Board Thread:Administrative Discussions/@comment-1824272-20150205084333

Good day, aces! I wanted to bring up something important to the future of Acepedia and to Wikia in general: our presence on mobile devices. It's a known fact that Wikia's mobile skin is subpar for what everyone requires out of their favorite wikias, and Acepedia is no exception. , and they brought up some interesting points that I felt were necessary in making sure that we can keep Acepedia accessible no matter where our users are accessing our articles and files.

This is going to be a long one, but I would highly appreciate everyone looking through this and taking it seriously. I need some feedback on a couple of decisions as well. So, without further ado...

Best Mobile Practices
The first half of keeping Acepedia as accessible as possible through mobile devices is making sure our content is easy to digest, not just by the users but also by the mobile browser that's trying to load the page. There are various tips and tricks to keeping articles "mobile-friendly" that Wikia shared in their announcement, all of which are available at the following links:

''Keep in mind that pages in the Help: namespace on Acepedia are typically hosted on the Community Wikia instead of actually on Acepedia. These articles and their information aren't hosted here.''
 * Help:Intro to mobile
 * Help:Wikitext best practices
 * Help:Designing a mobile-friendly main page
 * Help:Avoiding nested tables

What does this all mean? Basically, this translates to the fact that we have to pay attention to how our articles will appear on mobile devices as well as how they look to desktop users. According to Wikia, 50% of all pageviews this year will be on a mobile device, so we'd better make sure we do it right!

I've already made a couple of updates towards mobile-friendly wikitext, involving the Quote template and the Notice template (previously the Box template). However, there's a lot more we can do. I'll be continuing to familiarize myself with the four Help articles Wikia created, and I hope that users interested in helping out with this effort will look into doing the same.

If anyone has any suggestions or wishes to discuss changes we can make to some articles or to the Main Page or to some templates, please feel free to comment about them and we can get a discussion going!

Mobile Browsers, Game Guides, Community Apps
The second half to our presence on mobile devices is where exactly we can be accessed. There are three options that we can choose to push for and utilize, none of which can be taken lightly.
 * Mobile Browsers: I'm sure most of our mobile visitors, if not all of them, are coming to our site through mobile browsers such as built-in browsers, Google Chrome, Firefox, etc. We're already on here and this is something we'll have to keep in mind at all times in the future (see the section above, Best Mobile Practices).
 * Game Guides: Game Guides is an app run and maintained by Wikia. All wikias concerning video games are listed on here. If you download the app and search for Acepedia, you'll find us! :D We aren't exactly pushing this right now, and it hasn't been a priority yet to curate the content and categories properly, so it's very incomplete. However, it's definitely something we can look into. For more information, see Help:Game Guides. However...
 * Community Apps: Community Apps are like Game Guides above, except they're individual apps run by Wikia but maintained by one wikia. Imagine having an app just for Acepedia! We don't currently have this avenue open to us, and when I asked Wikia Staff about it, they said that the request for starting this has to be done through official contact. I'm very interested in pursuing an official Acepedia app hosted by Wikia, but I wanted to see what you guys would think about this. Any and all feedback appreciated, which I can send to staff if need be :)

Closing
So there you have it. Some ideas and some paths we can take to better Acepedia's presence on mobile devices. I'm sure having information quickly accessible, especially for those playing Ace Combat Infinity, would be extremely helpful in situations like looking up a plane's statistics or such.

Once again, I must reiterate that any and all feedback is welcome and appreciated and kind of necessary ^_^ Thank you all for reading and contributing! Until next time, aces! 