Many of you read MLBTR on your cell phone these days. Those on mobile devices have noticed a change this week: the introduction of our new mobile website. Now, if you go to MLBTradeRumors.com on your mobile device, you will get a streamlined version of MLBTR that works much better on a phone. The new MLBTR mobile site loads more quickly, has fewer ads, and retains features such as a search box, the teams menu, social sharing buttons, and the ability to read and leave comments on posts.
Some of you have protested the change, saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” We can debate whether the pinch-and-zoom non-mobile-friendly MLBTR experience was broken, but Google definitely thought it was, and will be docking all mobile-unfriendly sites in their search results starting Tuesday. So while we were planning to go mobile-friendly this year, the Google issue forced our hand to do it now.
Of course, we love our longtime mobile readers and respect the fact that some of you prefer the full text of the latest 15 posts to be available on the homepage. If that’s your preference, just scroll down to the bottom of the screen and hit the Desktop link, and you’ll get the old, familiar desktop version of MLBTR on your phone.
Another alternative is our free Trade Rumors app for iPhone and Android. The app allows for more customization than the mobile website. With the Trade Rumors app, you can set up notifications and feeds for any combination of players and teams from MLBTR, Hoops Rumors, and Pro Football Rumors.
If you ever have a question or comment about our sites or app, you can drop me a line on Twitter @timdierkes or write to me using our contact form.
As long as you keep the option to force desktop, I’m down.
Better yet, make desktop the default, and allow the few people who actually want a mobile site to opt out.
If we continued going mobile-unfriendly by default, it’s possible our website would cease to exist after a few years if we lost our Google traffic.
You aren’t “mobile-unfriendly.” Your site works fine on my phone and tablet. More often than not, it’s “mobile” sites that I find “unfriendly” as a user. But I realize you’re caught between a rock and a hard place on this issue.
Can you please at least make it so the site respects the “desktop” user agent setting on mobile browsers? Because I’m not exaggerating when I say nothing will make me stop reading a site faster than forcing me to use its “mobile” version.
If any zooming is involved or there is tiny unused sidebar content, I’d call that mobile-unfriendly. There’s no reason for that on a phone.
But yes, we are working on the issue of people having to hit the Desktop button every time they load the site, because it shouldn’t work that way.
I respectfully urge you to reconsider that assumption. I’m not trolling you when I say main beef with mobile sites is actually the way they don’t allow me to zoom in and out.
Zooming with text reflow allows me to choose my own personal preferred zoom level and text size. It also allows me to move quickly from one part of the page to another by zooming out.
Remembering the user’s choice of desktop is great, but I’m talking about something that should (I think) be easier to implement. Most mobile browsers have a “user agent” setting that, in theory, tells every website to load the desktop version.
The problem is some websites don’t always respect the browser’s user agent setting. You get the mobile version even if your user agent is set to desktop.
It’s infuriating, and it would be great if you could ensure MLBTR respects the “desktop” user agent setting on mobile browsers.
PS: I just checked, and your site currently respects the user agent setting. As long as that remains the case, I’m cool with pretty much whatever.
Yes, we are definitely working to ensure the user agent setting is respected.
Much prefer the desktop view, it’s a one-time load per page versus the app or mobile site that you have to choose each article and load individually.
The new mobile version is _so_ much better. I couldn’t help clicking through to ads accidentally with the old one.
Thanks for explaining your rational
Really appreciate that you site/my phone remembers that I selected desktop view and I don’t have to switch it on every time I got to the site.
Biggest downfall to the mobile site in my opinion is that it makes it difficult to read multiple articles. I much prefer being able to scroll through multiple articles than having to click a link to change articles. In that respect the load time on the desktop version is actually faster since it opens multiple articles at the same time.
That’s true. I think these days most people prefer and/or expect to just see all the headlines, maybe an excerpt at most, and click those that interest them. But since we’ve been full text on the homepage since 2005, it’s ingrained in our readership (myself included) and we like it. I don’t think it would be mobile-friendly to have the mobile site default to full text though.
One alternative in the app is to go into the first article and just swipe through them, that can be done pretty quickly.
