Discourse not working on an old phone with an unsupported browser

[jomaxro (Joshua Rosenfeld)]

@ame

I can’t see how knowing what phone I have, what OS and version, and what browser is going to help. It might help me, but it won’t help anyone else that has the same problem but an ever-so-slightly different setup. My phone renders HTML perfectly. If you could just send that that would be great.

It helps us have an example of where Discourse isn’t working. Perhaps it’s a simple regression that we can fix? Perhaps our browser detection isn’t working as expected? Without that information, we can’t help you, or anyone else here.

We do provide an HTML-only view. It’s what we serve with JS disabled. It’s this view we plan to improve, and show automatically to users with older browsers by June. Here’s this very topic on my browser with JS disabled.

@ame

I also know exactly how software development works. You choose what software you write, and how you write it. Discourse from two years ago worked on my phone. Discourse from today doesn’t.

I’m not sure what your point is here. I’d expect Discourse to change. Discourse is under active development. We’re always fixing bugs, improving performance, adding features, etc. 2 years ago we’d just released version 1.9, and started developing 2.0. 2 years ago we used Ruby 2.4.2, today we use Ruby 2.6.4. 2 years ago we used JS ES2017, today we use JS ES2019. And so on. Using the latest versions of the key components in our tech stack allow us to take full advantage of the features, improvements, and fixes that the developers of each component makes. Like Discourse, not all releases are fully backwards compatible, so as we move to newer releases we lose support for very old devices.

@ame

I can still use phpBB websites on my phone, with full functionality.

That’s great! And it has nothing to do with Discourse. I could list numerous applications that worked on my phone in 2017 and would still work today on that phone. And I can just as well list numerous applications that I use today that would not work on my 2017 phone.

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I appreciate what you’re looking for here. I do. But you’re not letting us help you. We do have a no-JS view. But you say both

@ame

I can’t do that in the browser on my phone.

and

@ame

If you had a basic, but functional, HTML-only interface like Gmail, I’d use it right now in my browser with Javascript turned off. And on my phone.

Further, without telling us which OS and browser you’re using, we can’t see if this is something we can fix! You need to give us something to work with.

I’m going to move this discussion to its own topic, as this doesn’t have anything to do with our IE11 deprecation plan - IE11 isn’t running on your phone. We do want to help you, but all we’ve got so far is a complaint that Discourse used to work, and doesn’t anymore, on an unknown phone running an unknown OS in an unknown browser. Given that you know how software development works, you know we can’t do anything with that report!