Membership Are you a desktop or mobile RPer?

[valucre 19]

I'll write my long posts on a computer proper usually, with quick OOC replies and just checking on the site via mobile. I know of plenty that post mobile though, and know that most people connecting to the internet now do so over phones and tablets than laptops and desktops. And google is prioritizing mobile-first indexing now. So it's good to be able to support both

[Tamir 9]

I can count the number of times I've had to write out an RP post on a phone on one hand. It's doable if you don't have a post template and it's short, but I can't even fathom how painful it would be to deal with HTML on a tiny touchscreen.

[Jerriah 9]

I've always been a desktop rper. The times I've tried to do posts via mobile have been very messy and usually I end up losing the post lmao x'D

[Bishop 172]

I can say that we're a 50/50 split. Our mobile skin is by far one of the most amazing features of the theme I went for. It is as easy to post in there as it is here. It is clean, not overly crowded and simply the best.

 

I keep this in mind because right now we have a player who is 100% phone, and always has been. Be it her husband won't let her have the computer (trust me that happens) or the part of the world she is won't allow her to have net. She is on her phone and the easier I can make it for her the best! So keep that in mind when you are choosing a fancy skin no? Some people (especially people across the world) don't get access to computers and go 100% phone. Keep it clean and simple.

[Rhindeer 217]

I do both. There are weeks sometimes when I am busy and can’t muster the energy for my laptop, but I can always post from my phone. My games have the tapatalk app installed so that’s super convenient for me, and allows me to save my posts which makes it easy to work on posts on the go. But yeah, I post a lot during work breaks, or even while out shopping waiting in lines. xD Or from bed. |: So yeah, sites having mobile friendly options is important!

 

...I say, as I post this reply from my phone.

[Gothic 307]

I can view things from my phone and make notes of things. Although I can't break the habit of posting from a desktop/laptop. 

 

I can't bang the keys on a phone. xD

[Jaxx 317]

I have only ever been able to do posts to my satisfaction when I'm on my phone. While I'll read posts or threads or apps or whatever from my phone (if I can, depending on templates and such) I have replied maybe... twice. In my life. I don't like the tiny screen, I don't like that I can't copy/paste easily, I don't like how far up I have to scroll just to read one or two paragraphs. And my old phone used to reload pages whenever I navigated away from them, which was annoying as *hell* if I had to do something in the middle of reading a post. 

 

And I will admit that if someone says that they only/mostly post from their mobile, I tend to get a little judgy if I don't know how they write. From the personal experience I've had, people who post from their phones expect that to be an excuse for bad grammar, typos, not using quotation marks, etc. I'm not saying that everyone's like that, just that that's been what I've run into. 

[Teenage Wasteland 4]

Necessity is a great motivator. I travel a lot, but there is always WIFI somewhere I can hook my phone into and whip out a post. I can't always pull out a beasty Alienware laptop and do the same thing. Also, when inspiration strikes, you gotta write on whatever you have to hand. 

 

My preference is the laptop, of course, I'm a very clumsy phone typer, but Grammarly and google docs catch the worst of it on my phone. I think it also depends on how easy the post is to read, and how long my reply is going to be. If I'm feeling inspired I can whip out a lot of words, in other threads I post two to three paragraphs y'know. It all varies and it all depends. Shorter posts from my phone are super easy - but I can also guarantee my post will be naked if I post from my phone. No way am I messing around with doHTML on a phone without going insane. 

[Rhindeer 217]

Just gonna chime in and add, so, my fiance also RPs on my games, and one of the best parts about phone posting is sometimes we'll go out to dinner together and just...rapidfire post to each other at the table, lmfao. I'm sure anyone looking at us would think, "Oh, how sad, a couple sitting together and not interacting, just all absorbed in their phones!" but the thing is, we're having fun together and playing together. xD Just in the nerdiest way.

[StormyWays13 91]

For the longest time, I was strictly a desktop RPer. But now that sites are finally getting better at mobile designs, it's easier to RP on the mobile devices like my phone or iPad. Mobile RPing also opens a whole other world when it comes to roleplaying like instant notifications and replies. 

