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Muahahaha

Muahahaha wrote: »

Is it just me or are others getting asked to accept cookies when you go to the same website each and every time? I cant understand why it doesnt know that you've already accepted them before multiple times.

And does Firefox have an extension to accept them automatically? Its getting really frustrating have to accept them every single time.

Yes many websites forget to remember that you have already agreed. Vodafone being a prime example.

There's the add on "I don't care about cookies" which works on Firefox, but it doesn't work on all sites.

MOH

Niner leprauchan wrote: »

Do you have a cleaner or auto delete setup for cookies? That shouldnt be happening

Not necessarily

Muahahaha wrote: »

Is it just me or are others getting asked to accept cookies when you go to the same website each and every time? I cant understand why it doesnt know that you've already accepted them before multiple times.

And does Firefox have an extension to accept them automatically? Its getting really frustrating have to accept them every single time.

If it's happening every single time, check your browser cookie settings, e.g. for Chrome. They might be set to automatically delete them on exit.

Cookies are set with an expiry date. Expired cookies will be cleared.
So if you haven't been on website in a while, or the cookies were set with a short expiration date, they'll have been cleared.

And since the only way of recording that you've accepted cookies is with a cookie, if that cookie is gone then you'll end up being prompted again.

MOH

El Tarangu wrote: »

This seems a bit simplistic; would you prefer to pay a monthly fee to use boards.ie?

No, not for Boards these days. Others would though. And I would for other sites.

But the whole argument that advertising-supported "free" websites are the only possible model, because that's the way it is, doesn't hold up. It gives the impression that the sites are somehow magically funded by benevolent advertisers, which is clearly nonsense.

So sites are paid enough by advertisers to operate. Advertisers are paid by business who buy ads. Either advertising works enough to influence people's purchases, or it doesn't.
If it works, and advertising is actually effective for businesses, then the business buying ads are making more from those ads than they're spending. Which means that visitors to the site are spending money on those businesses that they otherwise wouldn't, so the site is really being paid for by a subset of its visitors.
If advertising doesn't work, then businesses are wasting money on the ads. But the cost of advertising is ultimately baked into the price people pay for products. Which means that price is higher than it would be without advertising. So while it's not specifically the site visitors, people across the board are ultimately the ones paying to fund the site.

Advertising-funded websites also drives sites towards maximising visitors. Which in turns encourages quantity of contents over quality, clickbait, and rushing content out without checking for accuracy.

That's also all ignoring the darker side of it such as data harvesting and building profiles of site users. We had over a decade of increasing sophisticated advertising algorithms gathering increasing amounts of data of visitors. Which also able to track at a very granular level the psychological effect and response to minor variations in the ad copy, leading to the ability to microtarget particular ad variations at visitors based on the data collected.
You can argue about how much actual harm is done by that, but then pivot the techniques learned there to political campaigns and we ended up with Cambridge Analytica and the like.

Sure, get rid of advertising and sites would fold. Other sites would find a new model which works. Happens all the time anyway, life goes on.

Yeah, I know I sound like a cranky conspiracy theorist, but bottom line anything which helps rein in unrestricted data collection on users is a good thing, even if it results in a few inconvenient extra clicks now and then.

Metroid diorteM

It's helped me to identify which sites depended on abusing my data. Yahoo and disqus had the worst opt outs so I was happy to cut them off.