The discussion revolves around making Discourse work with Windows XP and Let’s Encrypt. iamntz wants to serve non-SSL pages to Windows XP users and SSL pages to others, but faces issues with dynamically disabling use_https and Discourse redirecting to HTTPS despite the checkbox being unchecked.
Mittineague points out that Windows XP support has ended, and sam suggests buying a supporting certificate instead of trying to find a workaround. iamntz shares statistics showing that Windows XP still has a significant user base, around 10%.
Codinghorror questions the source of these statistics, and Mittineague agrees that supporting an unsupported OS may not be worth the effort. iamntz provides links to various sources showing Windows XP’s market share, except for w3schools.
The discussion concludes with iamntz reiterating the purpose of the topic: to explore possible solutions and avoid spending extra money on an ancient OS. Mittineague acknowledges that China may be a significant contributor to Windows XP’s remaining user base.
Hey guys, as you may heard, letsencrypt is launched already for a while. You may also know that letsencrypt doesn’t quite work on Windows XP and some Android versions for various reasons. Long story short, it’s not a browser issue, it’s an OS issue.
However, the obvious solution would be to serve non SSL pages to Windows XP users and SSL pages for the rest of the users.
Buuuut… how it should be done?
One solution I can think of it is to route Discourse through Nginx (which is in plan anyway, because I want to host a static site as well on the same server) and add a condition to serve SSL pages only to supported OSes.
But then I have other two issues:
I can’t disable use_https dynamically, right?
Discourse doesn’t really care either if that checkbox is checked or not, it will redirect to https version if certificates are present (and if the SSL templates are enabled in the yaml config file?)
There is a way of dealing with this? (other than disabling SSL completely or buy a „real” certificate?)
@sam: thanks, I wanted to know if there is a way of doing this before I spend any money on it.
@Mittineague: that’s the official statement. The reality kind of beat that; stats usually shows twice as many users compared to Win10 and around the same compared to Win8 (~10% for WinXP, ~4% for Win10 and ~12% for Win8).
I’m not saying there aren’t some still using it. I myself, due to budget constraints, was stuck using Win 98 for far longer that I would have liked.
The point is, that it is no longer supported and therefore no longer safe to use online.
IMHO it doesn’t make much sense to spend time or money trying to keep it on life support.
