As announcement of the planned retirement came in October 2011 ,in June 2012, Ruby 1.8.7 moved into security fix only mode.

Ruby 1.8 was introduced in August 2003. In June 2008, the release of Ruby 1.8.7 built on the established version of Ruby and included some features backported from Ruby 1.9 which had arrived in 2007. Ruby 1.8.7 has been maintained since then as the last of the Ruby 1.8.x branch, a branch which is now completely unsupported by the Ruby developers.