This seriously limits access to the forum, since only the latest builds of browsers allowed to log in to the forum. This ensures that only people with the latest hardware and software can use Couchers forum and should be seriously considered as being discriminating on the basis of means people have.
I can’t use the latest browser constantly, browsers have become very demanding in resources and onlt those who have latest hardware can really keep using the latest versions of browsers.
I have not tested but sometimes the problem is also in the programmers of the application, that want a “pretty” one and not optimized.
I have had the same problem with TR and BW: often I am in a place that has a very poor signal, so it is covered by a repeater that carries only basic GSM features, say a maximum speed of 16 kB/sec . While email works, when you try to load one page of these sites, that loads MB of scripts, completely unnecessary for the purpose, the browser times out, so cannot be used.
On such platforms many guest told me that had similar errors and could not send a message throug the platform, and were saved by having email or phone number in the profile.
I tried various browsers just now on some 10+ year old devices to try to reproduce this.
All the old devices I tried can handle Firefox, which works with the forum just fine. Pale Moon is another option I found that works.
I could not get the forum to work with browsers like K-Meleon and Falkon. On SeaMonkey the forum does load in a very bare bones way, but it’s not really usable. A banner shows up with “Unfortunately, your browser is too old to work on this site. Please upgrade your browser to view rich content, log in and reply.”
The linked Discourse blurb does say quite clearly:
"Discourse is designed for the next 10 years of the Internet, so the minimum browser requirements are high.
Discourse supports the latest, stable releases of all major browsers and platforms:
Microsoft Edge
Google Chrome
Mozilla Firefox
Apple Safari
Additionally, we aim to support Safari on iOS 12.5+ until January 2023 (Discourse 3.0)."
The actual Couchers App though is a different story. That seems to run on SeaMonkey alright.
From what I’ve read on the forum, I think the choice to use Discourse was mostly about getting the project off the ground quickly, which seems to have worked out pretty well, although it does leave us with some limitations like this one. I know others have mentioned a goal of building in “forum” functions to the Couchers App eventually so we aren’t reliant on Discourse.
Thanks! But yeah, as @jasonalexander25 already explained the forum is based on an existing platform, discourse.org. There’s no way we could or would code a forum from scratch.
I was curious if the incompatibility is caused by any custom code we use. But it’s not the case here. So no way around the basic limitations that come with the platform.