Board Thread:New Features/@comment-1807002-20160119051815/@comment-4731443-20160119072627

I find Wikia's approach to mobile self-defeating in a way. They seem so focused on mobile you'd think the desktop view is about to disappear altogether, yet they've made it so restrictive that it's hardly possible to make a pleasant mobile experience for your wiki. You can't specify content that should be limited to either view to improve their respective designs, but they hide content on mobile that should remain visible without giving you a choice. They have a tool for mobile main pages that prevents you from adding any information to your home page and forces you to plaster it with big-ass images and videos that slow down page load on bad/crowded networks and/or low-resource phones, and essentially mean that if a visitor has turned off images to save bandwith, your home page is nothing but a bunch of links and empty space.

I do what I can to be mobile-conscious in my editing, but at the end of the day, if someone comes to me saying "this looks weird/doesn't work on mobile," I can only shrug and say "Yeah, Wikia doesn't really work on mobile, get a computer."

That said, I'm not sure an admin-controlled toggle would be the best approach to this. Instead, they should make it so the "view desktop site" option that should be available on your mobile browser actually does something. That way, visitors can choose what they prefer, as was intended from the start. I compared the two "versions" a minute ago, and the only visible difference was that the ads didn't seem to load in the mobile view (which is kind of ironic since it's supposed to be their primary market).