Making the forum mobile ready.

[beardie]

Yeah... explaining why software can pose a security risk can be complicated (if you try to explain the detail). I just figured I'd give the "executive summary".

 

[fallfromatree]

I build web apps for a living, so I can genuinely appreciate the concern for security. I think the biggest thing here is doing something to make the site more mobile friendly; Tapatalk was just one solution. Right now it's pretty painful to browse, and more specifically, post, from a mobile device.

I haven't work with phpBB in a mobile sense, but if there was a mobile theme (i.e., users still go to beardeddragon.org, they just get served a different theme on a mobile device), would you (or have you) consider something along those lines? If so, I'd be happy to put in the research to find a few to present. Since security's your forte, I assume this board is running phpBB 3+? I haven't looked, but I'd assume there's plenty out there for 3.0 to make the mobile experience more usable for those of us on mobile devices.

 

[beardie]

If it were just a basic theme, I'd be open to loading it up, providing it's a commonly used one. Blogs would not be supported, though. And I'd likely only keep it to a bare minimum in terms of customizing it to look like BD.org (probably just adding the banner). And only the forums would be available in the mobile-friendly view. I wouldn't add code to switch it dynamically by browser type. phpBB doesn't support that natively, and I keep "mods" to an absolute minimum. But I would set it so people could change their theme between the regular one and a mobile one manually in their user control panel.

The thing is, mobile use for a website like this one (discussion forums) is just not nearly in enough demand to warrant putting much effort into it. Mobile devices make up about 0.5% of requests. And while adding more friendly support might increase that, it would still be TINY. So, whatever solution it is needs to require little to no maintenance. A theme might be a good option for that, since they use existing logic. But mobile support may break if updates come out and the theme isn't compatible.

As for version... yeah... we're on the latest 3.x (minus a minor update that came out semi-recently that I haven't tested out yet).

-Alex