mobile theme and emojis

[Fizix]

Why don't you have a mobile theme? I find the forum very awkward on smartphones. Im sure there are good mobile mods out there?


Also is there a reason why we can't use emoji's? (I feel naked without them)

[Solace]

We don't have a mobile version of the forums, sorry. It's filed under "when it happens".

Emoji's are a relatively recent thing (outside of Japan), but we don't offer much support for emoticons in general. I'm sure you've noticed that we run the forums with a fair amount of minimalism; we haven't embraced social media much, either.

/old school

[Fizix]

Thanks for the reply. Lol @ old school

I keep using emoji's through force of habit, I'll have to break out of it

[NightWish]

Posting emoji is possible, my signature has used one for the last six months:

🐾

They are just byte sequences like any other character after all... "😈". The problem would be how they look once posted. I believe they need to be supported by the browser and operating system used by the person viewing the post.

Edit: This post looks as expected in the versions of Firefox I've tried, but not Chrome.
Edit 2: Ah, at least it did until I edited the post in-line.
Edit 3: Fixable, so the editor rendering breaks the multi-byte characters. Something to add to the list of things to fix

[Fizix]

Just noticed your reply.

For some reason when I've posted them on a phone (iphone and iPad) from the quick reply box, they appear as rectangles. �� (is it because its an inline editor?)

...

Yes ☺️ go advanced works. Nothing to do with the device. I won't flood your forum with them, promise 😏

[SeijiSensei]

Originally Posted by NightWish

Edit 3: Fixable, so the editor rendering breaks the multi-byte characters. Something to add to the list of things to fix

According to Firefox (Tools > Page Info), this page is encoded with the Windows-1252 character set. That seems an unusually restrictive choice for a site with a global audience like this one. Shouldn't you be using UTF-8? Wouldn't that be better for multi-byte characters?

I'm frankly surprised that the Windows-1252 character set is used at all. I thought the forums were hosted on Linux where UTF-8 is the norm. Before that the standard was ISO-8859-1, which I think was what the forums used when I first joined. Are you now using Windows as the hosting platform?

[NightWish]

For historical reasons the database is not all UTF-8 unfortunately and like many things we could do, converting it correctly is not something we've had the bandwidth to tackle. It works for the most part because no third party system accesses it so it is opaque.

Originally Posted by SeijiSensei

Are you now using Windows as the hosting platform?

Nothing of the sort, but you're assuming the vBulletin software is doing something sensible... In fairness it is probably not interpreting the database collation at all and blindly sending out bytes as it is asked to.

The forum does have encoding configured in the style setting, and always has. It is, as you observed, ISO-8859-1. This goes with the old Latin 1 used by MySQL. Likewise the HTTP headers are the same, if you look at the traffic. So why Windows-1252? The difference is probably explained some auto-detect system in the browser seeing characters that would have been non-printing in ISO-8859-1 but are possible display characters in Windows-1252, such as €? That's just a guess.

Really we should be using UTF-8 end to end... but there are lots of things we could be doing.

[Fizix]

But why does that lead to some editors on the site screwing the character set and others not? (thats whats happening right)?

Also, can't vbulletin convert character sets as a background task? That wouldn't hog your bandwidth out, it would add some load while it did it, but not bandwidth.

[NightWish]

Originally Posted by Fizix

why do ... some editors ... screw... the character set... ?

Presumably because they handle content differently. There are three editor modes (simple text, simple text with some extra script controlled buttons, and a nearly functional WYSIWYG editor) and five post methods (new thread, new reply, quick reply, edit post and the in-line edit). That is at least 15 combinations. There could be subtle differences between how each interacts with some given content. In addition there is the added complication of BB code handling; depending on which codes are used content might go through different filters and such like.

Originally Posted by Fizix

Also, can't vbulletin convert character sets as a background task? That wouldn't hog your bandwidth out, it would add some load while it did it, but not bandwidth.

Bandwidth in the "capacity to transfer data" sense isn't what I meant. By bandwidth I mean the human "energy or mental capacity required to deal with a situation" sense. i.e. the staff haven't found the time. If all it took was a background conversion from one type to another it wouldn't be too hard, but in reality the problem isn't the mechanics of the conversion itself.

The problem is knowing which conversion to apply and making sure the process doesn't lose information. The database isn't massive compared to what I deal with in my day job (only about 10 GB) but making sure a given post's current uncontrolled encoding fits into another given controlled encoding is non-trivial. It requires investigation, trial conversion, etc. all of which must to be done off-line first. Basically it isn't a quick or push-button job.

[Fizix]

Ah I see, I suppose as its a non commercial site it's a little more difficult to get stuff like that done.

[cyth]

A mobile theme for vBulletin sounds all kinds of wrong to me. But I think it's almost needed these days.

Maybe making vBulletin work isn't the answer. I know this could amount to a lot of work, but what about switching platforms? Discourse seems like something that works for mobile out of the box.

[relentlessflame]

Originally Posted by cyth

A mobile theme for vBulletin sounds all kinds of wrong to me. But I think it's almost needed these days.

Maybe making vBulletin work isn't the answer. I know this could amount to a lot of work, but what about switching platforms? Discourse seems like something that works for mobile out of the box.

We've looked into switching platforms before, and with all of them we'd be sacrificing a huge amount of the functionality and customization we have now. Now, I don't think Discourse was around when we did that comparison most recently, so we can take a look at it.

I do think it's possible to build a mobile theme for vBulletin, or to create a somewhat-responsive theme... but I just haven't had time to work on it yet. It's still something I'd like to investigate, anyway. But if we could find another more modern platform that carried over at least the majority of what we need and use, that would obviously be easier.

[Archon_Wing]

I've never had a problem with AS on a mobile device though I guess typing in the login box can be a problem.

OTOH, it would definitely seem mobile browsing is the way of the future, so it's worth taking it into consideration even if no action should be taken.

[Kemiu]

You really should make a mobile version doesn't need to be pretty but right now I am using this on my Nexus 5, slightly annoying.