nesdev.com

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 wiki is NOT mobile-friendly either. Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites use the MobileFrontend extension.

I use my phone to view both 98% of the time. I have no complaints... I simply zoom in to every page, it takes me about 1 second.

And every time I google search NES questions, the wiki is always the top response.

Plus, there's a lot of information on the wiki, it might be hard to make it 100% mobile friendly.

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nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES

Is this or the other thread a problem that we can solve, rather than waiting for a solution from the phpBB / MediaWiki dev teams?

I guess that MediaWiki does have a mobile view—at least, wikipedia provides one.

In the case of MediaWiki, we could solve it by installing the MobileFrontend extension. But I'd recommend upgrading to the latest MediaWiki at the same time. I might get to that this weekend.

Sites which deploy a mobile version that cannot be zoomed are, to me, mobile-unfriendly.

I didn't know Google Overlord had been deployed.

The wiki seems perfectly fine to me on my phone. It resizes quite nicely. It also comes up first in the kind of search results I expect to find the wiki (e.g. "NES APU"), so what do you mean by "demote"?

What makes you think there is a problem here worth addressing? It's also not like this site is a for-profit business. It's literally the only place that offers what it does, so I don't understand what we need to think about SEO for. It's not competing in some commercial market. ?? What's the concern?

The concern is probably making a good impression on people who are looking for this information for the first time, so they don't feel discouraged from pursuing this hobby.

Because Google is nagging me.

Every time I search Google from my Galaxy Tab A for something that's likely to be on my own site, such as thwaite nes or mpaa controls elections through news media or game consoles are easy to use, each result from my own site has a notice: "Your site is not mobile-friendly." I think I get these notices because I've claimed my own site in Google Webmaster Tools. And I bet whoever controls nesdev.com (WhoaMan?) also gets these notices for NESdev Wiki.

This may go without saying, but to balance, I'd be sure to include a "view desktop version" option because it seems some experienced users won't want to browse the mobile version.

Should it/can it, remember that choice?

Don't worry; it does. Scroll to the bottom of a "mobile version" page and see the switch.

I'm with rainwarrior on this one. This is a non profit site, not specifically required to work perfectly on mobile. People that wants the information will find it since it's the only place anyway.

Making it mobile friendly, hmm... Doesn't it require to update the content so it works better on mobile? I have no idea what is the obsession people have with mobile this mobile that. Sometime it worth it, in other case it doesn't. Do you make nes app on your phone? I don't think the nesdev wiki is meant for mobile anyway. That's how I feel on the subject. As long as a I can see the site I'm more than happy with it.

Except to remove google nagware, what will it bring to the wiki? I still don't see the point. Not everything needs to be mobile. Google just want to promote their SEO thing, that's it.

I assume the MobileFrontend extension will handle most of the changes, except for wide tables as used in pages such as Mapper.


Tablet with clip-on, Bluetooth, or USB OTG keyboard, presumably. After 10 inch laptops got discontinued at the end of 2012, some people have ported ASM6 and ca65 to Android for use on a tablet as a workaround for having to replace a laptop with a tablet. My six-year-old 10 inch Dell still runs, but not everyone is as fortunate as I.

A 9-10 inch tablet shares some attributes with phones, such as the imprecise pointing device. But it shares other attributes with laptops, such as not needing to zoom in nearly as often. Despite this, Google presents search results as if tablets were phones.

I do visit the forums and the Wiki from my phone on occasion, but like I said before, I don't think they look bad at all on my phone in their current state. Is anyone here actually complaining about how it looks to them, or is this entirely based on google's robonotice?

(I'm not opposed if you want to work on this problem, but I'm not really convinced it's a problem.)

At this point I agree that MobileFrontend installation can be postponed until we upgrade MediaWiki for other reasons.