I often use my Asus Chromebook PA201-DS03 to read Fortran-Lang.discourse.group. This is an older Chromebook beyond its AUE date (2020), but it has been working flawlessly (as far as I can tell) on every site that I pull up. I have been using this Chromebook to read this site since I joined, over six months ago.
About a week ago, when I opened fortran-lang.discourse.group in the Chrome browser on this specific Chromebook, I saw a completely blank screen. One by one, I disabled ad blockers and other Chrome extensions to see if I could regain access by doing so. All attempts failed.
Today, I tried again, and this time I could see a garbled presentation of the Fortran-Lang.Discourse.Group page, and a message at the top saying that my browser was out of date. Log-in was disabled.
I accept that the site may wish to shut out people whose browsers are very old, and that Google wants the public to keep buying new Chromebooks every couple of years. Nevertheless, I wanted to bring this issue to your attention.
If I remember correctly, your web browser must support “ReplaceAll” in order to work with the latest version of Discourse. If it doesn’t, you’ll have to browse Discourse using the basic HTML view.
Support for “ReplaceAll” was added to version 85 of Google Chrome (released on August 24, 2020), so it’s likely that your Chromebook reached end-of-life at an earlier point in the year.
You should definitely do that. Newer Chromebooks are supported for nearly a decade.
We rolled out the fix for that site recently, so users on Chrome < 85 should be able to visit and receive the read-only version of Discourse on that site now.
