Probably garbled on older iOSes. My iPhone 6 running iOS 12.5.5 cannot now use Discourse unless Javascript is turned off. That’s OK for short threads but for most of the threads I’m tracking, being unable to use Javascript requires far too much scrolling – like several minutes of scrolling to get down to the bottom of a thread to the latest posts.
Someone else reported exactly this – the Discourse developers seemed unmoved.
I wonder if we’re on of those remaining sites that gets updates later than the rest, due to the extra options we use. I’m going to page @codinghorror to see if he knows about this.
Perhaps. For about 4 or 5 months recently, a few minor Discourse features broke for me when viewing the SDMB on my old phone. Around the end of April, those features started working again. Maybe that was what was going on – a winter 2021-22 Discourse update broke a few small Discourse features for mobile viewers using iOS 12.X.X or whatever. Then a fix was rolled out, and it just took that much time to make it out to the SDMB. Who can say?
I’m a little curious about why fixes take so long to roll out, but I guess I don’t have the details in my head about what makes it take as long as it does. The fixes apparently don’t simultaneously happen in parallel across all Discourse boards.
Not sure if I should start a new thread … there is a new, current issue with this board on old iPhones running iOS 12. Well … on my iPhone 6, anyway – haven’t seen if it’s been reported by others yet.
Yesterday afternoon, I attempted to open https://boards.straightdope.com/ on my iPhone 6 (Safari, iOS 12.5). Now, all it will display is a “Loading” animation that never resolves.
@codinghorror , has Discourse now well and truly washed its hands of iOS 12? Or might something else be afoot?
This was a sudden break. Yesterday at noon, this board worked perfectly fine on my phone. 2 hours later or thereabouts … the break occurred.
EDIT: It was, in fact reported over on meta.discourse. Looks like a fix is being rolled out. iOS 12 support still anticipated to be dropped in January 2023:
My understanding is that it should never be empty. You are supposed to get either the full experience (if your browser is compatible) or a static HTML page with all of the content (if it isn’t anymore).
I might be able to get the static HTML page if I explicitly disable Javascript in the Safari browser. This sort-of worked** the last time Discourse had an iOS 12 problem back in May. It’s not an automatic thing, though.
** sort-of worked = could read the first several posts in a thread, but no further.
I went into that meta.discourse thread and simply asked explicitly that the fix be rolled out to boards.straightdope. David Taylor over at Discourse (who helped fix the May issue) is quite the mensch – he took care of it within an hour. The board now looks great on iOS 12.