Is the mobile site gone now?

[miniman]

The lack of "last page" is astonishing IMO.

Many people have said that, if they were in charge, they would have sacked the developers.

I do wonder, however, whether if I was one of the developers, I would have quit long ago.

[MrBarry123]

Devastated that the dedicated mobile site is being phased out - the new one is a bag of slow, non-intuitive, st. Very disappointing.

The beauty of the PH forum is its simplicity and what seems to have happened with the new skins is they've become horribly complicated.

And st.

[Funk]

OK, whatever changes have been made to the site mean I can't log in on my tablet any more.

I can log in on phone, I can log in on the PC but the tablet fails when I enter my username and password. It used to work OK on Mobile Beta but since the login change, nada.

Ok, further investigation shows that PH won't work when I have proxy enabled on my tablet, even when PH is set to bypass. Nothing has changed on my tablet regarding network or proxy, it's only since the changes were made to PH that it won't log in.

I guess I'm not surfing PH on the tablet any more then. Why do these things get 'improved' (and by that I mean 'broken')? Please, can't you just leave it be? Sure it's stty-looking but it just about worked and that's better than what I have now.

Edited by Funk on Tuesday 19th May 16:43

[benjj]

My posting has dropped off a cliff since this new fking ridiculous idea to bin off the mobile site.

Is PH the ONLY forum in the world that is specifically trying to make it harder/worse/more complicated to post/contribute?

I'm going to look elsewhere, this is completely unacceptable.

This in addition to the catastrophically cack PHTV is just a waste of money, resources and effort.

I (used to) use PH probably 90% on my smart phone, 10% on an actual computer. I'm sure I'm not alone in this.

I know that I CAN make it work on smartphone but the interface is st, it is clunky and generally poor to use and, despite comments above, it DOES mean more clicks than before.

Get a grip - the only job here is to provide the content in as easily delivered and consumed way as possible. I now have to run adblock to avoid the piss taking MASSIVE ads that have been creeping in over the last year, plus the 30 second ads on the PHTV rubbish in return for 12 seconds of shaky iPhone video of a cretin wheel spinning his mum's Corsa, and now this.

One assumes that there must be a PH moron equivalent of Kim Jong Un calling the shots as nobody in their right minds would make these kinds of idiotic changes and mistakes to a site that is clearly being monetised in as many ways as possible at present.

It's st.

[benjj]

Just in case I wasn't perfectly clear before, here it is plain as day.

Before:

Clean, easy, one click to any subforum - bish bash bosh, no complaints.



And now the super smashing brilliant upgrade idea. Well well, what do we have here then? Oh, look, the top 3rd of the screen is taken up with a miscellany of cack that I don't need to see, the middle 3rd is one giant fk OFF advert, the bottom third is taken up with a needless floating 'tools' thingymabob and ONE fkING THREAD.



Idiots.

[hornetrider]

He's right you know.

[miniman]

Harsh, but some valid points. The forums clearly aren't the priority, otherwise what is, in the grand scheme of things, a fairly modest set of front-end changes to a forum skin would have been carried out (i.e. to fix the desktop glitchiness of Beta 2) and there would be more consistency elsewhere (e.g. the fact that the useful My Stuff / What's New etc. footer toolbar on the mobile view don't appear on certain pages).

It would be interesting to see the traffic figures (in terms of posts, posts per user etc.) for the forums over the last few years. I would hazard a guess that impressions are up, but that engagement is down, and if that's the case it suggests a very crude approach to ROI somewhere within Haymarket.

[MrBarry123]

Perhaps a protest is needed to promote benjj to Chief Officer for Strategic Website Development & User Engagement within Haymarket's [currently rubbish] Strategic Website Development & User Engagement team?

[benjj]

MrBarry123 said:

Perhaps a protest is needed to promote benjj to Chief Officer for Strategic Website Development & User Engagement within Haymarket's [currently rubbish] Strategic Website Development & User Engagement team?

The day I work for a bunch of useless s like that will be a cold day in hell my friend.

Plus I don't know about tech. Or running a website. Or stuff like that.

In fact I've not worked for anyone for nearly a decade so I'm pretty much unemployable now I guess.

