„This website uses cookies...“

[Oslide]

I‘ve never encountered such a message on the „other platform“ and I would prefer it the same way here.
It seems that if I don‘t accept, this message „This website uses cookies...“ will stay with me forever?
Can I refuse to accept and have a clean screen all the same? - Thank you!

[Neo Bri]

Good question. I saw that once and don't love it. Maybe Matt K will chime in.

[Matt K]

Yeah that gets kicked on when a European user registers. Europe has a lot of protections I can look into making it based on IP.

[Matt K]

Also, per the warning, this site does use cookies!

[bhcordova]

I want Oatmeal Raisin please

[Oslide]

Also, per the warning, this site does use cookies!

Why is that so? I‘m sure that I don‘t want or need the ‚help‘ of cookies to get me „the best experience on our website“. In the case of Trombone Chat there is nothing that cookies could do for me. All I want to do is read what others wrote and occasionally write something myself. Cookies are only here to do something for others like e.g. help them direct „personal“ advertising towards me on other web sites. Can I say „no, thank you“ or can‘t I ? If I can‘t then this means to me that the owners of Trombone Chat have an agreement with third parties to let them use my data for advertising which I don‘t want. So what is going on?

[Matt K]

Also, per the warning, this site does use cookies!

Why is that so? I‘m sure that I don‘t want or need the ‚help‘ of cookies to get me „the best experience on our website“. In the case of Trombone Chat there is nothing that cookies could do for me. All I want to do is read what others wrote and occasionally write something myself. Cookies are only here to do something for others like e.g. help them direct „personal“ advertising towards me on other web sites. Can I say „no, thank you“ or can‘t I ? If I can‘t then this means to me that the owners of Trombone Chat have an agreement with third parties to let them use my data for advertising which I don‘t want. So what is going on?

No, no agreement with third parties. I can't fully explain the details of why at the moment (about to head off to a gig), but the terms in the announcement give the full extent for what the cookies do (as per the EU law that the banner is used to be in compliance with).

A very, very simplified explanation is that when you go to trombonechat.com, the site says, "Hey have you been here before?" and the browser says, "No, I don't seem to have a cookie, should I ?" and the site says, "Yes, go ahead and let me know who you are (e.g. Matt K) and then you don't have to tell me that every time you come to the site."

Then when you come back you say, "Hey trombonechat.com, I'm 'Matt K', by the way, I'm using prosilver instead of Latte, could you just go ahead and chagne that for me so I don't have to change the setting next time?" and the site says, "Sure! Here's the other template and I also remembered that you like to have your posts sorted ascending instead of descending by time."

Again, that's like, really majorly simplified but I'll write up a little something in a few days that gives the details. 99.9999999% of sites you access use cookies. If you wish to not use cookies, the easiest way to do so is to use Private Browsing on FireFox or Chrome. I can write up some instructions on how that works as well if you're interested. But that would be more useful for things like Facebook where they do nothing but mine your information. That's not what is going on here. Not using cookies here would really only cause things that have been complained about thus far to be much worse. E.g. you'd have to authenticate yourself every single time you changed form one page to the next.

[Oslide]

Why is that so? I‘m sure that I don‘t want or need the ‚help‘ of cookies to get me „the best experience on our website“. In the case of Trombone Chat there is nothing that cookies could do for me. All I want to do is read what others wrote and occasionally write something myself. Cookies are only here to do something for others like e.g. help them direct „personal“ advertising towards me on other web sites. Can I say „no, thank you“ or can‘t I ? If I can‘t then this means to me that the owners of Trombone Chat have an agreement with third parties to let them use my data for advertising which I don‘t want. So what is going on?

No, no agreement with third parties. I can't fully explain the details of why at the moment (about to head off to a gig), but the terms in the announcement give the full extent for what the cookies do (as per the EU law that the banner is used to be in compliance with).

Thank you for your reply, Matt!

I will have to learn more about the technicalities of cookies in order understand better what is going on.
What made me leery was the fact that neither TTF nor the first version of TC had ever asked me to accept cookies.
It’s true that many sites use, and ask to accept, cookies, but their notifications usually are located at the bottom of the screen or some other marginal place whereas this one on TC really covers up part of the screen in an intrusive way so that e.g. I could not use the Post Reply button because it was covered by the cookie notification (I had to quote a part of your message in order to be able to reach that button on my IPad).

Once I‘ve done my homework I‘ll be back.

Thanks for all the good work you and the others of the development team have been doing!

Wolfgang

[Matt K]

Hey no problem! I can link some resources soon too. There are a lot of good videos on YouTube...but also a lot of bad ones! I'll make a sticky to fully explain it but this week has been crazy. It's one of those things that probably doesn't need to be done but I really prefer being 100%buttomed up if I can.

