Does anyone have the ability to get in touch with an IB representative to discuss what current options are available/endorsed by IB to support mobile?
I contacted IB through their site a month ago with no response...

As many veterans may know, we had the RX7Club app many years ago and was shut down by IB in favor of the GarageTalk app, which supported all IB forums.
GarageTalk has been removed from the App Store (and I would assume the Android Store as well).
IB forums are not supported by Tapatalk, which is the largest mobile forum application.

So currently, as far as I know, there is no mobile support whatsoever beyond using a browser. I would like to know if IB has plans moving forward now that GT has been eliminated. It would be a shame and a shock if there is nothing on the horizon.

 

Given that this website is written in the old table format and not responsive with respect to styling such as Bootstrap 4, it would be a complete rewrite if the website. Many companies don't want to have to support building out a website and a mobile app. It's easier to just make it responsive and be able to view on any platform.

 

Thanks for the feedback. Sounds like you're in the business so you know the technical limitations, but does that explain why their own app which supported this site was discontinued/removed from app stores? I would imagine occasional app maintenance to keep compliance with new OS versions would be less burdensome than rewriting the site for something else.

Hoping to get some feedback from IB, if nothing else to have confirmation that they have ended support with no intentions of further action.

 

This might help.

https://www.vbulletin.com/en/mobile/

https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...bulletin&hl=en

https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/...nc/id401734351

 

@DC5Daniel,

I sent you a PM regarding your question. Thanks for making this thread. We'll get an answer shortly.

 

We have deprecated Garage Talk, and are instead focusing all of our efforts on the mobile theme. We have a significant update which will be rolling out this week in fact. The apps were always supported by external teams that we had no control over, whereas the mobile theme is completely within our own tech teams' control which allows us to be a lot more responsive when updating and adding features to it. We have no plan to develop another application, the overhead of maintaining through an external team which has an entire companies demands to support is not sustainable.

Happy to take feedback about things you like or dislike with the current mobile browsing experience.

cheers,
robb

 

Hi Robb, thank you for taking the time to respond. I can understand wanting to bring everything in house.

While I can't comment on the current mobile browsing experience, I will certainly have to give it a try since that is the future. I will say features such as push notifications via a dedicated app will be missed...

 

@Robb M., thank you for the rapid reply to DC5Daniel's question!

 

This is one thing which we are working to be able to replicate. Please do let me know any other feedback or suggestions that you have.

cheers,
robb

 

This may part of your big update coming this week, but I’ve noticed a few things:
1. You cannot view a members post count, join date, online status indicator, or even see their veteran badges on mobile (at least on iPhone). This is including when you view their profile. Makes it hard to identify spammers, differential between newbies and veterans, etc.
2. Many attachments/images do not display when you click on them; you are greeted with a black screen. If you secondary click on the image and choose “open in new tab” It opens every time.
3. There is no apparent way to see there have been new posts in threads you’ve posted in (unless you’re subscribed). On GarageTalk, if you went to your own profile and selected “show all posts”, every thread would have an indicator if there had been new posts after yours.

 

Thank you for taking the time to send me feedback!

1 is being addressed this week, we have added a mobile 'contact card' which will pop over when clicking on a username inside a thread.
2. can you please share some links for me to check out?
3. I believe there is a red dot which appears over the post count that indicates if there are new posts, kind of like this:

 

I appreciate you soliciting the feedback

1. Excellent, can’t wait to see it.
2. Here is the most recent example I encountered yesterday(post #6 to be specific). I’ve encountered this a lot in the past, but never paid much attention because I always used the apps and assumed the mobile site was just flaky.
https://www.rx7club.com/adaptronic-e.../#post11793329
3. I know the feature you’re referring to, but there doesn’t seem to be a mechanism in place when you specifically view your posts via your user account. It was nice to casually see there was thread activity after I had posted, without the need for subscribing. See below example:

mobile site (no indication someone else has posted neither with a dot or with their user name and post time):



GarageTalk (notice the blue dot next to the post at the bottom):

 

Can you share the link that you used for your mobile example? I'm not really sure where you got there from

I am looking into the mobile images now as well.