Anyway, what I DO know about is how not to fk up a perfectly good website that didn't need fiddling with.

[MrBarry123]

[hornetrider]

I for one am sick to the back teeth of benjj sitting on the fence.

[Rouleur]

benjj said:

Idiots.

I'd typed out a couple of paragraphs detailing my feelings about the way the site is being run, but decided that the above word summed them up perfectly.

Of course we're all wasting our time posting in here as no-one gives a toss what we think in spite of the fact that the site wouldn't exist without us posters.

[daydotz]

iS PH doing anything to tidy up the layout or placement of adverts it ruins the viewing this site on a tablet & mobile

Call me a cynical but I expect the mobile site was ditched because it couldn't be adapted to include adverts

[benjj]

Gaz. said:

So that is what I'm missing on my 3 year old unsupported Blackberry!

I thought the golden goose had its throat slashed with these massive adverts on the desktop site, but that second screenshot is just putting the carcass through the mincer.

It may also interest you to know that the advert in that 2nd screenshot isn't static. Oh no. It's a moving video style one.

Brilliant fking move that. Making a lightweight mobile site into a slow, heavy, glitch bh.

Also completely and utterly nixes any chance of me logging in while I travel and burning through roaming data just so some s can target me for ste I don't want and never will.

10/10 for PH/Haymarket for fking this one right up. Literally no stone has been left unturned to find ways to ruin it. that takes a special kind of spazzery rarely seen these days.

Edited by benjj on Tuesday 19th May 14:55

[Funk]

I have a special hatred in my heart for sites that burn through my data allowance with animated ads - or even worse, videos - which I don't want to see

The reason for the proxy on the tablet is for ad blocking as without it, the internet is a st thing to use. It's reached the point where I now take active steps to prevent sites bombarding me and PH is on that stlist.

[WinstonWolf]

Brilliant, a font so small anyone over forty won't be able to read it.

[RacingPete]

I have read the thread with interest...

Like I have mentioned in other threads I welcome those that want to see what happens behind the scenes of PistonHeads to come down for a bit of lunch and to meet the team - just PM me and we will sort out a day. This may give you an insight into the running of things to make a more informed opinion.

Beta2 is being worked on to fix the issues mentioned above, these will come out over the next few days.

There is another thread about the proxy issue - may or may not be related but have a read - http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&a...

[Funk]

Pete, I get the following:

"Bad Request- Invalid Header

HTTP Error 400. The request has an invalid header name."

I've added pistonheads.com to the exceptions to allow it to bypass the proxy and still no joy.

[WinstonWolf]

I want to see it work but you need a broad demographic of testers and a clearly defined end goal.

Switching between skins, a definite no-no IMO. Testing for user agents should have been implemented yonks ago

[RacingPete]

WinstonWolf said:

I want to see it work but you need a broad demographic of testers and a clearly defined end goal.

Switching between skins, a definite no-no IMO. Testing for user agents should have been implemented yonks ago

The Beta2 skin has been rolled out faster than it should have been to solve an issue with the breakdown of the mobile.pistonheads.com site - we are working as fast as possible to get the fixes out to make it better. It has been in test for 6 months nearly, available in a secret beta test team (made up of users of this forum) and used by some of the team... me included.

The rollout plan is in fast forward, and part of that is to make it the default and single skin for all users.

The whole of PistonHeads is made up of so many disparate parts that we work hard to try and get the various technologies together working well - though it may not look like progress to some, and change for the changes sake, there are proper reasons why we are doing this.

• The forums on mobile.pistonheads.com was the only part of that site left working, and the relationship with the third party is such that no changes can be made on it - that in turn (with the way the technology works by scrapping the live site) means that we need to move away from it, as it limits any changes we can make to the forums.
• Moving to a single supported "skin" in the forums means we can develop on a single view, meaning faster iteration to add features that are long overdue in the forums (e.g. a proper image uploader, better quoting, better recording of where a user has read to, forum search etc)
• Better tools for the moderators of the site on mobile - there are none through the mobile.pistonheads.com site and this means that the forums have better support on mobile for moderators.
• Better integration with the rest of the site so that we can link better My Garages, or Calendar or Classifieds with the forums.
• It also allows us to start to migrate the codebase away from classic ASP.