Forum Replies Created

Viewing 15 replies - 211 through 225 (of 448 total)
  • Thread Starter Ate Up With Motor

    (@ate-up-with-motor)

    Okay, but HOW does one implement those parameters? I’m not a developer, and the function references make very little sense. I can recreate components in a child theme or add functions if they aren’t too complicated, but I’d need a tutorial or some coherent examples to figure out how to make any sense of those function references.

    I did some web searches and found no tutorials for this, on WordPress or elsewhere, and none of the “accessibility-ready” themes on WordPress.org appear to have implemented those parameters.

    Thread Starter Ate Up With Motor

    (@ate-up-with-motor)

    Is this something that I can add into an existing theme with functions, or does it require building a new theme? I’ve been combing through “accessibility-ready” themes in the repository; none of them seem to add pagination labels out of the box, and I haven’t the first clue how I would add them without building a new theme (which I am not at all qualified to do).

    Thread Starter Ate Up With Motor

    (@ate-up-with-motor)

    For my reference, though, if I did want to change the skiplink colors, is it possible to do that within the plugin? If so, how do I need to add the CSS?

    Thread Starter Ate Up With Motor

    (@ate-up-with-motor)

    Okay, that makes sense. I realize tools like this can be inflexible on stuff like that.

    It seems like the Google Analytics Germanized banner is the bigger issue. Fortunately, it’s set to opt-in, so if a user doesn’t click, the analytics script doesn’t fire at all, so it’s an annoyance rather than a privacy issue, but it’s still a problem. Unfortunately, fixing it is way beyond me, so I left a comment for the developers. (Thank you SO much for bringing that to my attention — neither Opena11y Toolkit nor the WebAIM add-on identified that problem!)

    Thread Starter Ate Up With Motor

    (@ate-up-with-motor)

    Yikes — I will inform the developers, as that’s beyond my scope.

    This test I did was using the Opena11y Toolkit browser extension for Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/opena11y-toolkit/?src=search), which places the a11y script onscreen and highlights problems, with annotated suggestions.

    I’m concerned about this as well — it’s a potential accessibility issue because it could confuse screen readers.

    Thread Starter Ate Up With Motor

    (@ate-up-with-motor)

    I just want to append to what Mr. Godley says that while California law is to some extent GDPR-inspired, its definitions and standards are in some ways distinctly different — less stringent in certain respects, significantly more onerous in others. Again, I’m not a lawyer, but I would caution any WordPress user not to assume that GDPR compliance is CCPA-compliant or vice versa. (Complying with one will put you in a better position to comply with the other, but each has unique requirements.)

    As far as I understand it, the GDPR doesn’t prohibit collecting information for security and troubleshooting purposes, and my non-lawyer’s interpretation is that whatever information Redirection collects falls into that category, particularly if you configure your settings so you only retain the information as long as you reasonably need it and are upfront in your privacy policy about what information you collect.

    Thread Starter Ate Up With Motor

    (@ate-up-with-motor)

    I’m not in the EU or a lawyer (nor I assume is Mr. Godley), and the finer points of the GDPR are beyond my ken.

    On the surface, it does not appear that the counter or last access dates collect anything the GDPR would deem personally identifying information. (The Redirection logs do, since they collect IP addresses and user agent data.)

    It’s a muddier question under California law because California law has a very broad definition of “personal information” that also encompasses virtually any information or inferences about an individual’s web browsing or online activity. I have a hard time envisioning a hit counter being deemed personal information even by that expansive standard. However, the last-access date might enable you to determine what outdated link a specific visitor clicked on, which might be deemed to constitute online behavioral information. (Whether the state will actually interpret the law that broadly is unclear, and I don’t think it’s a reasonable interpretation, but the breadth of the statutory definitions is truly bonkers.)

    I don’t know if the GDPR regards information about a user’s online behavior to be personally identifying in the absence of some actually identifying data like an IP address. That might come down to how individual member states decide to implement the regulations, and is really a legal question nobody here is in a position to answer for certain.

