No idea what you guys were talking about for three days until this minute when it appeared on a Win 11 laptop using Firefox.
It’s a partially eaten cookie! Isn’t dispensing those illegal in Europe?
Appeared on my phone testerday. As noted, it blocks half the reply button and doesn’t disappear when I save my settings.
If you are on a computer, it’s just an extension to your browser. Every modern browser I’m familiar with has some capability to install extensions. They just add optional functionality to the web browser. The simplest ones just change how the browser looks, while most others do much more. There is a whole class of extensions that identify advertisements on web sites and do their best to block them. In my experience, some web sites are barely functional until you block the ads, as the ads can sometimes make the page very slow to load or scroll, and can even crash a browser, while other ads may actually cover up additional text on the page. I can barely stand to browse the web without ad blocking of some sort.
Extensions are nothing new; they’ve been around in some form or another since 1997 (Internet Explorer was the first to feature them). So, almost 30 years now. One reason why I was an early adopter of Firefox was because it launched with full support for extensions from the very start.
Unfortunately, mobile browsers often don’t support extensions, and on a phone or tablet you might very well need to install an app.
Getting back to the main subject, I have not seen a cookie in Edge on my Windows 11 machine, or in Safari on my iPhone. But I do use ad blockers on both, so that might be why it has yet to appear for me.
Even w my ad blocker disabled, my Win 11 + Edge is cookie-free for me.
While my Android + Chrome w no installed blocking at all has a cookie since ~24 hours ago. But not previously.
Clearly the Discourse’s devs and admins are still fiddling with how this cookie thing works and whether it’s active for SDMB or not.
Interesting. I wonder if this is a browser-specific thing then.
I’ve encountered a number of sites like that, but in every case, I’ve been able to find other sites that have the same or equivalent information but without the obnoxious ads (usually still ads of some sort, but less obnoxious).
I was curious, so I visited the site. I also see a cookie on their site:
I could imagine that they do it for advertising their cookie solution.
I’m Win 11 + Edge, and I see it if I turn off my adblocker. @LSLGuy, I’m guessing you have something still turned on and blocking it.
The worst offenders are news web sites, in which case there may be no other source for whatever I’m looking at. 
(Especially the local news sites for various places.)
And you’d be correct.
After turning off my adblocker & refreshing the page I still had no worm-eaten cookie icon. Then I did a clear cache, and viola; I too am enjoying the fucking cookie interfering w my workflow.
ETA: Fortunately reactivating my ad blocker, uBlock Origin, and once again clearing cache, kills the cookie dead again.
Side note, that is the exact same ad blocker I use.
I use Adblock on my PC browsers just from force of habit, as that’s what I started with years ago. But I use uBlock Origin with Firefox on the tablet for an actual practical reason – I found that Adblock impacted performance. I suspect that the best ad blocker depends on your platform.
On my Android phone, turning off uBlock Origin and refreshing doesn’t make the cookie gadget appear. Probably because my first-line OS-level adblock (anti-advertising hosts file) catches it too.
Interesting if so. It means that the mechanism of this intrusive doohickey depends on a known-bad advertising vendor address.
Not exactly making themselves popular, are they.
I was blissfully unaware of what you guys were talking about until I updated Firefox on my laptop and it showed up. Not sure if the update was what let it in.
Using my page editor to delete the cookie seems to last as long as my browser tab remains on a Straight Dope page.
for those of you who can’t see it, you’re missing the chance to stop this nonsense:
By switching the toggle to the right and clicking save, you are indicating that you do not want us to sell your personal information or share your personal information for online targeted advertising activities.
The default, apparently, is “sell my personal information.”
I keep hitting it instead of the other now-less-than-fingerwidth side of the reply button. This annoys me and makes me leave the site entirely.
It always is. They’re always going to default to the option that makes them the most money, hoping that only an insignificant number of people will choose the option that makes less.
Regardless of what answer you choose then save, the cookie icon remains displayed.
That way you can change your mind at any time. So dumb irritating.