It’s already one percent. What number of users should be able to hold the remaining percentage from taking advantage of their up to date software?
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In order to provide a well-rounded answer, it would help if you could share how many users that 1% actually represents. Without knowing whether that’s a few hundred or tens of thousands, it’s hard to meaningfully weigh the impact of this change.
Also, to be clear, no one’s suggesting that the other 99% should be held back. But this doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing decision. Many platforms maintain a basic compatibility mode or fallback experience for users on older systems—enough to stay functional, even if some newer features aren’t available. That kind of approach supports both progress and accessibility.
So the real question is: was a fallback mode ever considered? If so, why was it rejected in favor of a hard cutoff?
Some transparency here would go a long way in helping communities understand whether this is truly a user-centered decision or just a technical convenience.
We are weighing various tradeoffs.
The delay means that more communities will have control over the decision they make themselves.
A community that has many users with this problem, or even a community that has a single user with this problem, could decide “we want to stay on a version that works for them” and stick with the next stable release, which will continue to get security patches from the maintainers for 6 months after it’s released.
Others could choose to patch it beyond that date if there were sufficient demand or self-motivation to do so.
Other communities can make a different decision if they determine that is what’s best for their members.
Fallbacks have been considered to some degree, but doing more than what we are currently doing is not a cost we are prepared to bear right now.
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Thanks for the clarification.
That said, most communities will feel compelled to stay current with the latest stable version—especially for security reasons. So while the option to remain on an older release exists in theory, in practice it’s a non-starter for many. Which means the number of users who end up cut off likely won’t change, regardless of the delay.
Again, in order to fully appreciate the impact of this decision, it would help to know how many users that 1% actually represents. I’ve now asked for this number three times, politely, and haven’t gotten an answer. At this point, the lack of a response suggests it may be a significantly large number—large enough to make this uncomfortable to acknowledge.
If the decision is already made, so be it. But it would be more transparent—and respectful to the communities affected—to at least disclose the scale of that impact.
I don’t have a straight answer for you here.
Discourse is an open source product with several providers and many self hosted sites.
We are thinking in terms of percentages ourselves, and the scale of the impact will be different for different communities.
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Read over @Falco post. There are some options to enable support as his demonstration on Windows XP here.
Wine is an option for mac and if not mistaken things like VirtualBox could be used to fill gaps.
Time is always a factor with tech regarding software support. Virtual machine like virtual box can work well as iirc you can download images for them making it fairly simple to use without a steep curve.
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I’m not quite sure where this 1% figure is coming from, but with 14 million users, that’s still 14,000 users this would banish from Discourse. Just to add some CSS and performance tweaks?
As to “What number of users should be able to hold the remaining percentage from taking advantage of their up to date software?”… why can’t that number be something far, far less than 1%, much closer to 0% than 1%? I’d argue Discourse should be taking the opposite approach, not needlessly making backward-incompatible changes unless there is an overriding critical fix or major feature that absolutely requires it, AND there is widespread user demand for it.
The inverse of that question is “How many users are we willing to cut off to chase some minor conveniences with low to no user-facing impact?” Is a small performance boost that will barely be noticeable on anything but careful benchmarks worth cutting off 14,000 people from their communities?
What sort of “up to date software” are forum users clamoring for…? It’s a forum. People read text and answer text posts. It’s scary that the devs keep saying “we have to keep moving forward” while your actual customers are like, wait, why, none of these features mean anything and you’re cutting real people off.
I feel like this is the exact opposite approach that you’d expect stable, old forum software like Discourse to take. If you want to experiment with new features, that should happen on a unstable canary branch that people have to explicitly opt into, and the main branch should be LTS by default. Not only are you not offering progressive enhancements, you’re also not offering graceful degradations. That is a choice, not some inherent part of software development. You’re choosing to move faster than your users can keep up with.
And your hosted communities have no choice at all. The ones paying you for their community, not to be a tech demo and JS playground.
THIS is why it’s a cultural issue and not a technical one. Thank you for at least being willing to just say it out loud. You’ve weighed the costs of this in dev hours vs estimated user impacts, and in your math, the users are worth less than the cost it would take to make a basic posting version. There’s no other way to say it: You don’t value your real users and communities as much as developer shortcuts 
Sorry to take this quote just a little out of context, but… if you stopped thinking in terms of percentages and thought about the impacts to real individual people in their communities, perhaps the math would look different?
This whole thing is a bit Stalinesque, telling people that they’re basically a disposable statistic because they’re too poor to upgrade hardware or that it’s their own fault for not being willing & able to jump through hoops to install another operating system or compatibility layer or browser fork… just so that they can keep posting text messages on a forum they’ve been a part of for many years?
This is the sort of cost-benefit I’d expect to see from a major new version, like a complete rewrite, not from some minor, invisible developer-facing features that might have some small performance benefits =/ It’s really unfortunate that your company is taking this stance, IMHO, but still… I really do appreciate the transparency.
OK. Anyway, enough whining. I have a potentially/hopefully more constructive question…
If we assume that a basic HTML mode would be helpful for some small # of users, but it’s not something Discourse wants spend to resources on building itself… is this something feasible for the open-source community to potentially take on? It seems a bit too big to be something like a plugin, while still being too small for a whole separate project (like Discorkie).