[bimmerman]

Any idea why the "This website uses cookies..." banner keeps popping up after you click the Got It! button? Sometimes it goes away for a while, but lately I click Got It, pop into a subforum or thread, and BAM it's back.

[Matt K]

Any idea why the "This website uses cookies..." banner keeps popping up after you click the Got It! button? Sometimes it goes away for a while, but lately I click Got It, pop into a subforum or thread, and BAM it's back.

Hey all, so I actually had forgotten about those information I was going to provide and I got pretty busy there for a few weeks; it's back on the radar though.

As far as that particular behavior, that actually demonstrates how the cookies work with phpBB. Basically TBC isn't tracking you until you log in and even then, it's expressly to keep track of which posts you've read and your user preferences etc. Otherwise, the cookie would say, "Hey, I've already seen that message, you don't have to show it again," to unauthenticated users.

What browser/OS are you on where you are experiencing the issue? My suspicion it is on a mobile device and you are going in and out of wifi/cellular? But if it is something else I'd be happy to look into it. Basically what happens if you change networks---the site has no way of figuring out it was you or not so it just assumes you're a new person and does that check. If that doesn't apply, I'd be happy to look at the situation and see if there's something causing it - be it "us" or your browser.

Another possibility is that you don't hit "Okay" until you've already opened the other threads. In which case, it'll duplicate the message as it still doesn't recognize that you're you yet.

Do any of those scenarios sound like they apply to you?

[bimmerman]

Any idea why the "This website uses cookies..." banner keeps popping up after you click the Got It! button? Sometimes it goes away for a while, but lately I click Got It, pop into a subforum or thread, and BAM it's back.

Hey all, so I actually had forgotten about those information I was going to provide and I got pretty busy there for a few weeks; it's back on the radar though.

As far as that particular behavior, that actually demonstrates how the cookies work with phpBB. Basically TBC isn't tracking you until you log in and even then, it's expressly to keep track of which posts you've read and your user preferences etc. Otherwise, the cookie would say, "Hey, I've already seen that message, you don't have to show it again," to unauthenticated users.

What browser/OS are you on where you are experiencing the issue? My suspicion it is on a mobile device and you are going in and out of wifi/cellular? But if it is something else I'd be happy to look into it. Basically what happens if you change networks---the site has no way of figuring out it was you or not so it just assumes you're a new person and does that check. If that doesn't apply, I'd be happy to look at the situation and see if there's something causing it - be it "us" or your browser.

Another possibility is that you don't hit "Okay" until you've already opened the other threads. In which case, it'll duplicate the message as it still doesn't recognize that you're you yet.

Do any of those scenarios sound like they apply to you?

IE (groan, I know, work requirement for in-house apps), on win10 desktop. I hit 'Got It' as soon as it pops up in. It also will display the message if I open a thread in a new tab even after hitting Got It in the spawning tab. It's....weird. I'll try on another browser once I'm home.

[bimmerman]

IE (groan, I know, work requirement for in-house apps), on win10 desktop. I hit 'Got It' as soon as it pops up in. It also will display the message if I open a thread in a new tab even after hitting Got It in the spawning tab. It's....weird. I'll try on another browser once I'm home.

To follow up on the weirdness-- I went to TC on Firefox, got the message, clicked Got It, and it has now gone away entirely on both Firefox and IE. Weird.

[bimmerman]

IE (groan, I know, work requirement for in-house apps), on win10 desktop. I hit 'Got It' as soon as it pops up in. It also will display the message if I open a thread in a new tab even after hitting Got It in the spawning tab. It's....weird. I'll try on another browser once I'm home.

To follow up on the weirdness-- I went to TC on Firefox, got the message, clicked Got It, and it has now gone away entirely on both Firefox and IE. Weird.

aaaaaand now it's back anytime the page changes to another trombonechat.com page (i.e. navigating around subforums/threads/etc).

[Zandit75]

Only ever clicked it the once on Chrome, and never looked back.

[bimmerman]

Only ever clicked it the once on Chrome, and never looked back.

Yep, hasn't returned in Chrome on my home computer either. Probably just a weird edge case with IE on my machine.

[Matt K]

That is interesting behavior. I actually wasn't able to reproduce the behavior at all on my Win10 machine with either IE or Edge. I know some recent changes have been made to European legislation (which is the reason why it exists in the first place), I'm going to look into whether or not that changed these requirements.

In the meantime, were you logged in when you hit "Got it!" or were you an anonymous user?

[Matt K]

I've done the research and it turns out that I think we can comply with the European law in other ways due to some of the ambiguity. Working on a post now to explain what cookies are, why we had that silly banner, and just what the heck all of that means now.