Agreed. I spend a lot of time reading full articles on the home page, before clicking through if I want to discuss/read the discussion.
Are you still going to be redirecting people to the App Store in iOS? That’s so shady I stopped looking at the site on mobile long ago.
The mobile redirects were the result of some malicious advertisers, and affected quite a few publishers:
techcrunch.com/2015/03/19/mobile-web-surfers-again…
That’s not an excuse, just an explanation. It wasn’t intentional and we definitely didn’t make money off it. In fact, I spent a few thousand bucks hiring developers specifically to help me establish where those were coming from, so I could tell the ad networks. We worked feverishly to stop those redirects, but it’s very difficult, and turning off all the ads is not really an option.
I do think that the redirects were specific to the desktop ads being pulled up on an iPhone, so the mobile website should help with the issue. But even before the mobile website was launched, a developer in India helped me pinpoint as many as we could find, and reports of the issue have stopped for the time being.
I apologize, I’m wrong. I get frustrated by spam redirects and acted like a child.
Nice, reject anything that calls you out on your spammy ways.
I can see why you’d think that, but Disqus sent your comment automatically into Pending status. I don’t know what their criteria is for that. We’re getting rid of Disqus.
In favor of what?
Just a native commenting system, like we have on Pro Football Rumors currently. It will lack some of the bells and whistles of Disqus, but long-term it’s for the better.
Aw man, I’m gonna lose all my commenter cred xD
One or the other…. 😉
Oh, no. Please, please do not do this. Disqus makes it so much easier to comment. I was actually going to make a post suggesting that you change PFR to use Disqus. You’ll notice that PFR has almost no comments on any article. Aside from that, PFR’s mobile site is not good at all. imo, you should be making PFR more like this site and not the other way around. Even on desktop, PFR loads way slower than this site.
Maybe a poll asking the readers what they think? If you guys go away from Disqus, I probably won’t post anymore. A lot of us have enough accounts all over the internet as it is. Disqus makes it easier to just drop a comment all over the web. Ask your readers, please!
Just to prepare you, we’re definitely dropping Disqus, and it’s happening within the next couple months. Polling readers about every site change is a bad way to progress…67% of readers wanted us to keep gray text on a black background, but that had to go.
Regarding Disqus, I don’t trust a third party owning everyone’s comments long-term. I can’t control if they go out of business, or any number of things that could happen with them. I also have no ability to customize or add features to the comment system or deal with bugs. It really just needs to be under our control, even if there are growing pains. PFR had Disqus initially and had no comments then either…it’s a fraction of the size of this site, maybe 5% of the traffic.
In terms of PFR’s mobile site, all three sites have the exact same template, so I’m not sure what you’d see as different.
Well, good luck, but I think you’re making a big mistake. Disqus allows random passerbys to make comments as it’s the most popular and functional commenting platform on the web. I’m not even a huge fan of it, but it is light-years ahead of some of the others out there like livefyre and kinja. I sincerely hope I’m wrong and that your new comments system is great.
As far as PFR goes, yes, it had Disqus initially but it was also a brand new site. There have been a few times recently where I’ve thought about posting something but as soon as I see that I need to register, I simply don’t comment.
Design-wise, there are subtle differences to PFR vs MLBTR, both desktop and mobile. For Desktop, PFR is more graphics-heavy and has that annoying news ticker that you can’t get rid of on the top of the screen. The site loads and scrolls more slowly than this one.
For mobile, for reference I use a galaxy s4. PFR is unloadable a lot of the time and is unnavigable at others. Even when switching to desktop, I cannot read it. There are no menu/list/links on the right side of the screen and tapping ‘Teams’ moves the screen to the left and does nothing else (ie it does not show any ‘Teams’ links). Scrolling speed is again an issue. Hope this helps.
Yes, why listen to your readers and what they actually want?
Generally people are going to vote against change, and since most readers don’t run websites for a living or talk with web developers, I wouldn’t ask or expect them to try to learn the nuances of commenting system choices. As I mentioned, owning the commenting portion of our website allows us to build whatever we want for it, so in the long-term we can deliver something better than Disqus.
