If Discourse truly has tens of millions of users, locking out even a small percentage of them in May is a poor decision, especially just to add a few non-essential features. Users with older devices/OS’s are aware of potential risks, are smart enough not to do dumb things, and have valid reasons for not upgrading. Dismissing them as illegitimate users is unfair and contradicts the inclusive spirit of a ‘community.’
4 Likes
I’ve been following along here, and am interested in continuing to better understand what the impact of this change will be on different communities.
The way I’m thinking of it, for a given community, one could break that down as follows:
Ttotal number of users in the communityxnumber of those users impacted by this changeanumber of those users who don’t have an acceptable workaroundbcomplement ofa
ycomplement ofx
ttime we wait to make this change.
For a given community, I assume there is a high probability that x > 0, and that even a > 0.
We could think of the impact of this change on a given community as being modeled as a function f(t) that returns the values T, x, a.
If we accept that x and a will be hard to get to 0, what should we be aiming for?
Perhaps we bucket impact by a/T and set some threshold on what we find acceptable.
We could think of this impact of this change on communities as a whole as being a similar function F(t) that returns a population of communities []{T, x, a}
We could use the same threshold above and measure how many communities are impacted beyond what we’ve determined as acceptable.
If we were to wait another year for this, I assume that for many communities, both x and a would decrease, but still be greater than 0.
So there’s no perfect decision here.
Then, what should factor into our decision?
What is an acceptable value for a for a given community? How many communities are we willing to have cross that threshold? should we make this change?
We haven’t done anything as rigorous as this, but we have looked as some of the data we have to inform our decision, and felt like May is a reasonable answer for t.
7 Likes
I remember this topic from a couple of years ago about a similar situation which I found quite moving:
Perhaps @codev has some tips for how they (and their community) handled this at the time?
Out of curiosity, how is the deprecation handled for those sites tracking stable? As it’s between major releases, will they see this warning or will it just happen next time they update to the next major version?
14 Likes
It feels to me the best answer (for the users) is not about waiting for some while until not too many people are affected, but committing to implementing workarounds - graceful degradation of the forum, retaining read and write capability - before dropping support for older browsers.
What’s the rush with implementing new features that demand newer browsers? Why not always have a graceful fallback?
5 Likes
I think “rush” is the word I’m pushing back against here, by describing the decision as a function of time, with some impact the decreases but may never reach zero
If we said we were planning to do this in 1 year from now vs. 1 month, does that feel like a rush?
Assuming I can ignore that word for now and reframe the question without it:
What’s the [reason for] implementing new features that demand newer browsers? Why not always have a graceful fallback?
It’s about cost, and the relative value of doing this vs. doing other things.
Implementing those fallbacks would take attention and time. And maintaining them would do the same. That’s time and attention that isn’t available for other things.
It may be something we consider in the future, but at the moment, our assessment is that we have to make some tradeoff here.
8 Likes
Maybe a data explorer query to audit browser versions users are using?
1 Like
Indeed “rush” is not really accurate. Though maybe earlier warnings their browser support is ending ETA.
Project like Discorkie maybe the key for folks who are not willing/able/capable of exploring an OS change. Otherwise would need some kind of fallback basic interface. As the affected user can still browse the forum in a read only mode. How difficult would it maybe be to add ability to post/respond using a JSON load like Discorkie while still using the other code for decoration like in the current read only mode?
2 Likes
Something along those lines seems like the obvious solution to me. That way the Discourse team can keep focusing on providing the best possible experience for modern browsers without having to complicate the code with a bunch of fallbacks.
2 Likes
Late 2014 Mac Mini running 10.13.4.
I may be able to update it somewhat from that, though I’m not sure that it’ll fix the problem. I’m looking into update possibilities; but I can’t afford to replace it. And even if my particular device will update – that doesn’t change the overall issue.
Have you considered using bootcamp on the machine and updating to Windows 10 (which will give you till 14 october) or Window 11? It should work according to the internet and will put you on a train that is still getting security updates.
There is enormous amount of risk having an OS that is no longer getting security updates on the wide Internet.
