Hello, FC/OC Wiki readers, and editors.
We formally request that if you’re visiting the site via a mobile device, or worse, through the Fandom app, that you switch to using desktop view on your mobile devices web browser. A majority of this wiki’s readers, going by Mediawiki’s user statistics, are on mobile devices.
This is rather problematic as these users are presented with a substandard version of the wiki as a result. There is no greater example of this disparity in experiences than the main page. This is the main page you’re supposed to be seeing.
And this is what Fandom forces you to see on mobile devices.
The key word here being forces, as we are unable to edit and remove these trending sections. The content we created in the meantime is shunted all the way to the bottom of the page, and hidden in a collapseable.
This would include our featured pages, rules, the various getting started pages listed there, and our discord plugin, all hidden by force. This isn’t the only issue, but it’s the biggest by far in a whole laundry list, and it has caused several cases of confusion within our community. From people being unable to find our discord server link to mistaking this “trending content” for our featured articles.
Some of you might be asking why don’t we request that Fandom to allow us to change or edit the mobile user interface. To that, the purpose of a wiki is to be a curated information repository. Not an ad promotion vehicle. Given Fandom’s tortuous history with advertised content, we feel that making this request to our readers is more fruitful and useful insofar as getting constructive results.
This isn’t exactly a Fandom exclusive issue either most mobile variants of websites are, for lack of a better phrase, dogwater. Some even lock mobile view/app users from changing key privacy settings. Even regular Wikipedia’s mobile layout is dreadful for anything remotely productive. At the end of the day, it's a User Interface issue that isn't exclusive to Fandom.
In the case that you use a mobile web browser or lord forbid the Fandom app, please do the following.
- Uninstall the Fandom App if you have it installed.
- On your web browser of choice, go into your browser settings and enable desktop view. Here are guides on how to to do so in Safari, Google Chrome/Chromium Browsers (Such as Brave), and Firefox.
You should then be greeted by the desktop version of the site.
It should be stated that we will not prioritize the mobile layout over desktop when it comes to our editing practices. So if something looks like garbage on mobile, now you know why. Thank you for reading.