Privacy policy

[deggles]

This has been doing my head in for the last week or so, prompting to accept the policy on every single page load. (Latest Chrome browser on Mac).

Clearing cookies made no difference, I finally cured it by clearing Local Storage. You can do this through the developer toolbar:
View -> Developer -> Developer Tools
Application -> Storage -> Local Storage -> right click https://www.pistonheads.com -> Clear

It looked like it had cached an invalid API response from the consent management platform. Unfortunately now I've cured it I can't provide any more details, sorry devs!

Hope this helps!

[Matt Dell]

deggles said:

This has been doing my head in for the last week or so, prompting to accept the policy on every single page load. (Latest Chrome browser on Mac).

Clearing cookies made no difference, I finally cured it by clearing Local Storage. You can do this through the developer toolbar:
View -> Developer -> Developer Tools
Application -> Storage -> Local Storage -> right click https://www.pistonheads.com -> Clear

It looked like it had cached an invalid API response from the consent management platform. Unfortunately now I've cured it I can't provide any more details, sorry devs!

Hope this helps!

That's really helpful, deggles!

It certainly explains why I can't reproduce it. It would be great to know what localstorage values are present when it's happening if you (or anyone else) can provide that if it happens again.

[stopped]

Hi Matt,

Re your request in my original thread.

PC, Windows10, Firefox latest version.

I am getting constant Privacy Notices when I back page in a thread and random ones when I page forward. This started a few days ago and has never happened before. It occurs in open and private browsing.
As per the above Safari fix, I have gone to Firefox/web developer/storage inspector/local storage and deleted the Pistonheads entries. The fault reoccurs immediately I start navigating Pistonheads again.

Hope you can help. Ta.

[stopped]

This is so much fun!

I have just received not one, but five invitations to change my password, timed 1513.

Shall I click the link, or not?

{ looks thoughtfully into the distance, chin cupped in hand }

[jimmsy]

This is happening for me in Safari on my MacBook. Tried clearing data, cookies, and local storage, nothing works.

[stopped]

@jimmsy

As nobody from the tech team replied, I just kept hammering away at the problem with my limited knowledge.
No amount of cleaning, deleting, emptying of storage or malware scanning had any effect. On trying a different browser, MS Edge, PH worked normally, so i did a full reset on Firefox and PH is fine thus far, with no reoccurance of the Privacy Notice issue. The only negative impact on doing this was auto-removal of all browser bookmarks and some other browser data to a separate file.

I have no experience of Safari, but I would imagine you can do something similar to the above. Be careful re the bookmark issue though.

[Matt Dell]

Small update from us (tl;dr no fix yet)

We use a third party tool called Quantcast as our Consent Management Platform (CMP) to keep us in line with GDPR rules and European cookie law. It's a fairly standard bit of kit you'll find on a lot of websites hosted in Europe like Buzzfeed, Reach Media, Immediate Media, and a lot of other publishers.

We have finally been able to replicate this issue in PH Towers. The source of the issue is down to a value in the browser's local storage called "_cmpRepromptHash". If you're an advanced enough user to find that value, delete it and the problem will go away (after agreeing / disagreeing once more). My theory is that hash value isn't being reset properly once it expires (which it does after 30 days) and you select agree / disagree again.

We can't simply stop using them or turn this off because of the legal requirement set out by the EU but also because getting these CMP platforms configured for a site such as ours is a fair bit of work. Now that we understand what is causing the problem, we've expressed our concern to the vendor and they're working with us to find a solution. I get the impression that we aren't the only ones having this problem. If we can't work through a solution with them, we will look to take on the effort of switching vendors.

Anyway, I thought the people in this thread would appreciate an update and some candid transparency. Sorry for the trouble it's causing!

[stopped]

Hi Matt,

I really appreciate you getting back to us on this problem.

Just a note to give you a bit more information on this issue:

In my attempt to clear this issue I did exactly as you mention and cleared all browser storage (including the "_cmpRepromptHash" element) using the web developer functions. The repeated Privacy Policy request returned immediately. A full browser reset solved the problem.

No need for you to reply to this as I know you are busy.

[Matt Dell]

Thanks for that, stopped.

Just to clarify, after clearing the item from localstorage you will get the prompt once more to save your preferences. Do you mean that it kept appearing again on every page after that?

Also I would love to know what browser you're on.

[stopped]

Hi Matt,

I am on a PC, Windows 10, Firefox v. 82.0.3 64bit.

Went to Firefox/web developer/storage inspector/local storage and deleted all Pistonheads entries. Tried it three times; on each occasion the Privacy Notice came up on starting PH, as one would expect, and as soon as I got down to thread level the P Notice came back on every back page and random forward pages.

As mentioned in one of my previous posts, I then tried MS Edge and that worked cleanly, but as I prefer Firefox I did a full refresh on the latter and it has been fine since.

I did try to copy and save the PH storage string info so that I could post that to you, but the web developer page would not let me do so and there was too much to write manually.

HTH

[jimmsy]

One thought, are people in this thread using PiHole?

Using the inspector I'm seeing that the following URL filled to load as it couldn't find the hostname:

https://audit-tcfv2.quantcast.mgr.consensu.org/?lo...

Changing to a google DNS on my machine made it load. I wonder if whitelisting this would fix the issue?

EDIT: No more warnings bypassing the PiHole

EDIT2: This is the regex for the whitelist that's working for me now:

https://audit-tcfv2\.quantcast\.mgr\.consensu\.org.*$

Edited by jimmsy on Friday 13th November 21:45

Edited by jimmsy on Friday 13th November 21:46

[stopped]

The only PiHole I am using is the one in my face.

[Richie C]

jimmsy said:

One thought, are people in this thread using PiHole?

Using the inspector I'm seeing that the following URL filled to load as it couldn't find the hostname:

https://audit-tcfv2.quantcast.mgr.consensu.org/?lo...

Changing to a google DNS on my machine made it load. I wonder if whitelisting this would fix the issue?

EDIT: No more warnings bypassing the PiHole

EDIT2: This is the regex for the whitelist that's working for me now:

https://audit-tcfv2\.quantcast\.mgr\.consensu\.org.*$

Edited by jimmsy on Friday 13th November 21:45

Edited by jimmsy on Friday 13th November 21:46

Nice one, that’s got it

[V8covin]

I've been suffering with this for a while,on another website too.
I run Blokada,I've turned it off and the problem has gone away.
Adding Pistonheads to a white list in Blokada has fixed it for me

Edited by V8covin on Saturday 14th November 19:16

[V8covin]

V8covin said:

I've been suffering with this for a while,on another website too.
I run Blokada,I've turned it off and the problem has gone away.
Adding Pistonheads to a white list in Blokada has fixed it for me

Edited by V8covin on Saturday 14th November 19:16

It's now returned,as a result I won't be using this website for the foreseeable.
Get it fixed guys !

[wibble cb]

I use Firefox, and its still happening on a daily basis

[Megaflow]

I keep getting the cookie notice on every page I click on, every time I click on disagree, and the next page it is back again.

Is this some pitiful attempt to get me to click agree, because I won’t.

[anonymous-user]

Surely if you click disagree, it won't remember your preference as you won't allow the cookie for it to remember you.

The frictionless browsing you are looking for is one of the purposes of cookies...

[Megaflow]

I have always clicked on disagree ever since the GDPR regulations came in, and knowing how many tracking cookies this places uses, that will always be the case.

[Megaflow]

Only seems to do it on iOS, works fine on Mac OS.