OSes that get updates, are only vulnerable to zero day exploits that cost millions of dollars in the black market.
OSes that are no longer updated are vulnerable to known and disclosed issues, that leaves high risk around junior hackers just enlisting a computer to a DDoS botnet or worse still crypto style attacks where you have to send money to decrypt your computer.
We often underestimate how bad this can be, but there have been quite a few attacks we have seen over the past 10 years that can take out a computer simply by visiting a website.
4 Likes
I’ve read that this one support updates all the way to Monterrey, which is still supported by Firefox, so you get the same version of Firefox I’m running right now.
And you still can run either Windows 11 like @sam suggested or Linux as options. Both will give access to supported browsers.
2 Likes
I don’t have the time to first learn how to make my old Mac run Windows and then learn how to use a Windows system that I don’t want and that apparently even a lot of Windows people don’t like. I’m running a farm and will be extremely busy between now and October 14 and for some time after that.
And wouldn’t I have to pay to use the Windows system, with money that I haven’t got?
Yeah, I’m looking into that, and might try that. Seems like it might be a temporary fix at some risk of screwing up something else I routinely do on the Mini; but it might also stand some chance of fixing something else currently not working right.
2 Likes
I just posted in that thread, or at least tried to; and now the only thing I can see is
“HTML content omitted because you are logged in or using a modern mobile device”
How do I get that thread visible again? and what sense does it make to tell me I can’t see it because I’m logged in? and yes I’m using the desktop.
2 Likes
Sorry for the interruption, but I would rather ask: “What is the reason for giving up on many users just to implement one useless and frankly even annoying feature at all costs?”
Because, let’s be honest, who cares about managing alternative colors, given that most users follow forums that use your platform for their content and not for aesthetic appearance?
If you look closely, the “relative color syntax” feature is essentially the only one that is not supported by many of the older browsers, while the other two are supported (or at least, even my old Firefox passes the tests for the other two, as useless as they might be, and only fails on the relative color syntax, which is TOTALLY unnecessary for forum content).
It’s not so hard to decide not to implement something totally useless, right?
Also consider that, according to some sources, Windows 7 is completely insecure (which is false, but let’s leave that aside for now), and that it is no longer used by anyone… According to various online analysis sites (none of which give exact numbers, so it’s an estimate), there are still between 60 and 100 million users for various reasons (backward compatibility, software that no longer works on Win10/11, lack of financial means to upgrade, CNC machines that run on Win7Pro but not on 10/11, and others).
Although this is a small percentage compared to the estimated 1.5 billion users who use a PC (NOT all Windows, including Mac, Linux, etc.), it’s still not insignificant… Considering that, since discourse is " infiltrating" many environments, even just 1 or 2% of these users who use any service based on discourse (probably more, but let’s be conservative), and if they have not yet switched to something better, like newer machines or operating systems, they may be unable or unwilling to do so now. This represents a potential user loss (excluding bad publicity and loss of trust) that could range from a minimum of 60,000 to a maximum of 200,000 (or more). I find it hard to believe that the discourse management cares little about this… Am I wrong?
Wouldn’t it be better to simply remove the pointless implementation of the only “feature” (let’s call it that, because I don’t want to be rude) that causes most of the problems, and only implement the other two, provided they are really useful?
5 Likes
As moderator, want to jump in here. This is an important topic and we appreciate hearing feedback from many voices. We are listening! However, I do want to remind about the community guidelines. Let’s keep it civil, please. 
7 Likes
This may work to let you run Windows applications on your Mac. I have used it on Linux so in theory just need to install it. No windows license required.
3 Likes
Goto to sidebar and select “My Posts”
I think this might be the topic/post you’re looking for.
2 Likes
Actually the problem was that I had turned off some javascript that needs to be enabled to use this site.
It would have been much more useful for Discourse to tell me to turn on Java than to give me a message that appeared to have nothing at all to do with the actual problem.
1 Like
You’re saying it might let me run an updated Windows browser? All the test reports I can find on the site for this os appear to be for games.
Using the search on the link I provided with Fire fox
1 Like