nesdev.com

Despite this, Google thinks it's not mobile-friendly because of all the zooming you have to do to read the text.

If a site is not usable on mobile devices, Google will demote it in results from searches that are performed on mobile devices. I worry that Google is demoting our site for not being mobile-friendly. (I explained "mobile-friendly" in another post.)

The front page of the BBS is NOT mobile-friendly. It uses a table for layout, and I don't see how I'd make a CSS rule to make the table readable in a 320-pixel-wide window. If a responsive site (such as one whose CSS switches between layouts at certain thresholds of device width) is not achievable, a separate mobile-friendly theme may need to be applied somehow. While researching this, I discovered that themes are completely different between phpBB 3.0.x and 3.1.

The fact that it is not mobile-friendly is probably not of any real concern - if we were a large business with lots of competition, it'd definitely be a problem, but we're a small community of hobbyists and there aren't many other NESdev forums/wikis out there trying to steal our traffic.

There's also the fact that your initial link is to an SEO site, which specifically wants large businesses to believe their information in order to extract large amounts of money from them in exchange for said services.

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It's a lot more mobile friendly if you hold your phone horizontally. Then it's like having an extreme widescreen old Windows CE machine that nobody used.

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Like I said for the wiki, it's not a business so don't need to worry about it. Google just want to extract more money from their SEO service, that's it, that's all.

Who cares.


Who cares, if it is not even demoted searches made from a normal desktop computer.

Also, forums posts are usually written with a keyboard and phones doesn't have any, thus, the forums are not supposed to be used with a phone, period.


I agree.

Tablets are often used with a Bluetooth keyboard. Some 9-inch and larger tablets, such as the ASUS Transformer TF101 and Google Pixel C, even come with a clip-on keyboard. Though I've had no significant problem actually using NESdev.com with either Android tablet I've owned (ASUS Nexus 7 and Samsung Galaxy Tab A), Google still uses the mobile ranking for searches from Android tablets.

This doesn't mean anything while this site remains the most relevant source for this information. It's not competing against other "mobile" sites. To matter, it would have to be weighed against some mobile site with otherwise equivalent relevance.

You're advocating for spam you received that was meant to target business advertisers. The demotion concept is simply not relevant to this site at present.

(Again, not opposed to having a mobile option for the site if you're interested in implementing it, as long as it works, but it really ain't baroque.)

An additional data point: I would love it if this site were mobile-friendly. As someone relatively new to NES dev (I've only been at it about seven months), I rarely post, but I'm constantly perusing the forums for new information. It would be convenient and useful to be able to do so on my phone, but the completely non-optimized UI makes the process pretty painful at the moment.

I don't know which version of phpBB the forums uses, but it looks like Artodia has some free & nice-looking free responsive themes for both phpBB 3.0 and phpBB 3.1.

Every post I've made came from an iPad, just last month though I've started using a computer and I can't notice any difference and it seems to work just fine on either platform. Of course, that can't be said for phones cause I've never used this website on a phone, but to be fair, just typing on a phone in general sucks.

Looks ok to me on my Nexus 6.

http://i.imgur.com/0um6e4N.png

I don't think it's a real issue anyway. The site is perfectly usable and it's not like we're some shady site that tries to exploit Google rankings as much as possible to gain visibility. We have enough NES specific content for people to find us, and that's what shady SEO dudes wish they had.

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I don't know, it's generally useable, but I try not to since phpBB forums are indeed painful on a mobile phone, and I feel like it could be fixed with very few style or html alterations. I don't give a crap about SEO, but I wouldn't mind being able to browse this place more casually on the phone.

Right now, I'm posting from my simplistic Samsung SM-G110B.
I don't have problems, except when I try to do more complex posts (with links and images), but this is an issue with the device (being slow and sometimes erasing what I've typed), since it also happens with email, watsapp, Facebook, etc...
I agree it's no problem, since most of the time I use this cellphone in the forums I only read the threads.

Lately I've been browsing the forums on my phone more often than on my PC. It works just fine for reading and for writing short replies, but longer posts are sometimes troublesome to write. I normally use an external editor (DroidEdit) when I need better editing capabilities, which's almost always when writing code or using many phpbb tags.

Shouldn't Tepples' name appear in red?
It's white here on my phone.
No big deal indeed.