PCKF on Smartphone

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Benvolio
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PCKF on Smartphone

Post by Benvolio »

Life has evolved for me over the decades! When I was 12, the majority of my time was spent in front of a fully featured desktop PC, availing of its ergonomic controls and full sized VDU to ensure effective computing. 20 years on and most of my time is spend on trains, hospital wards and generally meandering along the street with phone in hand. It is therefore on my phone that most of my internet use occurs including PCKF.

Therefore usability on the phone is important to me. There is one inconvenience which I've been putting up with for years... now I ask if there is any way to change it.

Most websites on my browser (Chrome on standard inexpensive android phone) I view in mobile mode as they're optimised for the phone screen. PCKF and K:M also have a mobile mode but this doesn't display the contents of the entire right hand column beside the forum sections. Therefore there is no way to quickly scan the forum for new activity.

Instead I habitually switch into "desktop" mode when using PCKF which gives you the site as it would be on a PC browser. But of course this gives microscopic writing so it has to be used zoomed in, resulting in text which is not wrapped and an overall less enjoyable experience. There would be little point switching back andcforth brtween mobile and desktop modes as this would only end up being more disorientating and irritating.

So I wonder could the mobile mode be altered to give you the latest post dates etc that you mormally see on the main screen? I think this would help the mobile user.
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Fleexy
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Re: PCKF on Smartphone

Post by Fleexy »

If I turn my phone sideways, I think I get all the information you're looking for. I imagine phpBB accomplishes this through some kind of media query, so I could probably adjust the screen width cutoff if you like.
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proYorp
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Re: PCKF on Smartphone

Post by proYorp »

100% agree with this suggestion. I've also dealt with periods of only being able to access the internet through a phone. For the first year or so when I started using the forum, it was basically all on mobile devices. I remember when the forum moved I was disappointed at the removal of the "last post" infoboxes too (didn't even know they were still there on desktop for awhile). I think at one point, using the "desktop mode" option didn't even work to change the format, it was all dependent on the screen resolution so the "desktop" and "mobile" view were just different functions of the exact same page. Was that ever manually changed? I can still view the mobile arrangement on the computer if I make my browser really narrow.

I did get the impression this was a default function of phpBB, so I'm hoping it wouldn't be too hard to change. You think it would just be a single parameter though? If it was as simple as making the required size smaller that seems like it would work, for me at least. Typically the mobile devices I've had are fairly small resolution as far as phones go.
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Nisaba
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Re: PCKF on Smartphone

Post by Nisaba »

I think I either haven't fully understood the problems you describe, or I can't reproduce them on my mobile devices. Please be so kind and share some screenshots of the situation. I also took a few screenshots where you can see that I get notifications about new blogposts displayed (red colored icons).

I'm runnin LineageOS (an Android fork) as my OS and Fennec (a Firefox fork for Android devices) as my default browser.

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Roobar
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Re: PCKF on Smartphone

Post by Roobar »

He just can't see the column section that shows who has currently last posted for each sub-forum section. I would also like to see that, though I imagine the main page will become either too small to read or too tall.
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Re: PCKF on Smartphone

Post by Benvolio »

I never knew about the extra information showing up when you rotate the phone sideways. In any case my current phone doesn't really auto-rotate at all (a good thing as I always hated screen rotation). So I can't try it out. Either way I don't think it would have been the solution for me.

As Roobar says, adding in an extra few lines of text information under each subforum heading on the front page would lengthen the page, but I'd still rather scroll a little than have to go into "desktop mode".
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Fleexy
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Re: PCKF on Smartphone

Post by Fleexy »

phpBB doesn't expose a setting for this AFAICT, but there is indeed a CSS media query that switches into the mobile-like mode when the width is 700px. That parameter could be easily changed in the CSS file, but unfortunately I think the results from just doing that would be a mess. For reference, this is what the forum list looks like right above the threshold, which is considerably wider than many phones:
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I think it would be ideal for mobile mode to hide the Topics and Posts columns, but move each Last Post cell directly under its forum name/description cell. This might be possible by changing the <dl class="row-item"> elements to be grids in mobile mode with just the <dt> and <dd class="lastpost"> children visible. The main difficulty with that is preserving the unread/read indicator icon, which is implemented as a background image.

If someone can figure out a good CSS change to make that happen, I'd be happy to include it in our stylesheets.
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proYorp
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Re: PCKF on Smartphone

Post by proYorp »

Fleexy wrote: Sun Aug 28, 2022 20:18 I think it would be ideal for mobile mode to hide the Topics and Posts columns, but move each Last Post cell directly under its forum name/description cell. This might be possible by changing the <dl class="row-item"> elements to be grids in mobile mode with just the <dt> and <dd class="lastpost"> children visible. The main difficulty with that is preserving the unread/read indicator icon, which is implemented as a background image.

If someone can figure out a good CSS change to make that happen, I'd be happy to include it in our stylesheets.
I agree this would probably be the ideal option. Also the topic Replies and Views columns inside a subforum are helpful, but I don't know if that would also be too much clutter. Although I guess there's less text descriptions taking up space inside the subforums than on the main page.

Here I am once again wishing I knew enough CSS to edit the forum themes. :(


Nisaba wrote: Wed Aug 24, 2022 6:36 I get notifications about new blogposts displayed (red colored icons).
The red icons are nice, but I usually only log in when I'm going to write something, so most of the time they don't help me. The "Last Post" details on the main page give timestamps and usernames, so it's easy to tell at a glance if there's something new, as long as I remember when I last checked.
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