Louise, you’ve already posted about this problem in posts from April this year and now your spamming the forum with the same topic content in two different categories:
Here’s my summary of your situation and options. I hope this helps you get a clear picture because you need to know how much each option is likely to cost.
- You are self-hosting a forked version of Discourse 1.5.3. Forking Discourse is actively discouraged by the Discourse team because of the problems it creates - the sort of problems you are now having.
- How have you forked Discourse?
There is more than one way to do this as this old topic discusses: https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-a-good-development-strategy-for-working-on-a-fork-of-discourse-privately-on-github/2664?u=remah - Where is your GIT? Do you have a repository that records all the changes you have made?
- You want to use the Discourse mobile (iOS and Android) app which was released in version 1.7. so that will be the minimum upgrade you will need.
- Releases can be read in the Discourse blog as @codinghorror has pointed out, or in the category releases
- It will cost you a significant sum of money to move your forked version back to the latest Discourse. In the long run it will definitely be worthwhile doing this because you will continue to receive the improvements particularly the essential security updates:
- Return to core Discourse
- Develop plug-ins to incorporate all your modifications of Discourse.
- Some of the changes will probably be able to be handled using existing plug-ins.
- You should be contacting developers to get an estimate of what work is involved and how much it will cost.
- Are you listening to what others have recommended? Or are you ignoring it because it will cost too much?
- An alternative is to pay for hosting. With a large enough $ commitment then you might be able to get a cheaper deal for migrating your data.