Has the site layout changed in the last 12 hours or so?
Used to see my own username and vote counts when browsing which would also serve as a link to my own profile, however that's been removed/replaced and now needs the left swipe sidebar navigation for that purpose - which doesn't always work, meaning it's not only a far less visible option but also far less effective.
There's nothing in the last 2 weeks on the changelog win [unless I've misunderstood what that is meant to be], and given this wasn't an issue the last time I checked here on mobile [under 14 hours as I remember checking a thread that is now that old] something seems to have changed with no notification.
It looks different on mobile for me, looks like they changed it to the new "shared site" look. I think the devs goal is to create a full Reddit alternative in the end game but with less rules or oppressive admin. Hence the changes. The site is still a bit of a beta in that changes occur regularly and aren't always put out with an official change notice. With respect to the changelog, it may be a KiA2 specific change, as TD.win has been on that interface for at least a couple weeks now.
You can check communities.win and post over there if you have an issue, but that's a pretty dead forum for the most part. It might be useful to them if you have a certain odd phone configuration CSS and Javascript can do different things on different devices. If you've got something common like an iPhone I suspect they are aware. Sidebar works fine for me on Android 10/Brave.
Android and Brave here as well. Took 10 attempts to click the arrow to get off the message pages for the General and All Communities pages from the sidebar as neither seem to be working yet. Have experienced several times now needing multiple attempts at getting the sidebar to show.
Given the previous option was an ever present url to click this change is pretty crap in comparison for the reasons mentioned in the OP. Reduced visibility, reduced effectiveness of function. That stupid set of arrows that impedes posting is also still there so if anything this is nothing but a reduction in user control for the site.
It feels like quite a few previous examples I've encountered of end user experience being mismatched with product design and implementation.
Yeah if it were me I would have omitted those other categories from the sidebar until they were ready to launch.
I tend to be a bit lenient on the dev of the site overall, as it's pretty much a one man team doing all the tech work on the site. We aren't talking about a user experience team that has spend 6 months looking at PowerPoints about a redesign and then some Indians that make it for them. I think they are doing pretty good to have gone from nothing to handling millions of pageviews a day in a year despite being dropped by several hosts and targeted by DDoS attacks. So, I just temper my expectations a bit with that in mind.
Definitely changed today compared to the last time I was on yesterday.
Seems to me like they've implemented cross win navigation in the sidebar, rather than having everything be disparate sites, which is nice but having to make an extra click to reach my profile is annoying
I believe they're rolling out experimental changes, that some people get and some people don't. Could be wrong, but I saw some people talking about that on TD.
Long story short, communities.win tends to run a newer version of the site than kia2 does.
There were mobile changes a while back, that have made their way down the pipeline and are now here on this site.
In the sidebar there's the version that any particular .win is running (as of right now on this site: v1.2.1.16).
There was a sweeping set of changes in 1.2.0.0 - https://communities.win/p/11R4NtSyCi/mobile-ui-and-dark-mode-update/c/ , as well as a few minor changes since then.
WHY IS EVERYTHING BLUE
I LIKED THE GRAY