Would it be conceivable to try to scope this as an alternate open frontend that works with the current APIs, and if so, would there be any chance of getting such a thing (if ever built and tested) to be “officially” accepted/integrated into the main software such that it could also be used on hosted Discourse instances (which is where one of my affected communities is)?
Along those lines, do you have any sort of API versioning/stability system that such an alternative frontend could track?
Maybe the answer there is still a variety of "no"s for various reasons, and if so, that’s fine, but if it’s at all feasible… might be interesting to think about? Not asking for a full-scale feasibility study, maybe just some gut feelings?
I am not certain if such a thing could ever take off or be maintained. Not many devs like working on old software using HTML and minimal JS (but there are still some, like the HTMX folks). Just a thought.
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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.
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That’s a very high tech-saviness demand on users.
Meaning, they will be cut off from their communities.
I am very concerned about the impact of this change on my community. I am running new browsers on newish hardware. But it’s a problem for me if i lose community members.
That makes sense. And if the features you were testing for the were at all related to security, I’d be with you 100%. But slightly better color? That doesn’t seem like a cause worth leaving community members behind.
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Speaking of high tech-savviness demand: I haven’t the faintest idea what that even means. So the curve’s a lot steeper than you think.
For me, the computer’s a tool. I want it to work; I don’t want to have to build it. I didn’t build my tractors, either; or even forge my axeheads.
I have a large number of other things I need to learn in my life, including others which require continual update of knowledge. I do not have the time or brainspace to learn, in addition, enough of the underlying structure of computer software to get to the point at which the above sentence would make sense to me; and I’d have to do that first before being able to even try whatever it is that you’re talking about.
My version of Firefox IS maintained and IS updated. It just isn’t updated to use the specific toys you want to use.
Also true. Not being able to use Discourse won’t stop me from using the computer online, and won’t make it any safer while I do so. I take other precautions, routinely.
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Well, about that 1% … let’s consider just the windows users, excluding all the rest of the operative systems just for commodity, most of the sites that analyzes internet usage normally say that there are probably from 60 to 100 millions of users that still use windows 7 (mainly for geographical, economical or similar reasons, but some of them admit that there is no way for know the real numbers, and that realistically can also be the double).
Take the better possible scenario and say that they are just 60 millions, say that only the 10% of them use some forums or sites that run Discourse software, that makes 6 millions, it’s easy to calculate that estimated 1% 
And about all the “safety risks” of old browsers 
, well, there are always antivirus and firewalls, and as far as i know, none of the better ones have any intention to drop support for windows 7, at least til now (and the better safety “device” against risks is still a working brain in the head of the user) … cause i suppose that all knows that an user that does not follow at least some decent abitudes like “do not click unknown links, none gift you millions with emails in exchange of your personal data, if a site looks a fraud probably is a fraud” and few other similar rules, it’s a risk itself, no matter how much features, patches or updates you apply 
just my half cent
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Install I think VirtualBox and iirc there are some virtual images ready to go. A lot of things that have been complicated have had projects aimed at ease of use.
Wine for example has a variety of front ends available with scripts made for various programs. Making installation of programs simple.
VirtualBox is program that emulates a hardware system. You can often find some images of different Linux Distros. You could even load up something like chrome OS.
Running things like this used to be a bit complicated. Now a days fairly straight forward with the prompts.
Imho if you’re on mac the simplest easiest would be wine using a front end. Installing Windows programs becomes just a couple of clicks like a native application.
Using a project linked in this discussion Falco demonstrated Windows XP working.
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I’ve seen it … but does this means i have to revert back to winXP just for follow a forum ? … i hope not
I think here we are not talking about changing the OS of lots of users just for support an unhelpful (and in most cases, unwanted) feature that add nothing except some colors (no security, no functionality, no helps, nothing other than colors) … as i already said, the “colors” feature is the one that breaks the most part of the old browsers, that apparently pass the other two ones, or at least mine pass them (firefox 115 … still, can be helpful if more peoples that have old browsers make that test on github linked above and report here what ones fails, i suppose this can be helpful also for you developers for collect data about what work and what not), so perhaps the more good thing to do is to exclude that feature and integrate the other two ones for test them extensively with old browsers (i think peoples will be glad to help in testing, too)
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It was just a way to say “even WinXP can run modern browsers”, it’s obviously not a requirement.
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That project I believe works with other windows versions. Falco was just demonstrating that XP works. And depending on the Windows you’re using might even have the compatibility wizard if you did require WinZO. . Don’t remember when they removed support. Iirc it was after Vista?
Sorry, it was a joke (maybe i have to add more smiles to my jokes 
)
I’m already thinking about switch to RedFox in the next 2 or 3 months, but first i need to do a lot of testing for see if it works in the correct way with some specific workgroup private servers that i use for work and hobby, that are, well, just say “very picky” about browsers.
That is not remotely enough information for me to start messing with my operating system, when I would have no clue what to do if something goes wrong. (And the second sentence still makes no sense at all to me.)
– you’re doing the equivalent of telling someone who knows nothing about driving a car ‘Oh, just get on the expressway, you’ll be fine. The signs will tell you where you’re going. The brake is the thing that stops the car.’