[Guest Arantor]

This is very firmly related to my interests; and where I've been hanging around on other forums about foruming, I began to wonder if I had in fact got it all wrong.

 

Forums in general don't actually work that well on mobile (responsive themes aside) because all you end up with on mobile is small, terse replies exchanged, which isn't conducive to lengthy discussion that you can spend time on researching/writing/whatever (which to my old-school view is pretty much what forums are, the anti-"social network" precisely because you don't necessarily get long, thought out replies on mobile precisely because the device makes it harder to write them)

 

So to hear that mobile is a minority - though not entirely gone - in a forum RP world is a relief on some level, I thought I was going nuts, but it does also mean that I need to remember not to alienate mobile users in my quest for the perfect RP forum platform. Fortunately I inherited a reasonable responsive layout first...

[Kit the Human 759]

8 hours ago, Arantor said:

Forums in general don't actually work that well on mobile (responsive themes aside) because all you end up with on mobile is small, terse replies exchanged, which isn't conducive to lengthy discussion that you can spend time on researching/writing/whatever (which to my old-school view is pretty much what forums are, the anti-"social network" precisely because you don't necessarily get long, thought out replies on mobile precisely because the device makes it harder to write them)

 

That depends entirely on the user. I am perfectly capable (and do) research on my phone before giving a detailed post. The only time I need my computer is if I'm double checking my code.

 

Of course, not everyone is of the mindset that they can adequately research and post from their phone, but that's a user preference thing, not something that is inherent to the device itself.

[Guest Arantor]

Phones in particular are geared towards content consumption, not content creation. It's not that you can't create things on a phone, it's that the size does inherently make it difficult to do so efficiently and effectively. I'm not sure it depends on the user as much as it seems like it should - researching on a phone, sure, it's pretty good for that, but writing hundreds or thousands of words on a phone UI... even with a good keyboard that knows your writing style well... doesn't seem super ergonomic to me.

 

This of course assumes that RPing will tend towards posts in the multi-hundred word category, but I'm aware not all RP works like that. For example I know a group of RPers that for whom a 'long post' might be 200 words and frequently their threads are full of one- or two-line exchanges, and they're mostly mobile users (their posts from desktops tend to be longer just because of ease of entry, according to them). And that would be consistent with the majority of posting I've seen done on phones to forums in general.

[Kit the Human 759]

Again - that depends on the individual user. Some users do not want to use their phones for writing, that is perfectly valid. Some users find it difficult to use and would rather just wait to get to their computer. That is also valid. Some people however, like and only write from their phones, and I resent the idea that their contributions might be being devalued. Earlier in this thread, Sailor V pointed out that they know people who have abandoned forum use because they were not able to write on them. It seems to me that keeping forums inaccessible to mobile users is not only unnecessary but means that we as a forum community, lose.

 

My experience has shown no meaningful difference in post quality or length (and yes, I'm talking an average of two hundred, though it irritates me that something as inane as word count is considered a strike against mobile use and a reason to devalue the importance of accessibility). For myself, I find that because I have now associate my phone as a writing space, I'm able to write better and frequently longer posts. This is not to suggest that your experience with mobile writers is a lie or misinformed, but that your experience is not shared by all forum users and perhaps you should divest yourself of the assumptions you have formed over mobile writers.

 

In the past, due to the kind of keyboards that were available for phones, terse exchanges were certainly encouraged, because as I imagine you remember, pressing a key three times to get to the right letter was time consuming. That is no longer true (unless of course, the forums you frequent are a pain in the ass to use from your phone. In which case, well of course anything written from a phone will be short!) Phones are increasingly being loaded with applications and other utilities that facilitate a variety of content creation, whether it be artwork or writing. As heavy duty phone use becomes ever more common, views that phones are only for content consumption becomes ever more outdated.

 

The fact remains that there are people who write from their phones frequently and as I've already stated, I know several people who post exclusively from their phones for various reasons.