People vote against change because more often than not the changers are “fixing” what ain’t broke. However, I realize from using Disqus on my own blog for years, it’s far from a perfect solution.
Will your new comment system require me to sign up for a new account? Because the main advantage of Disqus is you can use the same credentials across multiple sites. Would be great if I could use my Google account.
Yes, everyone will need to sign up for a new account unfortunately. Adding something like Google sign-in could make sense down the road though.
Fair enough. While I read MLBTR daily, I only comment rarely, so my main concern is really the desktop/mobile issue.
BTW, I have to say, I really appreciate your patient and thoughtful replies. Keep up the great work!
It has to be certain words, phrases, or some combination thereof.
It’s something set by MLBTR. I use DQ on other sites and never have anything go into ‘pending’.
I think our word filter has too much stuff in it and we get false positives. That’s the only thing I can think of. I’m going to pare it down.
Dude – if you don’t like the site, don’t use it. But there’s no need to be disrespectful. It’s kind of the cherry on top that in addition to being a jerk, you’re also wrong.
As a note, my desktop browser does periodically kick me over to the mobile site for no apparent reason. A little disorienting.
I have seen that occasionally. Can be hard to reproduce but we do have to figure that out.
disorienting for the first time.
That has been happening to me too
Can you tell me if this is still happening? Anyone who happens to be on this thread!
Hasn’t been happening for me since before my initial comment 🙂
Were we supposed to see the mobile site by default on an iPad? If so, not working here.
No, iPad keeps the desktop layout. We might optimize that a bit but the screen is big enough where we don’t need that mobile setup.
Optimizing would be a good idea if possible. It works but can be sluggish.
Thanks… for a while it was impossible to use this page on an iPhone. Good work!
I cannot tell you the last time I typed the letter “m” into my address bar that mlbtr didn’t immediately come up. It’s prob been almost 10 years… That made me feel old.
So when you get rid of Disqus, will we be able to read comments in the App?
Yes, those two things are linked. There might be a month where the app developers are building the new commenting system into the app. But then it will be there.
I like it. Allows the mobile user to see at a glance everything that transpired since his/her last check-in to the site.
Ah, I missed the part about Google’s forcing this change. Another one of their “improvements” that aren’t.
Well, I was planning to do it anyway, so I don’t want to blame it entirely on Google. I honestly think it’s a better mobile experience.
Well, so much for that excuse lol. Seriously, sorry to be such a turd in the punch bowl, but it’s just so rare that a “mobile” site offers me a better experience than the full web version.
I mean, put aside for a moment the fact that our desktop site offers the full text of 15 posts on the homepage. I literally can’t think of one other decent-sized news site that does that, it’s very antiquated.
So imagine our desktop site was normal and had just headlines and some excerpts, maybe like TechCrunch or something. Isn’t the mobile version clearly better, then, since it cuts out zooming, loads faster with fewer ads, doesn’t waste space anymore, and retains functionality?
While your current layout isn’t perfect, I find its simplicity far preferable to the desktop versions of websites like TechCrunch. I personally find those hideous and am frankly baffled by the trend of redesigns in that direction. Just my two cents.
That said, I will agree that visiting TechCrunch on a mobile browser is a positive experience. I particularly like the way it rearranges the layout to show more or less depending on whether I’m browsing in landscape or portrait. If that’s what you’re shooting for, then I approve.
One qualifier I would make is you should seek to minimize the difference between desktop and mobile browsing layouts. One redesign in this vein I actually love is SB Nation. They seem to take a similar approach as TechCrunch to mobile displays.
The difference is that the desktop version of SB Nation websites is much closer to what you get when browsing on a mobile device (in landscape mode, at least). There are some small layout changes, and a few options are gone, but the experience is very similar.
I suspect this reflects a deliberate choice to design the desktop version of the site so it would translate easily to mobile browsers. Something to keep in mind going forward.
Don’t like mobile sites in general, and this one is no exception, but I love mlbtraderumors. As long as you keep it going I’ll be here.