Re-Work and re-work and re-work

So the cookie law implementation date came and passed. My solution was rolled out over all pages on my works website, with some last minute tweaks and amends given to me by the CEO just as I was about to upload everything.

Then the following Monday I found out that they had made an alteration in the wording of the law itself. The wording changes were only small but have a big impact on how we can go about seeking acceptance for using cookies. It was one of those moments when you wished they had did this a week before not a day or two before launch date. To be honest I hadn’t re-checked the wording of the law on the run up to the 26th as I was a little busy. But then in the same vein I hadn’t read online anywhere that the wording had changed either.

So what does this mean? I hear you ask.

Well in short the wording change means we no longer need to seek definitive acceptance from the user. Before they had to give explicit acceptance before we could set any cookies. With the change all we need to do is show the cookie message once, and with no accept button showing only a decline as the onus is now on the user to decline the use. Previously we had to assume they didn’t want to use cookies, now we can assume they do and by the user saying they decline only then would we stop setting cookies.

This does not sound like much, but it is a big change and will help a lot more with the likes of analytic tracking software that will be on the website. Also I am a firm believer that more people will pay less attention to our information box now we can change the wording and the acceptance/decline part. This should mean more people will not both declining and we can use our google analytics and get back to work tracking their movements on our pages. Another bonus is that if they continue on after the first page where they are asked if they want to decline cookies and don’t both, we can make the assumption that they are happy with the use of cookies so we don’t have to keep re-asking for acceptance.

This all means I have been working on a v2.0 of my solution, one that is a little more robust and will incorporate an issue we discovered with an internal affiliate system we use. Unfortunately the last couple of weeks at work have been very busy. Seeing as this work wasn’t scheduled in, I have had to find time in and around my normal and scheduled work to develop the solution more. Currently it is in the last stages of testing, and now uses some Ajax calls in JQuery to a .net page to handle all the cookies (including the new affiliate ones we were having issues with).

This has made the solution a little fiddly in comparison to the original version but needs must after discovering the affiliate issue. Hopefully v2.0 should be the last I need to work on this and I will have a bespoke solution for the companies website.