 

I appreciate that you have a responsive theme for your forum, which is fantastic! But I think that it's worth stating that if you do not ensure that your forum is accessible from a mobile, you gain nothing. But you are potentially losing people who would be fantastic additions to your community. It genuinely saddens me to see anyone decide that mobile accessibility isn't really that important because they don't really value the kind of posts that they think mobile writers make, or because they personally, don't like writing from them.

[Guest Arantor]

I think you misunderstand where I'm coming from, and I think we have largely the same point, though seeing the cause and effect from different perspectives.

 

The problem is that writing everything on a typical phone screen is difficult for the majority. I'm not saying it isn't possible or that it doesn't happen - it clearly does. And for some people it clearly is their preferred method. However, this very thread is evidence in line with what I've been saying: that phone use generally doesn't go in line with writing long posts. The same complaints come up time and time again - not enough room for pressing all the buttons/the buttons are tiny and hard to hit (also supported in the correlated views that tablets are more common for writing than phones are), and that there isn't enough space to see the preceding post being replied to, whilst also writing a new post.

 

Thing is, these complaints are on some level simply not solvable on a phone, because the physicality of the device vs human ergonomic requirements prevents it - making the buttons bigger means less room for seeing what you're typing (regardless of orientation) even if it makes them easier to press. Fingers are within a range of sizes, and phone keyboards are at the edge of what is comfortable for most people - so for most people it's simply not comfortable. I'm not disputing that some people find it more comfortable to write on a phone, but that all available (mostly anecdotal at present) evidence seems to suggest it is the minority case at best.

 

There is an assertion that I (and more general forum providers) need to keep mobile support because of potentially cutting out users. That may be true - it seems like it would be true for you and the people you're aware of that exclusively post from phones. However, watching mobile use on forums for the last 8-9 years (because before I started on StoryBB, I was a fairly hefty contributor to SMF), and watching it rise, even with truly responsive layouts... even Tapatalk, actually... even when you literally give a forum-centric, mobile first environment, people simply do not write long posts, which leads me to believe the behaviour is not driven by the format of the forum but by the device.

 

Now, for plenty of RP cases, that's absolutely fine. In some cases, even encouraged because some styles of RP are sufficiently quick repartee/back and forth where short snappy and above all quick replies are the norm, and where it works well. But the rest of the people in this thread seem to be taking the view that for them, mobile is primarily a way of keeping up with what's going on and that for creation, something more ergonomic than a phone is the order of the day. We seem the same trends in more conventional forum settings - people tend to check in on mobile, add short snappy responses, and leave the longer form responses for later on a machine with more room and a bigger keyboard - it just so happens that short snappy responses are more typical on 'more conventional forums' than they are in RP.

 

This isn't even unique to forums - I've hung around enough writers' groups the last few years while working on novels to see the same behaviours there too, which has long suggested to me that the forum element is an aside and that it's simply the device that is unsuited to that particular task for many users - but firmly not all. I think it's telling that I've been an iPad user pretty consistently since 2011 and I still can't type as fast on an iPad as I can on a regular sized keyboard (especially given the recent changes in iOS that make multi-touch on the keyboard act like a cursor whereupon I've managed to delete multiple lines of text because I was typing too fast and the keyboard thought I was in text selection mode) and most of that is simply because the keyboard is smaller and effectively more difficult to use at speed.

 

It's also interesting that of the users that StoryBB was originally built for (because existing group of RPers fleeing from another RP site after changes of management)... every single one of them said they did their writing on their laptop. Even the one outlier who said they wrote on their phone, they'd send it to themselves via email and then edit it on the laptop after. Mind you, that particular person is someone for whom multi-thousand word posts are normal. Every single person in that group has outright said they wouldn't care if it didn't work on phones, but it does need to work on tablets.

 

I think that this is evidence of the spectrum of the ways and means of writers of RP, and the different styles of the storytelling it generates - but that the typical style of RP that tends towards multi-hundred word posts does generally cause people to be less inclined to write IC posts on phones, and it's not because the software sucks.

 

I think this post may have been half as long if I happened to be using my tablet, and would not have been written at all if all I had was my phone.