Membership Are you a desktop or mobile RPer?

[Deep Sea 326]

A lot of mobile use comes from necessity. I've had more than one player who only posted from mobile because they were homeless. And players who work manual labor graveyard shifts and use their phones to post while they've got downtime between tasks.

 

Not that this directly contributes to the conversation at hand, but I do want to point this out before anyone reading along accidentally falls into the "only inferior writers who write short posts would ever care about a mobile site, true roleplayers only ever use desktop sites!"

 

Which is a very real sentiment I've seen in people.

[Morrigan 1,826]

I feel like you're getting the wrong impression from this thread @Arantor. Yes, half of the members that have voted have said they exclusively post from their desktop but over half the users say they actually use both, it doesn't matter to them as long as they are capable of it.

 

You're also assuming that the complaints in this thread for their not using mobile are the only opinions here. I work from home, I'm always on my computer but I only post from my computer half of the time. The other half of the time, while I'm out, while I'm lying in bed, while I'm taking a bath are all posts from my phone. My phone not only gives me access to post from anywhere at any time but it also gives me all of the necessary tools to post the same as when I'm on my PC. In fact, I am actually more affluent when I'm on my phone and post more and more often.

 

To basically call a phone a "content consumer" is actually extremely inaccurate in its use. That may be what YOU use a phone for but not everyone in the world uses it for that purpose.

 

Your evidence is very one sided and personal to you and your experience. That's not the experience of all roleplayers and writers. It's actually rude of you to make assumptions about other players and people based solely on your experience and try to tell us that we are wrong because of what you believe.

 

You are allowed to believe whatever you like however the evidence alone in this thread doesn't definitively prove your point, in fact it shows definitively that mobile is important and that it is important to make things accessible to mobile users.

 

If you believe that:

3 hours ago, Arantor said:

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.

 

Then as a designer you should actually attempt to make this section more accessible to your end users. It's not the fault of the end user that most forum softwares are not responsive enough for them to appropriately be able to use, that's the fault of the designer. No, you can't control the size of the keyboard but that isn't something that you have to worry about, that is on the end user and their phone and their choice on whether they use it.

 

 

 

What would you say if I told you that I typed up and am posting this from my phone, in my bed right the hell now? Because I am.

[Guest Arantor]

I would note that I don't use my phone for anything, I haven't even picked it up in weeks, my content is split mostly between iPad and laptop, and I was citing based on what I'd seen people do by trying to actually do something vaguely akin to studying people in all of this.

 

What I also realise is that I should have read this community far more before saying anything because this isn't the first time I've misread the situation. Sorry to have troubled you.

[Morrigan 1,826]

It's not a trouble @Arantor we're all allowed to disagree however in general most of us don't want assumptions made about us that may be inaccurate or untrue. You're always allowed to state your opinion and share what your experiences are but to tell us we're all the same is both unfair and overall rude.

 

In this case you were putting over a blanket understanding of us and trying to tell us that we were wrong or inaccurate which none of us were. Your experiences give you a different outlook but also doesn't change us or our experiences nor does it make our uses invalid which is what it felt like, and was what you were doing.

[Rhindeer 217]

I’ve written tons of long posts on my phone. Tapatalk is great for that, because I can save my posts and work on them throughout the day.

 

My fiancé posts almost exclusively from his phone because when he gets on his computer, he’s there to game. So he’ll pick at them throughout the day at work or whenever. I write my posts pretty much half from my laptop and half from my phone; sometimes it can be days or weeks before I open my laptop, but my phone is always there.

 

I don’t find it difficult to post from my phone, either. It’s actually pretty darned fast and comfortable, and I can type at a pretty fast speed on said phone, especially with autocorrect and predictive text. 

 

But yeah, post length has really nothing to do with phone posting. A ton of my games’ users phone post, and you can’t tell the difference.

 

...Well, sometimes you can—one of our members is known for hilarious phone typos and autocorrects. xD But unless you have a super stuffy community, that’s not an issue, and you can just relax and giggle about it. 

[Paulpatine 17]

Desktop only for IC posts but handle a lot of site business on mobile and browse on mobile quite a bit.

