Want to edit from a mobile device? Now you can. (Android only)

If you use an Android device, you can now use it to edit Giant Bomb.

Here's what you need to do:

1. Install Firefox if you do not have it already.
2. Launch Firefox and install the Stylish extension.
3. With the extension installed and enabled, install my Giant Bomb mobile edit button style.

That's your inital setup, which you only have to once. Now, let's say you're on the go and you want to edit the Giant Bomb wiki. Here's what you do.

1. Use Firefox to navigate to Giant Bomb and select Request Desktop Site from the menu. This will kick you back to the home page if you're not already there.
2. Navigate to the page you want to edit the same way you normally would on your device.
3. Hit the big old edit button at the top to enable editing mode.
4. Tap the save button to expand the save form, optionally enter a comment, then tap the real save button.

Editing is not optimized for mobile devices. The WYSIWYG editor does not work as well as it does on your computer, the save button might get in your way, you may need to rotate your device landscape orientation to access the real save button, and various other things could be broken. Clearly it was disabled for a reason. But it should work fine for simple tasks, which is probably the reason you'd want to edit on a mobile device in the first place.

Unfortunately, it is only available for Firefox for Android at this time. Other browsers do not support extensions or custom styles. If you wish to continue using a different browser, you can use Flashify to open your current URL in Firefox whenever you need to. Requesting the desktop site will send you back to the Giant Bomb home page, so when that happens just press the back button and refresh the page to see the edit button.

A better solution may appear in the future, but for now hopefully you'll find this satisfactory.

Oh for Android only? :(

Happy that editing on a mobile device is becoming possible. :D

@Dragon_Fire This solution is for Android only. And the second solution I discovered later is only for Android with root. A third solution I discovered might work on iOS and others, but I haven't tested it thoroughly. I'll explain those other two methods at a later date when I have a better understanding of them.

Not sure if this works on iPhones, but with the Chrome browser on my iPad I can edit giantbomb pages when I hit the "Request Desktop Site" button.

Right, right. Because by changing your user agent, you've eliminated the one thing that identifies the iPad as a mobile device and disables editing. Phones have an additional obstacle, which is that the button is hidden on smaller screens. The user style in this post simply forces the hidden button to be shown.

But knowing that Chrome also has a "request desktop site" feature on iOS gives me hope that my third method, which I have only gotten to work in Chrome for Android, might work in Chrome for iOS as well.

If Giant Bomb supports this, then why don't they just enable editing on mobile devices on their end. That would seem a lot easier.

@max_cherry: The quality of WYSIWYG support varies depending on OS version. And on Android you also get browsers like Chrome and Firefox that bundle their own rendering engines so you can't even rely on OS version. The only way to be sure it works is to test as many different devices as possible. I've also found that there are different types of text selection in mobile browsers, and the one that WYSIWYG editors rely on requires the the Shift and arrow keys of a keyboard. That will likely come as a surprise to users who try to format text.

The technique demonstrated in this thread only works on a single browser, and that's actually a good thing because it's easy to test. I've also found other techniques after I posted this, but I can't be sure they'll work well across browsers, devices and operating systems.

I hope people appreciate the work I've done getting editing working for mobile users, but doing so has helped me understand why they disabled it in the first place.

@lordandrew: I am sure as you started seeing at how complicated the wysiwyg. Cheers on the great effort here.

We were able to get the editor to sort of mostly work but performance was a huge issue on anything but the latest devices and even then things were not great. Text selection being a problematic event for one. I'd love to be able to get things working on mobile devices but as you can only imagine the incredible number of devices and OS makes it a challenge. We'll see what the future holds.