There are many topics regarding the Google Adsense and GDPR compliance/consent, but none of them is really conclusive.
The situation today is:
- One can use the Advertising plugin with Adsense to display ads on a Discourse instance.
- Google Adsense’s own consent manager kind of works and ads are correctly displayed.
- The problem with Adsense CMP is that it recognizes that Discourse uses infinite scrolling and launches a floating element on the site, that enables the user to revoke or adjust the consents.
- This is terrible in terms of UI/UX. The floating notifier is highly distracting and in some scenarios it can even overlap the UI buttons of Discourse.
- I have reported this to Google more than once, with no response.
- There are a lot of frustrated comments around the internet about his, noting Google’s reluctance to improve the UI/UX.
- An elegant hack to the solution would be to hide the floating element, and in order to remain compliant with the GDPR, provide a consent revokation link somewhere else in the UI. Google provides these instructions: Link
- Since the consent management is a mandatory requirement, this hack should/could be a feature of the Advertising plugin?
- Hide the floating element that Adsense generates
- Provide the consent revocation callback in a user friendly location - maybe the burger menu, or user profile menu. This does not seem like a complex coding effort, but annyoingly just beyond my skillset.
- Has anyone doodled with the CMP floating element, with the aim to hide it? I’d love to see some code examples of what and how you have done.
If you don’t know what I am talking about, then just go to Tappara.co, give consent, for a minute or two scroll some topics up and down → the floating element will popup.
Ping @JammyDodger