[Huskerdust 625]

See right now for the past few weeks I’ve mostly been on my phone. And it’s difficult for me to fully

invest in a post because I’m a shit texter. 

So i usually

only

do com type threads from my phone or very short replies. 

 

In the past I would attempt

to do actual

para posts from the phone but it’s too big a pain in the ass now. 

 

I do see mobile bile devices more for consumption than for creation or whatever that argument was about. But it doesn’t mean that sites shouldn’t be optimized for mobile. I just don’t think there is any way to make it easier to post from a phone because the way they are set up. 

 

But some people have patience and do it wnofhht that they gain they gain the skill. That’s good for them but I think most of us just browse. 

[CovertSphinx 710]

I'm still trying to figure out how in the world any of you IC phone posters (that write full paragraphs) have the patience to sit there and tap away a "long" post. I interject this as I just tried to make a response to a thread on my phone for the first time in months and failing miserably in focusing lol

[Sparky Muse 16]

I absolutely do not like typing on my tablet. It's slow, it's inefficient, that stupid auto-correct, and it loads pages all sorts of funky. I can log on and read stuff, although it's a bit of a struggle every time I need to get where I'm going, but when I post I have a tendency to do longer posts at times, and that could literally take two hours plus on a tablet what I could probably do in fifteen minutes or less on my laptop, and if I make a spelling error or autocorrect funks up something, it can take five or six minutes to fix that and hope it doesn't auto-correct and undo my fix as soon as I leave the word again.

I haven't had a good experience on tablets with regular typing, so there's no way I'm gonna make an RP post from my tablet. Desktop FTW.

[West 1]

I will reply via mobile when necessary, but I absolutely hate it and avoid it when I can 

[Morrigan 1,826]

14 hours ago, CovertSphinx said:

I'm still trying to figure out how in the world any of you IC phone posters (that write full paragraphs) have the patience to sit there and tap away a "long" post. I interject this as I just tried to make a response to a thread on my phone for the first time in months and failing miserably in focusing lol

 

It really depends on the person. I do phone posting until I get out of bed in the morning. I do phone posting until I fall asleep in the evening. It’s really not that hard if you know what you want to say or you have it in your head what to say. 

 

I mean half of everything is just that and if you know your characters well enough ge medium in which you post your content shouldn’t matter. 

 

#posted from an iPhone. 

[Panda 3]

I’ve posted from both and sometimes posting mobile allows me to post while at work on my 3-3-3 sites or I post in a google doc and move over. Lol 

[Kit the Human 758]

11 hours ago, Morrigan said:

 

It really depends on the person. I do phone posting until I get out of bed in the morning. I do phone posting until I fall asleep in the evening. It’s really not that hard if you know what you want to say or you have it in your head what to say. 

 

I mean half of everything is just that and if you know your characters well enough ge medium in which you post your content shouldn’t matter. 

 

#posted from an iPhone. 

 

Habit too I think. You do something so many times, it becomes normal for you.

[JD Hart 72]

I tend to roleplay on mature/advanced sites and could never type out 500 word plus posts on a phone. I try and make sure that I offer something for people who like to post on their phones though - as I know that people can roleplay that way. For me though, it doesn't matter if there is a mobile version of a site - I never use it.

[Hysteria 56]

I know the discussion is a bit on the older side, but something came to mind...what about the folks that use the cross-platform "note saving" apps like Evernote or even Google's dropbox for example? People could write on their phones and post those written works via their computer when they get home or vice versa. This alone shows that there are many reasons why a roleplayer would use both devices without feeling "restricted" by one or the other.

 

As an example, I move around nigh constantly. I have jobs and social connections that keep me on the move, and I am almost always writing from a new device each year because moving means things can unfortunately break from rough travel, or they can get lost, or a myriad of other unpredictable things. So long as you have a way to write and a way to save it and post it from whatever device you might prefer - I don't think that makes you less of a writer or unable to particpate on the aforementioned "advanced" role-playing forums.

 

Heck, some of the most famous authors write their idea's down on napkins, toilet paper, or other random things.

Given that light, I doubt using a phone is the worst a role-player can do. 😛

Edited September 14, 2018 by Hysteria