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UrbanToronto Redesign

@Edward Skira the site is completely and utterly broken on iOS and it has been for months. I would be mortified if my site went down or broke for just a few hours, let alone leaving it like that for months. What's going on?


It's obvious that your use of frames on the site is colliding with how xenforo was designed to work, producing broken scrolling, photo browsing that won't close and ads so big that they take the screen hostage. The only remedy to the latter is blocking ads which I'm sure you'd rather people not do. I get that you want to merge the site and the forum but it's very obviously not working the way you implemented it.

MacRumors just released a xenforo 2.1 update and it's beautiful. It works flawlessly in mobile and even adds dark mode automatically. What a contrast to what Urban Toronto put out. ?
 
Edward Skira said:
The problem is that I don't see any of that on my iOS phone. Anybody have the issue @MetroMan is talking about?

What version of iOS and phone are you using?
Click to expand...

I’m always up to date on the latest iOS version. That was on iOS 12.4 and now I’m on iOS 13. I have an iPhone X and an iPad Pro 12.9”. I use my iPhone and iPad almost exclusively as my main computers. Sometimes I’ll use my Mac and it works fine there. But people have been shifting to smartphones and tablets for browsing the web. Your primary focus on desktop/laptops is outdated. The rule of thumb now is to design for mobile first.

Frames are a big no no on mobile. It should be obvious that headers and ads are obstructing the content that people come here for. menus and tools should be in a navigation menu, not always visible and obstructing the content. When posting, good luck writing anything more in depth than a few lines. It’ll break scrolling. Try zooming in on a photo which people on a site like this want to do all the time to look at details.

Look, UT is by and large the best place to read about and discuss development in Toronto. No contest. But the user experience is absolutely atrocious. It would be so great if you could hire a competent developer with a UX and design skill set, not just a web programmer. A good place to start would be to follow the rules set out in both Android and Apple‘s human interface guidelines. Urban Toronto is breaking dozens of them.
 
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The fact that the website uses multiple HTML p-body classes (p-body-inner inside a p-body) makes it hard to use because it creates multiple scrollbars and makes it impossible to use the scrollbar or scrolling shortcuts on mobile.
 
We made some updates to the forum over the weekend to solve some issues. Please let me know about any issues including any of the stuff previously mentioned that is still not working.
 
Edward Skira said:
We made some updates to the forum over the weekend to solve some issues. Please let me know about any issues including any of the stuff previously mentioned that is still not working.
Click to expand...

Seems to be behaving better on iPad. Tapping the title bar to scroll to the top now works. I’ll keep monitoring to see if any of the issues I frequently encountered are still here.
 
I’ve noticed lots of improvements. The top bar now moves out of the way, you can now tap the header to scroll to the top and writing long posts on mobile doesn’t mess up the text box. It scrolls as you write, as it should.

Photos seem to be working much better too. Closing a photo with the X now works reliably and when pinching to zoom on photos, the site no longer tries to fight you and snap back to a zoomed out position.

Good work. ?

Still, there’s a general jerkiness to the site on mobile. Because of all the moving UI elements, things just pop in and out of view and there’s this sense that everything is snapping into predetermined places ranther than scrolling fluidly. It gives you the impression that you’re not in control.

I thought I’d point that out but I’m not going to cry over it. Not that it isn’t important — it does affect the user experience on UrbanToronto — but the site is finally usable on mobile which was critical.
 
Though I know that the UT Search is less than perfect I tried searching Daniels Waterfront (thread titles only) today and it ONLY brought up the Real Estate Thread NOT the general comment one. Both have both Daniels and Waterfront in thread titles so ...

While I'm at it, I also note that quite often (maybe always?) even if you tick the Thread Title box you get hits that have neither word - odd!
 
Suggestion: can someone standardise the spelling of PORT LANDS (2 words) which has 5 examples in thread titles and PORTLANDS (one word, which has 10, not all Toronto!) in Thread Titles so the Search works properly. The official WT spelling seems to be two words. See: https://portlandsto.ca/
 
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