Forums » Help » Mobile Users: Tips

As a long-time mobile user, I find about half my RPR time is spent from my phone. I know it's sometimes a pain, but there are tips and tricks to make it easier! I'm going to share these experiences with you to help you out.

I am an Android user. I don't own an iPhone or an older phone model with a decent enough browser to browse the site. If you are an iPhone user or a user with an old phone model, please PM me and let me know if you have any useful tips! I'll make sure to include them here.

Please keep in mind my advice may not work for non-Android phone or tablet users.

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The first step: making RPR mobile friendly.

Go to Dashboard > Your Settings and scroll down until you see "Display Settings". You will find a checkbox here that says "Try to be more friendly to low-memory devices". This option will strip a lot of data from pages where you post, like when replying to a forum topic, to make loading the page easier on your phone. This is not necessary, but especially useful on older phones that struggle.




The second step: using an appropriate browser.

The default Android browser is not very nice to use for RPR. It doesn't format a lot of content properly and makes your notifications page look a little messed up! That's why I recommend Opera Mobile. It formats pages nicely and when I tap a textbox - for example the search bar - it will open a nice, big text window for me to write in.

(Tip: If the bottom menu bar shows up when you first install it, and you don't like the screen being so small from it, tap the big red "O" and then go to "Settings". Turn OFF "Navigation Bar".)

I have some pictures to compare between Android's default and Opera Mobile. Just click on the collapse tag to see every example.







The third step: a lifesaving tip for multitasking roleplayers.

Don't switch apps when you're in the middle of a post. Especially if you use Opera, do NOT do this or you might lose everything you wrote! Multitasking is possible, but pages often reload if I switch from Opera to Skype, and then back to Opera. I've lost a lot of writing this way, and it's very uncool.

I recommend you use your default Memo app to write very big posts in. You can save the post easily, then press and hold until you can "Select All" and then "Copy" your post. Go to your browser to post, press and hold until you can "Paste", and voila! This way of writing big posts saved my ass a bunch of times, so I can only endorse it.

For those who have huge documents/posts and want some more flexibility, try one of the following text editing aps:

• Google Drive (Synchronizes your files with your Google account, which I find useful!)
• Docs To Go (Recommend by Ross)

The fourth step: making drop-down menus work.

It's very annoying that my build of Android/Opera does not support drop-down menus properly. If I tap on "Forums", it instantly takes me to the forum's normal front page instead of showing me the drop down menu.

I found that I can make it work with a little bit of precision! There's a small area beneath each menu that can be tapped and it will make the drop-down work without actually clicking the link. If this has annoyed you, try tapping in this area of each link:



You might need a few tries to get this right, but it works! Took me a very long time to figure this one out.

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This concludes my tips at this time. Again, if you have any tips of your own, please share them! I will update this post with any new tips. And probably be very grateful to have some new tricks to use, myself.

I have a tip: if you're writing a really big post, consider using an office app (polaris came with my phone, you could also use openoffice) to write your post, as the memo will cut you off after a certain number of characters. You can make multiple memos, but it'll be more of a hassle copying and pasting.

Also, bear in mind that you may lose line breaks when pasting in to opera from an external source. I haven't found a fix for this yet.

Those must be some really big posts! I haven't hit the memo limit yet with mine. I'll go hop on Android market and see if there's a couple of office apps to recommend.

And I don't think I've ever experienced line break losses with mine. And I copy pasta a -lot- with moderating stuffs. Where do you copy and paste from when this happens?

Polaris office - I haven't tried many mobile word processors, as I only recently moved to my phone as a primary posting device since my laptop went in for repairs.

I have a iphone so to be of further assistance I'll let ya know some tips and tricks and such. Just gonna be a bit. About to be busy with my son here this weekend. Goofy kid is claiming he fell on his bed repeatedly. Lol.

Update: docs to go is pretty good.

Updated the post with two links for document editors.

I'll be looking forward to your PM, Lance!

I've been encountering something. Since I do everything via mobile I figured is just ask here. Since my return an odd thing happens, I'll be browsing around the site and I click to a new page (from the home page to the news for example) and I end up logged out, I can still see the news, but I have to log back into the site (not a massive issue just a pain in my butt.) I was wondering if anyone else encountered this issue?

That's a browser issue. Are you by any chance using Safari? I also encounter this with Opera, when I login it doesn't always register my login, and I have to login again. It doesn't randomly log me out while browsing though.

The issue is very likely that your browser is not storing the cookie properly, causing you to log out.

I'm using Opera I switched after someone (I think it was you actually) recommmended it. It happens randomly, and thankfully hasn't when I was replying to a post.

Then that's definitely Opera! I'm sorry to hear you're having this problem. A tip before sending a post: press down until you see the option Select All, then copy. If you make a habit out of this, you surely won't lose your post.

If you keep having this issue regularly during a session, I've found that forcing a Log Out and then logging back in also tends to help.

If you're logged out when posting, it will show your post when it doesn't go through, so you can save it for later. You won't lose it! All you have to do is copy and paste it again.

I've been using a mobile browser for a while and I just now found this.

Another browser I'd recommend is Google Chrome. I like to multitask a lot, and this browser has the best mobile-friendly tabs system I've ever seen. I can open my RPR in one tab, see a few of my RPs got replied to, open them up in new tabs, and then add another tab to google whatever.

(Speaking of tabs, am I the only one who opens a new tab on their browser and says "Ok, now to do something more productive that is NOT RPR" and then immediately open RPR again? I'm weird.)

So yeah, there's that. Also, with Chrome when you tap on the RPR's drop-down icons it opens up the drop down menu for whichever one you're tapping. You can tap the icon again if you just want to go to that main page.

Anyway, there's my product endorsement for today. This is for iOS, so I'm not sure how accurate it would be for Android users.

(Also, hey! Nikina gave me kudos! I remember that! )

Thanks Sanne! I'll check to see if I'm using an outdated version of opera too.

lol Oaky, I might have a lookie into it and yes I gave you a kudos for Bunny Kitty Moose.

Hey, this thread is kinda old now, but I just wanted to echo Oaky's praise of Chrome. I use it for android and it works really, really well. The best part is that you guys were all talking about saving your post for if the page reloads... no need to do that on chrome. It does reload pages, but it saves your writing when it does, which has saved my neck many times. Plus it's just really nice and smooth to use, I love the tab system, and everything works correctly! I've never tried Opera but I'm pretty sold on Chrome.