Mobile AO, or at least Minimal AO

AO is a great place, and has evolved over time. Now we have the member stats, and everything else all over the page. Nothing is wrong with that when you're at a computer, but it is troublesome when you're at a cell-phone like I was during the last two weeks...

Some features would not work. I could login and out and read threads well enought, but my phone came up with some message in Japanese that I could not read, but I think it meant that there was some unsupported content. I'm guessing that it didn't understand the radio-buttons in the post posts, or something else... It happened in posting a new thread, and some changing site options. Also, it was difficult to stay logged in, but I couldn't get to site options to really fix it...

I would like to see AO have some feature to seriously cut down on the data that is displayed. I know that it would be quite difficult, and would probably cause outages on the main AO-site..., but it could be located some where else to prevent conflicts. It could be at http://antionline.com/mobile or something... All I ask for is to be able to login, look at / use your PM box, check your antipoint center, view your site subscriptions, view posts with some options menu when you select user name, reply to posts, and have some fourm navigation... Sounds like a lot, but I'm guessing that it would be able to access the same data, but just parse it differently than the main site...

Of course I'm back from vacation now, so it really isn't that important..., just some idea I came up with incase I go on vacation again...

Another (slightly related) subject...

I messed up my MBR when I put in a new HDD and repartitioned/formated/reinstalled lots of things, so I feel a little..., seperated..., from my normal routine on the computer (play music, code, hit power button, work on Design Document, code, hit power button again, render stuff, delete junk files, play music, write more stuff, get on internet, download stuff, chat on AO's IRC server, remove power + phone cables, put them back in, delete stuff, code, play music, turn off for the night)... What I do sounds boring, and with the restarts and all, sounds troublesome, but it is good... I acturally get a chance to rest and think during those 5-10 minutes of disk scanning... Now, I'm exploring my reinstalled Linux + LILO boot floppy (more space with the new HDD this time), and don't have much resting/thinking time anymore.

-Tim_axe

I think this is a great idea. It may end up helping only a minimal number of members, but for those of us who aren't always in an office or near a desktop machine it would be worthwhile.

This was discussed once before. There just wasn't enough need for it. Creating a whole seperate system (which is basically what it would take) just wasn't worth it for the 1/2 dozen people that would actually benefit from it.

You could do it dynamically with PHP... I read this thing somewhere that explains how to create a text only version of a page on the fly... In fact, I think AO uses it already... http://www.antionline.com/printpost....&postid=558584

Seem's like an interesting idea. If AntiOnline does already do it then it should be continued in my opinion.

Uhm. It would take quite a bit of work to get everything "just so" in a mobile format. For people with slow connections, perhaps something like the proxomitron would help in replacing images with appropriate text and cutting out unnecessary loading, but a purely-server-side solution doesn't seem too practical.