Make Discourse play nice on Windows XP while using letsencrypt.org

installation
1

Hey guys, as you may heard, letsencrypt is launched already for a while. You may also know that letsencrypt doesn’t quite work on Windows XP and some Android versions for various reasons. Long story short, it’s not a browser issue, it’s an OS issue.

However, the obvious solution would be to serve non SSL pages to Windows XP users and SSL pages for the rest of the users.

Buuuut… how it should be done?

One solution I can think of it is to route Discourse through Nginx (which is in plan anyway, because I want to host a static site as well on the same server) and add a condition to serve SSL pages only to supported OSes.

But then I have other two issues:

  • I can’t disable use_https dynamically, right?
  • Discourse doesn’t really care either if that checkbox is checked or not, it will redirect to https version if certificates are present (and if the SSL templates are enabled in the yaml config file?)

There is a way of dealing with this? (other than disabling SSL completely or buy a „real” certificate?)

2

Windows XP ??

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/end-support-help

Windows XP support has ended
As of April 8, 2014, support and updates for Windows XP are no longer available. Don’t let your PC go unprotected.

1 Like
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I am afraid we are it interested in any weird hacks to support this crazy, a Discourse site is either https or http.

If ancient Windows XP is so important, why not spend 10 bucks and buy a supporting cert?

4 Likes
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@sam: thanks, I wanted to know if there is a way of doing this before I spend any money on it.

@Mittineague: that’s the official statement. The reality kind of beat that; stats usually shows twice as many users compared to Win10 and around the same compared to Win8 (~10% for WinXP, ~4% for Win10 and ~12% for Win8).

5

What stats? From where? China?

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I’m not saying there aren’t some still using it. I myself, due to budget constraints, was stuck using Win 98 for far longer that I would have liked.

The point is, that it is no longer supported and therefore no longer safe to use online.
IMHO it doesn’t make much sense to spend time or money trying to keep it on life support.

1 Like
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The only place that show different is w3schools.

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That’s the reason I opened this topic:

  • To know if there is a way of doing this, even remotely supported by Discourse community;
  • To prevent spending extra bucks for an ancient OS :slightly_smiling:

I want as much as anyone that everybody to have the latest OS and latest browser, but there are times when this it doesn’t happen, that’s all :wink:

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In large part, exactly. Not entirely, but definitely enough to skew.