games.on.net rolls out new mobile theme, various site upgrades
By Tim Colwill on November 19, 2012 at 7:42 pm
Hello, friends! We’re pleased to announce that today marks the rollout of a bunch of improvements to the games.on.net site, including a proper mobile theme, as well as some various site upgrades to improve performance.
Mobile visitors will now see a slightly modified version of WPTouch, which provides slick, ultra-fast mobile browsing to anybody cranking their games.on.net from a smartphone. While this only works for the front page, we encourage anybody looking to do mobile forum browsing to grab the Tapatalk forum app for their phone of choice, as our forum is set up to support it.
Meanwhile, we’ve also deployed a jQuery UI upgrade (thanks, ginji!) and made some other various tweaks. If anything’s on fire or not working as it should be, please let us know!
We have launched our first ArmA 3 servers! Please come and play on them
Shoot your mates in the head on our servers, for SCIENCE.
We’ve relaunched our Minecraft PVP server: get all the details here
Let the bloodletting begin.
You can use the following bbCode
[i], [b], [img], [quote], [url href="http://www.google.com/"]Google[/url]
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Too bad I can’t use the Tapatalk-compatible app on the Windows Phone marketplace with GON because of some strange cookie setting in the OS that blocks login (can’t change this setting either as MS insists it’s for security purposes).
Also, I can’t get to the mobile site on my Lumia 900.
It took me quite a few refreshes to get it on Safari, but now it’s working fine. Could be the same issue? (Maybe not, though.)
The tweet display module on the forums is busted. Seeing blank spots where tweets should be.
Looks snazzy, and I can browse fine on my phone, but it crashes the browser as soon as I start typing a comment.
But that’s probably a combination of an older phone running an older version of android (2.2) more than anything else.
Might be nice to add the logo?
Tim Colwill,
It doesn’t seem like you’re detecting the IE Mobile UA string…?
waiting for games.on.net rolls out the “edit” button
Nice work ginji, great to see the community stepping up to make our home a little bit nicer :)
Such a shame you have to pick that horrible ios style look, What if someone has a Windows Phone or an Android? Why should they have to put up with a mismatched look on their phone?
You really should have gone with a platform-agnostic look so it looks at home on all 3 major mobile platforms.
Am I the only one who thinks of Transformers whenever the term ‘roll out’ is used?
We pretty much used an out-of-the-box solution here I’m afraid as we don’t have the time or resources to devote to what you’re suggesting! But if you’ve got any alternatives you’ve come up with theme-wise, we’d be happy to look at them :)
I don’t… know what that means I’m sorry, but perhaps some knowledgeable type will stop by and explain!
So what’s a “jQuery UI upgrade” do for me? Or is it a case of if I don’t know what it means having it explained to me probably isn’t going to help much?
Really funny – I am setting the same ‘out of the box’ solution up for a client at the moment. Yours isn’t very pretty though, no customisation.. I’d be happy to spend even a few minutes making it look better if you want.
Firstly, how is your site checking whether a browser is mobile or not? Simply looking for webkit or?
By “you” I meant the games.on.net website. It detects what browser (and platform) you are using by looking at the User Agent string, which is kind of like the browser’s signature. If the UA string of a mobile browser is detected, the mobile site is served instead of the regular version.
If in my desktop browser I manually change the UA string to, for example, Android’s built-in webkit browser, I can see the mobile site:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/19093054/gonmobile.png
palzer0 was saying that he couldn’t reach the mobile version of the site on his Lumia 900. This is because while the site detects the UA string for iOS and Android mobile browsers, it does not do so for the mobile version of Internet Explorer (the Lumia 900 is a Windows Phone). This is probably just a developer oversight.
emobile/7.0 is one of the UA strings by default in that theme.
nacimota,
Ok so they’re simply looking for mobile-webkit. Bad idea since AFAIK Android’s Chrome won’t even work here.
BTW, an FYI to GON, the UA for WP7 IE:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows Phone OS 7.5; Trident/5.0; IEMobile/9.0; ; [;; [;<operator] are naturally autofilled.
