On 26 Aug 2014, at 16:34, Peter Coombe pcoombe@wikimedia.org wrote:
One thing that comes to mind is that CentralNotice is dependent on JS. Blacklisting browsers means they won't see CentralNotice banners at all.
This isn't really a big concern for Fundraising: it's a small percentage of views, and not having to support these browsers in our increasingly sophisticated banners is probably a blessing. However I wonder about other uses of CentralNotice e.g. letting people know about the recent Privacy Policy and Terms of Use changes. Where we not only want to reach as many users as possible, but may also have legal obligations to.
I'm not really sure how big an issue this is, or how to solve it.
I don't have a legal-relevant answer, but for what it's worth, this isn't new.
We've always blacklisted older browsers. This is just our annual updating of what that blacklist is.
This in order to prevent maintenance costs from increasing exponentially. Because, new browsers are coming out continuously, keeping support for old browsers means we're supporting more, not the same, as last year. And it allows us to start using newer technologies and stop having to account for older browser bugs in new features we develop. This includes usage of existing features, such as CentralNotice banners indeed. Each banner that's made is paying a small human-resources price ensuring it works in all supported browsers.
As for the legal part, I'm not a lawyer, but in my limited knowledge two things come to mind:
* Is announcing policy changes legally required? Or is it a recommended courtesy? Many policies contain stuff like "We reserve the right to change this at any time.". Does ours? And either way, visitors didn't explicitly agree to the version that applied to them either, so one would think that whatever legal mechanism allows that, also means we can't be required to inform them about changes.
* These kind of announcements probably shouldn't require javascript if that's the case. Remember, even if we'd support every single browser ever, if they don't have javascript or if they disabled javascript, the banners won't appear either. Would we be required to display the banner in a way that doesn't require javascript? Quite a few extremist (sorry) out there have javascript disabled in their browser. We use javascript at all due to technical restrictions related to site performance (changing the banners without purging every single article on every wiki from cache, js seems the only way to project changed content separately).
-- Krinkle
Interesting read: http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/19/6044679/the-six-lawsuits-that-shaped-the-i...