Discourse provides our hosting and also provides some degree of technical support. I don’t know the exact nature of our agreement, but they keep our software up to date and respond to bug reports and issues. They don’t do admin stuff like manage our site settings and such though.
Since Discourse manages the software for us, we generally aren’t involved in installing updates and don’t really know ahead of time when they are coming. We can check in the admin control panel to see when they’ve last installed an update, so they don’t hide it from us or anything, but they manage it all for us. We can also check to see what has changed in the updates.
So I would expect that sometime in July or so they’ll roll out that update for us and we’ll lose support for those old browsers.
Not yet, though I probably will try it. I really hope I don’t wind up breaking something I need to use, though.
I did get as far as checking to make sure that the iPad’s not showing the warning, though; as well as logging in there and posting from the iPad once. The quote function is a bear because I always have trouble selecting text on the iPad’s touch screen, but I did manage.
There are also people (in addition to me) trying to convince the Discourse people to continue to offer a version, simplified if necessary but still usable to post as well as read, that will continue to work with older browsers and systems. At least one such poster appears to be posting from a country where updated computers are hard to come by for a much larger percentage of people than in the USA, and is pointing this out as a discriminatory issue – Discourse is apparently hosting message boards from all over the world, and they may be cutting off larger chunks of their users than just the handful of us on the Dope who are having problems with this.
There is that risk, I suppose, but if you back up your really essential things… worst case, you should be able to reinstall the whole thing from scratch.
Best case, upgrading to a more modern OS should buy you several more years of compatibility with Discourse and other apps & websites.
Yeah, it’s annoying trying to edit text on an iPad. I think you can hook up a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard to the iPad, though, which might make it easier? Maybe even a USB one on some models? You should be able to find Bluetooth stuff for pretty cheap (much less than a new computer).
Yeah, I’m one of those posters on that other forum too. That post really blew up, huh? It’s getting much more traction there than on the SDMB.
Exactly. I don’t know why Discourse feels the need to keep adding trivial new features when there’s a public backlash against it (and apparently several more in the past too). It’s a freaking forum… doesn’t have to be super fancy… shouldn’t randomly cut people off every few years…
Do you happen to know if you’re able to install Discourse plugins (I mean the SDMB moderators, without having to involve TPTB or change billing or anything like that)?
In the other thread, the company has decided they will not do a more thorough fallback. It’ll still be delayed until July, but then those browsers will stop working:
I’m not sure whether that’s a definite final decision, or whether they might still be argued out of it; possibly by reactions by people in other countries. The argument in that thread is continuing.
Posting my experience with my iPad in case it helps anybody-- I’ve been seeing the message that Discourse will no longer support my iPadOS version for over a month, and I’ve been trying to upgrade my 6th generation iPad (5-6 years old) from iPadOS version 16.2 to 17.7.8.
I kept getting a message that I have too much data taking up space on my iPad and I needed to delete files or apps to make room for the new OS install (even though it appeared I did have enough space, though not by much).
I kept deleting apps and everything else I didn’t think I needed until it seemed like the new iPadOS would take. The download failed a couple times, but I kept at it. Finally, it worked. After what seemed like an interminable time it booted back up…
…and then I’d get a “this website is not private” message for every single website.
Much googling revealed a number of possible fixes, including to just clear the cache of the browsers (both Safari and Chrome were doing it). Clearing the cache worked, and I now seem to have an operating older iPad without the Discourse obsolescence message showing any longer.
Nope, I was on 16.2 (or 16.[something on the low end], I may be off on the decimal) and am now on iPadOS 17.7.8.
It may be that your iPad is an older model than mine, and 16.7 is the most recent update it will support. But you’re good with the Discourse update- 16.7 is the minimum it will support:
From 1st May 2025, Discourse’s minimum supported iOS version will be updated from 15.7 to 16.7.
(They must have extended the date, since I could still log into and see the SDMB as usual as of this morning, but I knew my time was growing short).
Somewhere far away, someone has run over a skunk, and the faint smell is wafting in through my open windows. It seems wholly appropriate to a wonderfully improved world tonight. A kind of melding of themes.
On the upside, Discourse is suddenly much better. No one can see how or why it’s so much improved, but apparently it is.
Posting from Supermium, so that now I have to run a different browser just for fucking Discourse.
Firefox on my Android tablet still works with Discourse. Firefox on my tablet is properly “up to date”, and so it’s an unreliable piece of shit, so of course it works with this fine up-to-date site.
I changed the user agent on the browser to the latest versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari and it was unsuccessful. The Discourse developer forum says that Discourse will also “feature detect” the browser in addition to “user agent sniffing”.
I finally got the SD board to load on an old machine by changing the user agent to “Google Bot”. This loads a text-only site that is a PITA to navigate (to reach the end of threads, only a “next page” link provided and each thread loads on page 1).
Any website that pays attention to the user agent string is badly broken here in 2025 and has been for a decade or more. Feature detection sounds sinister, but is the industry standard solution for building websites that work and cannot be exploited.
Now whether Discourse needs the features they’re apparently now demanding is a separate question I’m not equipped to answer. But anyone thinking that since a fake user agent string didn’t fool the site, then clearly the site’s devs are just being nefarious, is wrong about that.
I’m using the HP laptop I bought a couple of months ago for this day. I don’t even know or care which model it is. It was on sale for around 275. My current desktop is the one I put together 15 years ago.
Maybe I’ll buy a new one later this year.