 

Sure, image and link below. Accessed by clicking your username from the menu (takes you to your profile). Same method as accomplished in the app.

https://www.rx7club.com/search.php?searchid=16046788





Additional comment/question: I setup a shortcut to the homepage, so I can access the forum like it was an app. Problem is a new browser tab is opened every time the shortcut is clicked, so very easy to end up with a dozen open forum tabs! I realize this is specific to my use case, but maybe others would like to do similar. Not sure if you have any ideas to work around this . It would be nice if every time I clicked the shortcut it would just redirect the tab that is already open. I can understand how this might be difficult to handle if a user has several different pages open to the forum, certainly don’t want to falsely redirect those tabs.

 

I prefer to use the full size version even on mobile. hopefully that will still be an option

 

Are you converting the site to use bootstrap 4 vs the old table format?

 

I have been able to replicate your issue with attachments not opening from the mobile theme, I'll be reporting to tech to see why this is. I'll come back here once I have more info on why and when we can fix it.

As to your second concern, I can not replicate this behaviour on iOS 13.5. I've tried a number of ways to make the homepage bookmark open extra windows and it always opens the most recently used instance of the page I bookmarked. It's possible I am not leaving enough time between, or using enough other apps/memory that Safari is holding my choice in cache somehow, but I don't know that this is something we can address from our end.

I do as well, and yes the full-size version will always remain available regardless of device choice.

I'm really not sure what you mean here. While the surface of this may appear to be old, we are actually releasing a significant update to the underlying forum software this week. Our team have created a customized version of vBulletin specific to our needs and it's continually being updated.

cheers,
robb

 

When I look at the source code, I see a lot of class="trow" "tcell" etc. The site does not have a responsive design like Twitter Bootstrap 4 would offer. The current CSS just looks outdated. I do see inline styling. I've been coding using C# and bootstrap 3/4 along with htlm5 and can say it is a world of difference for the user experience.

 

@Robb M.,

You may recall that KansasCityREPU suggested updating the source code to Bootstrap when we polled the community for improvements to the forum. At that time, he kindly offered to advise on specifics either to you or to the IB tech staff.

@KansasCityREPU, not trying to throw you under the bus. If you are still available to advise then maybe that option could still be explored?

 

I get what you're saying now, thank you for the explanation. I don't think that we will be making significant change like that in the short-term.

Definitely appreciate the offer, though I imagine it's not going to be super feasible for us to consider this until we're out of these Covid times I'm afraid.

 

yes - I'd like to help where I can. I'm a web developer so any help I can offer I'm willing to give where IB sees fit. I'd even offer to write code if thats a possibility. I'm fluent in C# MVC, Razor, HTML5, JavaScript, JQuery, SQL, etc.

 

the most recent software update has been pushed out. tap on a persons username to activate the new contact card pop-up:

 

I did see that roll out early yesterday.
I noticed your contact card opened as a separate pop-up; on my device the page is redirected. Are you using the mobile theme? I'm on iOS 13.5, so wondering why the difference.

Also, was it ever considered to display any of this data without the need to click the contact card? For example we see people's user title under the screen name. I would rather see online status, post count, and/or seniority badge. Maybe I'm in the minority. There seems to be room currently to possibly implement without removal of the user title. I’m not sure how feasible that is, or if anyone else would appreciate that.

 

If you tap the avatar, it opens the profile page, if you tap the actual username, it provides the pop-up. This seems a bit inconsistent to me, so I'm asking our team about the reasoning.

These are good suggestions, and the boxes within the existing layout definitely help to visualize what might be possible. I know for the seniority badges specifically. we are working to re-implement them from CSS, right now they are images. I could see them being added when that is complete. Join date or post count I think would also make great additions as well as online status. I'm going to share all of this with our team. Thank you for making some really great suggestions about ways we can improve the mobile experience here at RX7Club, I certainly appreciate the input.

cheers,
robb

 

Robb, thanks for all the feedback and reception. Very nice that IB seems to enjoy improving the user experience!

Noticed two more things:
1. Whenever you click in a text box to reply in a thread, keyboard defaults to lowercase. This is also true if you “RETURN” down a line. iPhone natively will default to uppercase at the beginning of text, punctuation, and RETURN, so not sure why this is happening.
2. The site seems to refresh very frequently when you have a reply box open...if you’re typing a reply and view another browser tab (maybe for reference) for more than what seems like only a minute, your page is refreshed and your message is lost! Very frustrating!