Oh goodie, the insurers are fully engaged! I’m sure they will help clear the quickly rotting food off the beach just as much as the volunteers who are physically there doing actual work.

God I hate pencil-pusher culture, it’s so weird 😂

Thanks for the quote! I realise I replied snarkily - I’m not mad at you of course, just at the quote

I can say that I’ve used a plugin for WordPress called Dark Visitors which seems to track and report on bot crawlers, including LLMs. Not sure how accurate their info is, but our marketing dept seems to believe it so 🤷‍♂️

Maybe looking into what Dark Visitors does would give you pointers on how you might detect them.

You and I certainly pronounce either “consume” or “womb” very differently if those words rhyme for you 😂 where are you from, out of curiosity? No judgement, just curious as I’m not sure I’ve ever heard an accent where those words rhyme!

Y’all 🤠🤠🤠🤠🤠

But also Cloudflare confirmed an issue:

Hahaha uh oh!

Funny enough, I mentioned that in my first paragraph as I’ve had to do that for a client recently who had some specific niche use case for something that wouldn’t allow cookies to be used.

Very true, you’re right.

It’s just that the sort of “depth” and “breadth” of the tracking has evolved, as well as the ways marketers use that information.

Yeah, 100%! And the languages point generally opens up to a third-party system like WeGlot, whether the cookie is first-party or not. It’s sort of amazing to me how collaborative the modern web is, but also just how insecure it can be.

It can be really locked down but I would say at least half of the wordpress sites online (and wordpress powers something like 20%+ of the whole open internet, iirc) pull in all sorts of third-party scripts and code that isn’t vetted by the people including them (including me! Only so many hours in a workday, after all).

Yes, you’re spot on; it’s mostly about elements and functionality not working. Just as a heads up, I work in the WordPress ecosystem so the following brief descriptions will be focused on PHP based sites. I’m sure there are ways round using cookies, such as using localStorage in JavaScript etc. Anyway!

The biggest thing you’ll run into is anything to do with login systems. Any website that offers a login/account typically makes use of cookies, in order to let the website “remember” that you’re logged in, between page navigation.

One of our clients offers a comparison calculator for investments. This calculator relies on cookies when you want to “save” your results, and also makes use of them when you’re not logged in, in order to allow you to access your previous runs of the calculator without having to create an account.

Another of our clients, also in the financial space, produces documents containing financial info about funds, and marketing materials. These docs are subject to strict compliance rules determining what can be shown to users based on what “type” of investor is viewing the site, and where in the world they’re viewing from.

Anybody visiting the site self-identifies by manually selecting an investor “type” and a location. This info gets set into a cookie, and the site serves content based on the values in that cookie. If the site can’t identify the cookie or it has an invalid value, it’ll basically be unusable, in order to protect the company themselves.

As a web developer, I can confirm that there are sometimes necessary cookies that aren’t just for the wankstains in marketing!

That’s sort of what I’m saying, though; I would have thought this would have been a violation of some of the guidelines around consent in the gdpr

I actually do think I’ve seen variations in this wording over the course of a few months. I’m going to go digging around sites I think are probably less scrupulous to see if I can find examples.

Boom, gotcha. First absolute rag that came to mind. Check it! Screenshot:

Edit: also it’s totally on me that you thought the word Reject was in there - I put it in quotes and then provided an example that didn’t contain it, sorry! 😂

A lot of news sites! Let me see if I can find one.

I’m pretty sure I saw it on Autosport earlier today. Just opened it in Chrome (ew) – see screenshot!

Edit: reading the popup, I assume the legal loophole is that you technically CAN revoke consent after accepting, without paying, by visiting a whole separate page and doing it there. Ultra scummy!

I love the way companies simply refuse to not track us. You guys seen those cookie popups that are like “accept and continue” or “reject and pay” where you have to actually pay to reject cookies? I cannot believe that’s legal at all. Total scumbags.

You’re right that’s exactly the same as replacing one grouping of two letters mate

What’s the exhibit? Telling someone else to stop whining? 😂

If you really don’t give non-native speakers of English enough credit to use context and their current understanding of the language to learn one more letter, I think that’s pretty exclusionary. People who don’t speak English as a first language aren’t stupid, mate.

I’ve never used it. Jesus man stop whining, you already don’t read the comments like you’ve said. I swear sometimes it seems like people online just desperately need something to moan about.

Yeah, I’ve got used to it. It’s not a hard substitution to make, and even if it does take you a little longer to read the comments I guess I don’t see the problem. I’m not in a rush to read online comments, and if I was in a rush I wouldn’t be reading online comments 🤷‍♂️

I am employed, but it’s a small agency. I’ve tried to push for more design work, but my direct boss is a designer and pretty protective of his role so no chance there.

I’m working alongside work at the moment 😅 which reduces time and energy available for studying, but I always try to expand my role in my freelance so I think that’s probably the way forward! Good suggestion, thank you ✌️