Probably not.
Let’s assume it takes
- A few months of full time work to design and code login / sign up (which would probably need to involve captcha, 2fa and more)
- Another month to sort out profile editing pages and posting.
- And then there is notification pages which need to be redone
- Then CDCK would have to own long term maintenance cause the reality is that open source engineers will come and go.
So I would say
- This is too much of a lift to expect the community to pull off for free
- Given how intertwined it is with Discourse we would still need to be involved
- And at the end of it all… we would be on the hook maintaining a very big piece
CDCK has had a long history of dropping old unmaintained browsers.
- https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-will-be-dropping-ie9-support-in-2016
- Maintaining support for iOS 12 - 14 until January 2023
And I am sure there are more.
One point that is very important to keep in mind is that old unmaintained browsers are a bad thing for the Internet.
I get it, not everyone can afford a new computer, but running a browser that is unmaintained leaves the old computers in a state where worms, malware, viruses and a myriad of VERY DANGEROUS software can trivially run on peoples computers. As time passes on it is becoming a lot cheaper for black hat hackers to hack into computers and this is a wide open front door.
I feel like much of the argument here is moving goal posts, it is asking for a no-js / no-css interface to Discourse. A request which is as old as Discourse, but would be an enormous lift to build.
Discourse philosophically, wants to run on software that receives patches. This is something we feel very very strongly about.