Well, there is this one forum software called vBulletin.
Now there’s a word that instantly makes me feel 20 years older 
Wikipedia has a page that compares various forum software.
It took me considerably more than a second, but I made an account there, got logged in, read through the thread. and typed up a post
And when I hit reply the entire page froze. Wouldn’t do anything at all, including but not limited to posting the reply. Trying to refresh the page wouldn’t work.
Other sites working fine.
I just tried again, reloading the page from your link, and this time it worked. But this has taken me quite a lot of time.
Thank you, @thorny_locust, and sorry the process ended up being more difficult for you than expected.
Like the Discourse devs, I’m on a more recent machine, and it doesn’t give me much trouble. I imagine the experience would be quite different on an older computer 
I’m glad you were eventually able to post there, though.
It does seem like folks there on the thread are speaking up more, and hopefully the devs will consider their pleas and have mercy.
If they do implement a basic HTML mode, that might not just save you from this current headache, but might even make the posting experience on Discourse forums faster for you overall. Maybe.
If not, well, you have your iPad and the two alternative Mac browsers to try (Orion and Firefox Dynasty). Worst comes to worst, apparently you can also reply by email (which I didn’t know), but make sure you set that up before May in case you get locked out of the forum after that…
I hope they will listen. Thanks for saying something to them.
How do I set that up? Maybe I’d better do it, just in case. The iPad isn’t actually any newer than the Mac Mini; it just seems to keep updating without problems (other than, of course, the ‘what the hell did they do with that thing I’m used to doing – oh, the same thing now goes under an entirely different name for no apparent reason; and why on earth did the colors reverse?’ problems that seem to go with updating.) But it’s quite possible that one of these days they’ll say ‘you can’t use that iPad any longer, either.’
This all seems like an extreme amount of effort to not upgrade your mac from 10.14 to 10.15 so you can upgrade your firefox to 137 so you can use the boards like normal.
My mac is so old it will no longer upgrade.
I don’t think this one will do that; I think it’s a hardware problem. Software Update tells me “no updates available”.
I will go further. The first two are minor convenience features, and there are even ways to get them that would still work on older browsers. They’re also entirely cosmetic and thus they could just keep around a cosmetic skin that would work for older browsers
The last one, the regex one? It’s bad practice to use these very much, as they will harm performance. And there are other implementations that could be used in the rare cases where they are actually needed.
As for user-facing features: this isn’t the first time Discourse has done this, even since we’ve been on Discourse. And you’ll note the software is largely the same as when we first got here.
I said it before: the issue is just that Discourse wants to be on the bleeding edge to avoid any risk of legacy code causing problems. There is some merit to not wanting to stagnate, but, IMHO, they go too far–further than any other website. And it’s not like messageboard software is so innovative that it needs to be on the leading edge. If anything, the opposite is true as users skew older and more likely to hold on to older hardware.
Based on what is described here, it sounds like it is very developer-led, and that could easily lead to ignoring other concerns that do not directly affect them. It’s not their job to make sure Discourse is widely used, let alone that existing users are happy.
Based on the discussion on Discourse itself linked above, at least some of the developers think that being on the bleeding edge is the only way to keep Discourse widely used.
In some areas, I could see that. But for a site that hosts messageboards?!
Which Mac Mini do you have? According to this, the late 2014 mini is compatible up to 12.0, the 2012 mini is compatible to 10.15, there actually isn’t a single mac mini that can run 10.14 but not 10.15.
In any case, I provided instructions earlier in the thread about how to install unsupported OS updates on any mac:
Note that there’s a whole separate thread for that sort of discussion; “New Cheap PC for Windows 11 or supporting Discourse discussion {Also obsoleting Browsers & OP systems}”
Yeah, that logic doesn’t make sense to me at all. The only audience I can think of who would care would be very technically minded. As long as it runs in the newer browser and doesn’t look old or run slow, most people would never care.
It’s the late 2014. And again it is telling me that there are no updates available. ETA: it’s running 12.13.4. Processor 2.6 GHz Intel Core 15. Memory 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3.
Finder says 1.04TB available.
Maybe I’ll try to get a friend of mine to do that. At some points I don’t understand what they’re talking about, and I don’t want to mess with my basically-functioning-fine computer by doing things to it that I don’t understand.
That’s pretty much a Windows thread, though.
I had no idea that the other thread was only for Windows PC discussion and that Mac discussion would continue here.
Maybe I’m wrong; but that was the impression that I got.
Ok, so that means you can install regular Firefox. You’re on the ESR version for no good reason.
I’m on the ESR version because that’s all that Firefox will give me. – Whoops, sorry, mistyped. 10.13.4
Also occurs to me that software update I think will only show you upgrades to your current version of the OS. IIRC: for your generation of the OS, you should go into the Mac App Store and search for Catalina to install 10.15.