Last week, the default certificate authority for Discourse announced an incoming change for next year, you can read it in details here:
What that means in the current status of Discourse is that from 2021-01-11T03:00:00Z users on Android version prior to 7.1.1 will be unable to connect to Discourse using Google Chrome. This can be postponed to September if we change how the certificate is requested, but it’s not something we have ready nor planned.
While the blog post shows that this can be a big as 33,8% of the Android users, doing a quick check on the last hour of some our hosting shows this number to be closer to 3%.
The post also tells that one workaround is using Firefox for Android that ships its own updated certificates. Firefox is supported in 97% of the affected users, as it supports Android 5+. And while we don’t support it officially, we do have some enthusiastic Firefox users on the team that keep an eye for basic usability issues.
Users can test if they will be affected by visiting https://valid-isrgrootx1.letsencrypt.org/