be helpful.

Tue Jul 31, 2018 5:00 pm

The forum software has bee extensively modified so any mobile version would have to be written from scratch.

Tue Jul 31, 2018 5:06 pm

https://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=703972

:roll:

Tue Jul 31, 2018 5:29 pm

If it could done for free? Sure.
Since it can't? Nope.

Tue Jul 31, 2018 5:48 pm

I access TS exclusively on mobile, it works just fine

Sat Dec 29, 2018 11:14 am

Making it mobile friendly doesn't mean that it has to be completely redesigned, nor does it require a new interface.

Here's what it looks like on most phones.

Sat Dec 29, 2018 12:39 pm

noexit wrote: Making it mobile friendly doesn't mean that it has to be completely redesigned, nor does it require a new interface.

Here's what it looks like on most phones.

Like most phones, my phone does not show nearly that much information. Maybe you have an iPad?

So if it's so easy, are you volunteering to do the programming for us?
;-)

Tue Jan 01, 2019 6:01 am

I have a android phone , and that screenshot is exactly what I see . I only access this site on mobile and it's perfect. I was a member of the site vwvortex.com since 2001 and when they switched there interface up a few years back I stopped going on the site . it's horrible now .

Tue Jan 01, 2019 9:15 am

I have an apple so that screenshot is kind of what I see. My phone actually brings in the sides of the site so that the posts look longer but I don't have to scroll sideways. It's perfect and definitely doesn't need to change, it would be confusing to a lot of people if it does change.

Fri Jan 04, 2019 6:27 am

I would love The Samba to use a 'responsive' front end design. I am often in my bus working away when I need to search for the forum for reference. Zooming and pinching the screen is a real pain on my mobile phone.

I can help with the implementation of this if required as I am a software developer in my 9-5 although I am sure the site admins already have this covered! 8)

Sun Mar 24, 2019 12:43 pm

Hello everyone. Mark me down as definitely wanting a mobile friendly site! It's actually very hard to believe that a site this big doesn't have that ability already. There are far far smaller sites that have long been mobile friendly. I feel bad for people trying to use it mobile and have less than average eyesight

Tue Apr 02, 2019 10:08 am

unitedracing wrote: It's actually very hard to believe that a site this big doesn't have that ability already. There are far far smaller sites that have long been mobile friendly.
Most of the new site builders and forums have mobile mode built in now, I setup a new Wordpress install for a local club last year and it's fairly slick.
The smaller sites also tend to have less to modify to make mobile work well.
TheSamba, as mentioned, has been around for a while and has a number of custom modules.

Here's a screenshot of theSamba side-by-side with Reddit in mobile-mode (sorry, couldn't resist a shitpost) on my iPhone SE (4" (diagonal) screen, tiny by current standards).

imo theSamba is very usable as-is on mobile
If anything, a simple-ish css switch that would bump up the default post text font size on small screens would be welcome, esp if you could put an option for it in settings.

Everett, do you mind sharing the current percent of desktop vs mobile users? I see the google-analytics call :)
For my two tiny sites I'm seeing:
56.4% desktop, 33.8% mobile, 9.8% tablet for 429 users in 2019 (has a mobile-mode)
84.7% desktop, 14.9% mobile, 0.5% tablet for 233 users in 2019 (no mobile-mode)

Tue Apr 02, 2019 4:28 pm

Thanks for the feedback.

For March, 2019 (rounded):
57.5% desktop, 34% mobile, 8.5% tablet for 640K users

Sat Apr 27, 2019 3:01 pm

+1 for making it mobile friendly.

Mon Jul 08, 2019 10:15 pm

noexit wrote: Making it mobile friendly doesn't mean that it has to be completely redesigned, nor does it require a new interface.

Here's what it looks like on most phones.

Your screenshot is missing the 'quote' and 'report' buttons, so it's either zoomed in, or cropped off the right side.

-1 for mobile "upgrade".....

I interface the Samba on my phone maybe 60% of the time, and have no problems with the current format. However, I am unlike most mobile users: I don't surf in portrait orientation, nor type with one hand...I rotate my phone into landscape mode so that I get the full width in a size that can still be read without a microscope (yeah, my eyes are going bad), and I type with both thumbs (I'm a Gen X'er :D ).

Tue Aug 20, 2019 11:57 am

+1 for charging mobile users $100 a year for a mobile friendly subscription.

Tue Mar 16, 2021 8:47 pm

+1 for a mobile interface
+1 for an updated desktop interface
+1 for an updated file upload experience

How many developers do we have on thesamba?

It's what I do for a living. 1 person doing it would take a while. A group effort would be nice. For the past few nights I've started experimenting with a React/Next JS/Tailwind CSS approach.

Sun Feb 20, 2022 5:56 am

Resurrecting this thread to say I also desperately want a new mobile interface. And I’m here to volunteer. I’ve been a professional web developer for +12 years, Director of Technology at Make Magazine, Head of Brand Engineering at Patreon… I can write the css to make it mobile friendly in a few days. We could also add a setting to the users profile to allow them to opt out of the new mobile css if adoption attrition is a valid concern.

Everett, if you’re interested in my help, let me know. I think this site gives so much for free that I would not even entertain charging for this work.

Sun Feb 20, 2022 6:23 am

I don't know what it means.

Sun Feb 20, 2022 12:06 pm

@Rich Latsch You don't know what a mobile-friendly interface is? It's restyling or remaking the pages so that they're not scaled down to fit the smaller screen of a smartphone and removing the need to pinch-and-zoom, to read, or navigate, or log in etc.