Ok I promised some details on my observations using the site in Safari mobile on the iPhone.  The page loaded quickly enough over wifi.

First of all, clicking anything, just about anywhere, is really difficult unless you're zoomed way in.  Clicking on links or radio buttons for instance, you'll see a highlight (or a darklight) where you're effectively selecting when you click a link on this device.  But unless you're zoomed really tightly, you'll notice that entire sections of the web page are "selected", causing nothing to happen.

Next was the navigation menus.  Since you can't hover over things on the iPhone, I have to click the menu item.  I tried the one called "The OIC!".  Because of the issue above, I have to really zoom in to get it to register.  But then there isn't enough room for the whole menu.  So you tap the scroll buttons that appear at the top and bottom of the pop-up menu when the window size is smaller (in Firefox, I can recreate this by making a small window and calling a menu).  Only tapping the button causes the scroll to not stop until it hits the end, rather than scrolling one line.  If you miss and have to click the "The OIC!" part again, it reloads the page, and you start over.

As for the forums, I had several unread forums and threads, all lit yellow the way they should be.  So I went to start this topic.  When I get to the post screen, the rich editor controls don't appear.  I can type away in the window, but I noticed later that's what causes the posts to just get ignored.  So we go to the basic editor.  Again, you have to zoom WAY in on the radio button so that clicking on it registers against the button and not some odd layer of a block of the site.  So we get to the basic editor and it works ok.  I think I figured out that my line breaks were being ignored because the default for basic editor is raw text.  So unless you use tags to even do line breaks, they will be ignored.  So if someone can't use the rich editor for any reason, they get defualted to a user unfriendly editor instead.  Changing the default type of basic editor would probably solve that...if this schmancy forum module allows that in this release.  :-)

When I got done posting, I went back to the top-level of the forums and all of the unread threads and forums were now gray and marked as read.

So yes, I agree that much of this is probably more related to the skins than the software.  And the answer may simply to find a mobile-friendly skin and then use a browser detect to serve the correct one.  Or provide a link to the browser friendly version at the bottom of the screen.

But those are the observations, from an iPhone perspective.  And poke fun, but the iPhone has - hands-down - the best mobile browser out there for basic users, handling the CSS better than pocket IE or the other Mozilla homebrews out there for other platforms.  People are likely to use the iPhone if any mobile device, to view and use this site.

Well it looks as bad as it does on a PC.  :-)  You have to remember, it displays it like a desktop would.  But as for the functionality?  Still selects entire regions of the page when clicking, no matter how "on target" you get.  When I zoom way in, I can trigger the main menu; sometimes it drops down, and sometimes it drops down and then reloads the page (because that's what clicking the menu will do normally).  However on this skin, clicking on any option has no effect, which is a new one.  Very odd.  So I can't get to the forums that way on the iPhone / Safari mobile.  And since the forum URLs are not simplified in any way, I'm not about to type out the whole thing to get to the forum.  :-)