Sorry let me do that again. The UA is:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows Phone OS 7.5; Trident/5.0; IEMobile/9.0; ; [;<operator])
Yet not edit option for comments -_-
Still didn’t work. Last attempt. Formatting absolutely sucks here seriously.
Stuff it, here’s a picture just in case: http://i46.tinypic.com/2jcssbn.png —
————–
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows Phone OS 7.5; Trident/5.0; IEMobile/9.0; ; [;<operator])
—–
Just gonna try something with this commenting system, seems like a good place for it lol
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows Phone OS 7.5; Trident/5.0; IEMobile/9/0;
; [;<operator])
Nope that failed lol
I take it the firefox transitions bug still hasn’t be nailed down? Just tried to watch an embedded youtube video on the front page and it was briefly freezing every 5 seconds.
I’m using Android Chrome on my Galaxy S3 with no troubles!
Thanks for the UA for WP7 IE :) We’ll try and get that added in ASAP.
Helorik, if you’d like to do that, please go nuts! We’d sure appreciate it.
libbaz,
Iv noticed that too, i thought it was my flash settings, spent about 2 hours going back and forward between different version untill i realised it was just on this site only…. Please find a fix, its frikking annoying.
Shame the background is still borked on the normal template. The image in mention is:
http://games.on.net/wp-content/themes/gon/img/bg_body.jpg
Went the browser window is made close to the actual width of the site it pushes the back to the right of the actual content.
Still so much wasted space…
User agent changes will rolled out shortly, good news for Windows Phone 7 users :)
And thats done
Spoke to soon, seems to be some issues
Give us a tick to sort it out
Tested this on a Windows Phone a bit earlier, seems to be happier now :).
Yep, works fine on my Lumia.
this is cool. Samsung galaxy s3.
tacitus42,
Same here. Good stuff!
Logging in takes me to the desktop site. This behaviour persists as long as I’m logged in.
Nope. Still can’t get to the mobile site on my Lumia 900 even after logging out.
I’m not a web dev but my guess is that WPTouch doesn’t play nice with the phpBB login scripts.
palzer0,
Log in, then wait a few moments (seconds). You will automatically be redirected back to the main page, logged in! I’m replying to this from my phone :)
WPTouch detects all agent strings without a hitch. Not sure why anyone would be having a problem. It’s definitely the best mobile template solution for WordPress out there.
It’s pretty fantastic, we are very happy with it :).
Hiccups we had earlier had more to do with our caching, needed to make an exception for a large number of user agents. Should be sorted now, 90%+ of those on a smart phone are going to land on the homepage and see something that isn’t utterly broken now, and that’s a big win for us!
I eventually managed to get back to the mobile site by clearing browsing history. Logged in as normal then got redirected to the phpBB “you have successfully logged in” page which then redirected me to the desktop site with ?sid=blahblahblah on the end.
I retyped the address in and I’m still getting the desktop site. Might be something with IE9 mobile that’s causing issues (however, like I said before, I’m no web dev).
I cant get tapatalk working with the forums.
I searched tapatalk for internode, gon, and games.on.net with no luck.
Any idea how to get this working?
GON is listed for me as “GON – games.on.net Forum”. From memory it didn’t have any trouble finding it, so I’m not really sure what that could be. Maybe tapatalk is playing up?
It should appear in search, if not Select Network > Games > PC > GON – Games.on.net Forum
Will be in the list, it was a good page or two down. But it’s certainly there. I’m not sure what’s going on with the search results in their app.
Can definitely confirm you can find it as Cas suggests: Network > Games > PC, scroll down. Not coming up in search though like it used to :/
I’m probably one of the few who cannot stand “Mobile Versions” of websites. I went to the site today on my tablet, and after looking around for the option for the full site, I just closed the page and came back on my PC. I would rather have the real site, even on the tiny screen of my mobile. Can you at least put the option for us to use the full site.
What Tablet are you using? The browser should offer you a Request Desktop Site option, Chrome for Android/iOS does this and others can be similarly configured.
Cas Bitton,
My tablet is a Xoom with the GED ICS. The browser doesn’t seem to have this setting, my mobile does, but I will try Chrome.
man, tapatalk is awesome.