What is Plusnet's definition of "essential"?

[#1]

Thanks for that @ejs, that's a very valid point, but equally as the continued display of the popup would soon annoy the most patient of users then it could be argued to not to ask in the first place as any participation does not affect the essential functionality of the site. As you will know this can be done with an if statement in code that renders the popup.

[#2]

@Anonymous,

Thank you for coming back here - I sought to PM you but you have that switched off. @ejs has said what I sought to say, differently. With the survey process as implemented, the cookie is essential for proficient use of the service.

I did not seek to disagree that it could be implemented differently - my preferred solution would be that the survey decision (done or declined) was stored server side, thereby totally removing any question of client side cookies being required, essential or otherwise. That solution would also prevent the question being asked on each client used by the account.

I hope we can return to our mutual good grace - I meant most sincerely that I miss your presence in the SU space.

[#3]

@Townman You're idea of server side is undoubtedly the best solution to this as it makes sense and is really beneficial to the user, but I can't see that happening more is the pity.

As for returning to mutual good grace absolutely, it was never my intention to wind people up, and my response in message 11 could, and with hindsight should, have been more graceful, so apologies if I have offended anyone who read it.

[#4]

Hi @Anonymous,

I am not going to read some of the heated posts prior to this so I am going directly off your question regarding what 'essential' means. I helped develop the new cookie banner system so I should know a bit about what I am talking about. Its laid out pretty clearly in our help articles here:

https://www.plus.net/help/legal/cookie-policy/#essential-cookies

Essential cookies are split into a few sub categories.

The 'strictly nessesary' storage is for things that are needed in order for the website to function such as logging in, making sure the shopping basket works etc. Basically, if you turn any of that stuff off, the site will not work.

The 'performance' storage is basically anonymous analytics. We are not collecting any information about a user, only google analytics stuff which are anonymous and not personally identifiable to a user.

It's all there in the Help article, as well as details of every single cookie/local storage/session storage variable that goes into details about what it does exactly.

I hope this helps answer your question?

[#5]

Also

Based on the above I would like to see the Survey popup removed when the essential cookies option is applied, but is this a possibility?

Sorry, our GDPR compliant banner does not interact with core functionality of the forum. The only time our banner interacts with the banner is for any functionality that we create such as the remembering which of the expanders on the forum page being open when the page loads next... thats about it I beleive.

[#6]

@jaread83 - The policy says that you use a functional cookie to remember the survey state, which is fair enough I. But as I always select Essential I should continually be prompted by the survey popup, but I am not, as a ‘Functional’ cookie is being stored in an ‘Essential’ only session; so either your implementation is wrong or the cookie policy is wrong.

P.S.  Being the pedant that I am you should not have to accept cookies in order to read your cookie policy!

[#7]

The cookies used on Community are not controlled by us. The value survey, login cookie etc for community are controlled by Lithium and they have deemed these cookies as being essential functional and there is no way we can (through our cookie banner) interact with the cookies created by Lithium. So it doesn't matter what you select, the community forums will still work the same as they always have done - with the exception of the expanders on the forum overview as mentioned above (because that is something I created and so I have control over that).

[#8]

Jack,

If it can be argued that the Lithium cookies are not complaint with the published cookie policy, then might that observation be raised as a bug report please?

[#9]

@jaread83 - I am not going to teach a professional like yourself how to do their job, so the following is purely observational.

I see a cookie called storagePreferences for the plus.net domain that appears to contain a value that could be used to suppress the appearance of the survey popup when the 'essential function = true;' thus negating the need to breach the policy by storing a cookie out of context.