User blog comment:Hotsoup.6891/Mobile Forward 2015/@comment-4189499-20150204001859

While I do access Wikia through my phone with varying regularity, I rarely to never use the mobile skin. Partly, it's because I just don't like the look of it, partly because it's relatively hard to navigate, partly because the sections which I want to access while on mobile, namely things like the forums, just don't work well in the mobile skin, and partly because it's easier for me just to stick to the skin and layout I know and am familiar with.

My two main irritations with the mobile site are the fact that the forums display in the most inconvenient way as none of the CSS to make them usable loads, and the fact that they didn't seem to take answers wikis into account when creating the skin. Forums are one of the few areas which are good for adding to while on the go, unlike pages where it's better to have a proper keyboard, but the mobile site has the actual text of replies taking up just over half of my already small screen, leading to an average of four words per line showing, which is not ideal for reading longer posts. That's not even taking into account the indentation effect of quoting previous posts, which can eventually push it down to a word per line. Despite it not being optimised for touch devices, the oasis skin does the job much more efficiently.

The second problem I have with the mobile skin is that it doesn't display answers wikis properly. I understand that answers wikis are a dying breed, but until the last breath of life has been flogged out of us, we need to be considered in skin design decisions. In other words, the mobile skin needs to have an ask bar. The whole point of an answers wiki is that people can ask questions on it, which they can't is there's nowhere to ask these questions. Please remember our existence and put in an ask bar!

Also, another suggestion: why not have a separate mobile front page to full site front page? Sometimes, once the CSS is stripped away and the content is displayed on a tiny screen, people's beautifully crafted front pages for the oasis skin just fall apart in the mobile environment. If you let users specifically craft a front page which was optimised for the mobile conditions without oversimplifying the oasis experience, that would be really nice.