This is not an alternative anymore, it is extremely dangerous running old unpatched versions of Discourse, you want to always be on a supported channel. Anybody self hosting Discourse should not ever treat this as “upgrade once a year”, at a minimum you probably need to be upgrading Discourse monthly.
We take security extremely seriously, the amount of eyes on every line of code we write has grown exponentially and there are new edge cases found every few days.
Of course that if you are hosted by us, this is not a concern you have, we upgrade our hosted LLMs regularly and provide you tokens out of the box so you don’t need to worry about this kind of stuff.