On 26 Aug 2014, at 16:34, Peter Coombe <pcoombe(a)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-…