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Please remove the setting that disables zoom on a mobile device
I agree, but more to the point, give us the option of choosing the mobile or desktop site. The mobile site sucks balls!
Probably would be better to offer a fluid site that works well on both instead of one or the other.
Looking into some possibilities, but no promises.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, height=device-height, user-scalable=no" />Getting rid of user-scalable=no would be a really good start.
Unfortunately just getting rid of that currently leaves a site that can break in some pretty horrific ways if you zoom and cause a re-flow. I'm sure we can come up with something that's at least a little more workable, but it might take a little time.
You don't need an ultra-modern browser with tons of memory to handle layer after layer of nested style sheets and computed styles, you don't need 'responsive' design that changes layouts based on screen dimensions. You don't need fancy editors just a plain built-in text box.
A frequent annoyance when browsing on my tablet is that all the new and fancy pages struggle to be rendered, or I get a notice that the browser runs out of memory for rendering, or I watch and wait as the screen is rendered piecemeal in small blocks.
I just barely struggled with viewing a site that does that, using my tablet. They can't use plain text boxes, they are fancy custom javascript controls that autocorrect for you. They can't use html's built-in flow rules, nor style sheets, everything needs to be scripted and placed through executed code. They can't just load the page, they need to script it in piece by piece, each time they fill in a div with new content and trigger the struggling old mobile browser to re-arrange and re-draw and re-layout.
Sometimes (like right now) I miss the old, simple web. HTML 3.0 for everybody. 3.2's introduction of "div" elements and style sheets simplify some aspects of development, but we've spent twenty years developing new and better bugs to overcome the layout problems they introduce.
Honestly, I'd really love to start from scratch and code up a much simpler layout with less visual clutter and just generally a lot less "junk" to be loaded by the browser. I think the site could really benefit from a clean-up, and although moving to Invision didn't seem like a bad idea at the time it's becoming more and more apparent over time that it isn't really all that well suited to our particular community; basics like the post editor just don't deal well with pasting in code or any non-trivial formatting in posts, and given our extremely limited developer time it's hard to replace or fix things that might be broken (or break other stuff) when we apply updates from Invision.
...but it's a big site, and I have to fit what I do for the site around work, maintaining my house, a family with two kids, and having a social life, and then when I do have time for the site it gets split between answering support emails, running our social media, sending newsletters, moderating, participating as a normal member, and other stuff I'm probably not even thinking about now, and THEN I can spare a little time for bug-fixing or improvements.
Going along with all of the technical problems hinted at above, I also think our business model really needs an overhaul; not so anyone can get rich from running the site, but so that we actually have the resources to make needed improvements and to keep the place running without needing to beg for more money or to sell ourselves out with ad campaigns or the like that we would rather not rely on.
A lot of the stuff that's been added to web standards over the years can be used well if it's used judiciously and only when absolutely needed.