    In any event, the function above will disable the last-access date collection and prevent redirections from incrementing the counter, so you can turn it off that way.

    Thread Starter Ate Up With Motor

    (@ate-up-with-motor)

    Unfortunately, I have not. It seems to be at least partially theme-specific (I have a site with the Astra theme that is NOT having this problem).

    If I understand her correctly, I believe what Joy was saying was that the issue was caused by a scroll-to-top script (rather than such a script fixing it). That seems to be what’s happening to me — it looks like the anchor link resolves correctly and then some script overrides it and sends it back to the top of the page. Once the user is ON that page, the anchor links function normally, even if they hit refresh/reload or just hit return in the address bar.

    Thread Starter Ate Up With Motor

    (@ate-up-with-motor)

    I’m surprised by the implication that the substantial challenges and compliance with expansive privacy laws like the GDPR and CCPA is some kind of eccentric personal problem of mine, but if that’s the official position of the WordPress.org community, so be it, I guess.

    Thread Starter Ate Up With Motor

    (@ate-up-with-motor)

    It would help if there were a standardized tab for it in the plugin/theme pages, even if filling it out were not mandatory.

    Again, I am not a developer. Neither are a lot of WordPress users. I am facing a legal climate that is increasingly calling for fines of thousands of dollars for noncompliance over things like cookie disclosures that are challenging to figure out for people who are not developers (or even people who are developers dealing with someone else’s code).

    Why is it not onerous to have keywords to let me search themes by how many columns they are, but onerous to provide some indication of whether they use Google Fonts?

    Thread Starter Ate Up With Motor

    (@ate-up-with-motor)

    Also, I’m not suggesting that developers be barred from using cookies or external resources (which would be silly as well as impractical), just that they put that information into some consistent place on the theme or plugin page so that users can make an informed choice.

    I don’t really see how doing that is more burdensome and onerous for developers than ending up fielding the same question multiple times in the support forums or other feedback messages. And, some plugins use neither cookies nor external resources, so there’s no documentation involved in that other than maybe clicking “no” on an upload form.

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Ate Up With Motor. Reason: formatting error
    Thread Starter Ate Up With Motor

    (@ate-up-with-motor)

    The thing is, the lack of disclosure by developers makes it very difficult for website owners to make those choices. If I want to find a theme that doesn’t use Google Fonts, for instance, I have to download it and dig through the source code — the repository lets me search certain design types, but not that crucial privacy question.

    Again, many of us are not developers and not coders. The “eh, well, it’s your problem, learn to code” attitude makes compliance challenging, and the penalties for noncompliance can be extraordinarily steep.

    Thread Starter Ate Up With Motor

    (@ate-up-with-motor)

    It’s not the date per se, it’s that California’s new GDPR-style privacy nightmare regards essentially any data about a person’s online activity as personal information, subject to onerous access and deletion requirements. This explicitly includes IP addresses (which are treated as personal identifiers equivalent to a name or phone number), but also transitory data and “inferences” drawn from other data. So, data that allowed a specific user visit to be tied to a particular referring link — even just by inference — gets into an uncomfortable gray area. (The Redirection log data would definitely implicate the new law, even with partially obfuscated IP addresses, because it documents online behavior of specific individuals.)

    How zealously they’re going to interpret the statutory language is TBD, but the statutory language is crazy broad.

    Thread Starter Ate Up With Motor

    (@ate-up-with-motor)

    Okay, it appears that worked — at least, testing redirects doesn’t increment the hit counter or update the last access date. Thanks!

    (I take your point about using the hit counter to see if redirects are still being used, but in this case, there are a lot of online sources with old versions of the links, so it’s not really practical for me to ‘retire’ old redirects. In a rational world, the last access date wouldn’t constitute a privacy issue, but “rational world” does not describe whatever universe California legislators are apparently living in!)

Viewing 15 replies - 211 through 225 (of 448 total)