Why the cutesy icons on mobile?

The Photo Booth

This is the view of my site (Galleries page) that visitors see on an iPhone (iOS 9.1)




Where there should be a house icon, greater than icon, and stacks of photos icons, there are cutesy symbols (megaphone, plate of food, and green hearts). Even the question mark icon in the upper right corner (not shown in this photo) is replaced by an icon of a girl with scissors in her hair.

Looking at the same page on iPad (running iOS 7.1.1) shows the correct icons (same icons I see when I look at my site on my computer).

PLEASE allow me to force the Desktop version of my site for mobile devices! PLEASE!

Mark

WinsomeWorks

Yuck. That's disturbing. I don't see these on mine, but i haven't published yet, & I'm on an Android. I'm still able to switch to desktop, but only when I'm on just one photo (I think), and it kept switching me back & also kept logging me out. It's a mess. The other thing I notice is that many of my chosen Featured photos for categories or galleries are not showing up on the phone. What's more, they are not the same Featured Photos that show up on my desktop!! And the order of categories / sub-categories keeps reverting to alphabetical or something else, even though I want it to always show in the order I purposely placed them. It seems the default is alphabetical.

annnna8888

Mark, I've never seen this before. It looks like your phone browser isn't loading our custom font that displays the correct icons. Which browser are you using? Can you try viewing your site in a different browser on your phone? Also, iOS9.1 doesn't seem to be final yet - do you have some developer beta version? The latest release version is iOS 9.0.2.

Ana
SmugMug Support Hero

The Photo Booth

Ana, Yes, it's iOS 9.0.2, my apologies. FYI, I figured it out on my own (see below).

I also emailed a Hero for help. Steve responded and asked me to try http://smugmug.com/popular/today on my iPhone's Safari browser. I got the same weird icon substitution there too:






However, shortly after visiting that site I remembered that I had installed a content blocker app on my iPhone about a week ago. The app I installed was 1Blocker. I started wondering if perhaps it was causing the icon substitution so I turned it off. Sure enough, that was the problem. For some reason, 1Blocker is interpreting SmugMug's iconography as something that needs to be removed from the page. Why it is then substituting a bunch of cutesy icons is beyond me.

That said, while clearly 1Blocker is causing the problem, I feel SmugMug needs to figure out why it's happening and correct it. Content blockers are becoming increasing popular and, going forward, I think more and more visitors to SmugMug sites will be using them. 1Blocker is the most popular one right now (on iOS). Something in SmugMug's coding is fooling 1Blocker into assuming this icons need to be stripped or replaced.

I will also be notifying the 1Blocker team of this finding.

Mark

The Photo Booth

More information on the 1Blocker app... Within the App itself, you can configure which types of content gets blocked. I just discovered that turning off the blocking of Custom Web Fonts fixes the issue with SmugMug's iconography.




Leaving that feature off should be all that's needed to allow me to continue to use both 1Blocker and SmugMug on my iPhone.

Mark

annnna8888

Mark, I'm glad you found the culprit. Also thanks for the additional information about the app and for the screenshots, very useful!

Ana
SmugMug Support Hero