What is this, and how does it affects you? I'll try to explain it in as shortest form as possible:
- GDPR stands for "General Data Protection Regulation" in EU countries (if you're outside of EU then it won't affect you in any way), basically it's a regulation on how your online data can be used, you can learn the details by searching this term up online.
- To comply with it Google forces everyone to pre-configure this message until 16.01.2024, otherwise they'll configure however they want it. Alternatively it can be turned off and all the ads for EU along with it
- I've already configured to serve only non-personalized ads via Google long time ago (since that option became available, for everyone, not just EU), so realistically this change should only affect the cookies (hence the tracking of you by Google and 3rd parties) and add a popup.
- I've pre-configured this GDPR message with everything turned off by default, so you should be able to remove that message with 1 click, but I have yet to see how that message will actually look like myself (it may take some time to propagate).
- I have tried to make it look as unannoying as possible, but if it'll turn out to be extremely annoying then I might as well just turn off the ads for EU, it's not like Google ads bring me any meaningful revenue anyway, they just serve as a placeholder and annoyance to those who are not in donators group (but I don't want them to be too annoying), so if you're from EU and have witnessed this magnificent message - let me know about your experience, how annoying it was, I will check it out myself (anonymously, to make sure that I see what you see), but your opinions also matter, depending on the provided feedback I'll decide whether to leave ads for EU or not.
I have disabled this GDPR message, for several reasons:
- It basically blocks access to site, until visitor either accepts or rejects, which is not the behavior that I'd like to add to the forum.
- It changes the way Google serves ads, basically it makes user to choose either to watch Personalized ad or no ad, ignoring my preference to serve non-personalized ads to my visitors...
- Since I've pre-configured this GDPR message with everything turned off by default, user would either need to disable ads with 1 click or subscribe to personalized ads via gazillion clicks, which is not realistic.
- I'd rather serve you non-annoying non-personalized ads for the remained time period and then place ads from another company there or none at all, than place this inconvenient annoying garbage with stupid choice on our forum.
- Google already pay me minuscule amount of $ for their ads, that wouldn't cover even a month of hosting, it's just a placeholder and small annoyance, but with this change it will become way too annoying (IMO) with even lower revenue.
