Is there a mobile version of bikeforums.net?
 

Browsing the full site on my Zune HD is a pain in the ass.

Not that I have found, I use Opera Light to browse. You can also try http://www.google.com/gwt/n I have used it a couple of times with limited success. You have to email yourself the resulting address to make it work...at least I did. FWIW I browse mobile on an elderly Blackberry 8830.

Aaron :)

Thanks for the link; my ancient Blackjack II couldn't keep up with these dang-blamed young whippersnapper sites.

iPhone works great with this site. I spend a good amount of the work day here, on a boating forum, looking at new bike headlights and other stuff - and I can play various games while texting.

Makes for a much better work day :)

I disagree that the iPhone "works great" with the site. It's more or less usable, but takes forever to load pages.

Writing this comment on a Blackberry Tour.

I don't have any issues with this site, under either the native browser, or Opera.

An app for iPod Touch and iPhone would be nice. I'd even pay for both an app and membership despite some of the racist overtones the mods perpetuate.

There's a new request for this every few months in the "user assistance" forum.

The old board used to load slowly in my Windows phone, pages took 45-60 seconds to load, but it would load and work. The new site software takes ~5 minutes to load a page, which just "doesn't work" for me.


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All the websites got fat and lazy with DSL and broadband, many pages approach 1 meg, for what is often less than 50K of actual content text.

Bottom line is, mobile devices are the future,,,, smartphones becoming more comon, netbooks, now e-book readers with wifi...... all this silly junk shoveled into websites now isn't visible or useful on a phone screen; some like Flash won't work at all.

Mobile sites need to be lightweight--strip out all the crap, back to HTML only and no images.
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I'm trying out the site in Opera Mini, which was just released on the iPhone. It is dramatically faster than Safari Mobile, though the formatting buttons on the post form apparently don't work for some reason.

An Iphone app would be sweet

An app would be sweet, but as much as I'd like one for my iPhone, it'd leave other phone users floundering with the full site.

I don't know of other forums that have slimmed-down mobile versions of their sites. The Washington Post, as one of many examples, has a mobile-specific site that loads much more quickly and is formatted to be easily usable on a small screen. Something similar for a forum would be pretty awesome.

They do exist.
The biggest forum I know of that does is AR15.com-

regular site: http://www.ar15.com/

mobile site: http://www.ar15.com/mobile

The same forum message content is viewable on both for free, but only (paying) forum members can post on the mobile site. I don't know what software they use.

...I might never have known about the mobile site at all, except that when a user posts from it, the website software automatically adds a special sig that says "posted from AR15.com mobile".
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HowardForums.com uses WiForums to make their site WAP compatible.

Another forum I frequent has a wap version but that doesn't render correctly on my Zune HD. I'm beginning to think that there are issues with the browser on this thing that will never be fixed. That's too bad as this is otherwise a great little gadget and there's definitely advertising $$$ to be made off a mobile version of any web site. Thanks for the replies.

We are working on a microdevice version, but it's not ready for any form of release yet. It's on the horizon for sometime this year is all I can say right now. There are micro versions for vB3.8 or earlier, but they are not compatible with vB 4 and neither is the database as it's now coded backward compatible to older software for vB.

I'll keep you all updated, though, as I get more information.

Somehow the image of someone riding a bike while looking at Bike Forums popped into my head, with the predictable result of distracted riding. :cry:

Google has some sort of conversion-thing for mobile uses. I have seen it used for the Network 54 forums, but I don't know if it works with everything else. When you visit a site with your mobile phone that uses it, there is a line of text at the top of the page that says something like "formatted for mobile by Google".

The funny (predictable?) part I have seen more than once is that in some instances it will strip out all the actual page content, and leave only the ads. And the ads didn't appear to be just Google ads, they were just the usual assortment of banner ads....
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I was pressed for time in the previous post, and just remembered to get back to it........

There is ONE other thing that I see online with my phone, that is fantastically infuriating.

If you're a webmaster and you use Google to format pages for mobile, then don't be an idiot and make CERTAIN that there's a plain-HTML, working hyperlink that can get the user to the real actual web page, in the event that huge chunks of the Google-formatted attempt are missing.

I've seen web forums where the login box wasn't in the Google-formatted page, and the link that is supposed to take you to the real web page just circled back to the Google translation....... that didn't work.
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