Discourse w/ Topic as Pinned then Banner on Chrome Incognito

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I use Chrome Incognito to access a Forum run on Discourse.

In Sept, an Admin posted a Pinned topic. In Oct, she changed the setting to: “This topic is now a banner. It will appear at the top of every page until it is dismissed by the user.”

On Incognito, that means I’ve “dismissed” that post/thread every day, multiple times a day, since it was first created Sept 9th.

How do I make this go away so I’m not X-ing out (dismissing the post) multiple times a day for the rest of my time on that Forum? (Regular Chrome, of course, easily dismissed the post/thread long ago and retained that information. )

I recognize it likely has to do with Incognito purposely not retaining browsing history and possibly related to info stored in a cookie? Do I need to delete the cookie? If so, will I need to look for that site’s forum cookie, or a Discourse cookie?

If not a cookie, what can I do to fix this? It likely affects anyone else using Incognito on that Forum.

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This is working as intended.

You browse the forum in Incognito mode, but do you log in?

If you do log in, the pin status will be saved into your account.

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I log in via the company that runs the forum.

You misunderstood my point— The pinned post was unpinned in Oct. But in Chrome Incognito, logged into the forum, that post returns no matter how many times a day that I dismiss it. As soon as I close the browser window (effectively becoming ‘logged out’), and re-open the browser window, and re-log in, presto-magic the same post is back. If I sign in 10x a day… 20x a day… I have to RE-“dismiss” it on every visit.

*It SHOULD stay dismissed when any user dismisses the post, no matter what browser they are using.

Surely, there must be a way to not nag users who use Chrome Incognito who have already dismissed one of these posts hundreds & hundreds of times, multiple times a day and every singe day since October???

4

Storing the closed state of the banner requires cookies, when you use incognito all cookies are deleted when you close the tab. So it becomes impossible.

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5

Is there anything you can recommend that I can do to make the regular Chrome w/ its cookie take precedence? Is there any way to override the issue showing in Incognito?

Based on your premise that cookies are deleted when closing Incognito, it is illogical why the banner thread remains showing in Incognito—since it shouldn’t be “remembering” anything at all from any browsing session (and it is displaying correctly in Regular chrome)… but the banner thread persists since early October only in Incognito. Do you see the flaw I’m pointing out in this scenario? There must be some way to bypass this issue??

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The “remembering” in this case is remembering that it was closed.

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What’s odder is, I used Regular Chrome during Sept. Therefore, Incognito shouldn’t have seen anything to “forget” nor need to remember it was open as a banner— or closed. There’s some oddity here that is not making sense.

So does this mean if I use Regular Chrome for the next 16 wks or 16 months, and go back to using Incognito, that Incognito will still show a banner that was dismissed Oct 2016 ?

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Banners are supposed to show for anonymous users who have never logged into the forum.

Clicking the :heavy_multiplication_x: stores that you dismissed the banner in the browser storage.

Closing the last open Incognito window discards all browser storage.

Therefore, clearing browsing data results in the banner notice being shown again.

Everything involved is working as designed, and together it results in an odd user experience for you. Have you considered creating a new Chrome profile instead?

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Perhaps Discourse can tweak this so a member can use a setting that says “Do not show any banner posts older than 30 days”. Any member logged in should not have to put up with this, no matter what browser they use.

I’m not going to be forced to make new accounts to avoid an issue that should never be an issue. Users (who don’t have coding experience) should not be hog-tied into seeing a banner for the rest of their lives! I’ve been on that forum for over a year; and Moderate there, so it will not be a simple matter to change my identity to override a design flaw that happens to now haunt me. Oh, and by the way—if this is a correct explanation, why don’t ALL the other past bannered threads show on my Incognito? This banner is the only one that’s an issue. We had banner posts before…and since… none of those show.

The way it works, per your explanation, is that time-sensitive and expired events will show from the beginning of time of the forum to any new user— Who wants that on a rapidly changing forum? (The banners are for a “new task”, but the new tasks for users expire about every 30-60 days. Those threads would be of no use to new users, at 1 day past, 3 mos, 6 mos, 1 yr, 2 yrs after the event expires!)

Rather ridiculous and viscous cycle that’s created for users, eh? :wink:

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I would take it up with the people who run the instance, which is … not us. They have the power to remove banners or set them as they see fit.

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We could lower the pain by remembering that the banner is closed not only in the cookie, but in the user’s account as well. It looks like this is not happening yet.

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It is.

It is in the user_profiles tables dismissed_banner_key field.

I think the issue is that discourse/models/user.js.es6 has

  dismissBanner(bannerKey) {
    this.set("dismissed_banner_key", bannerKey);
    ajax(`/users/${this.get('username')}`, {
      type: 'PUT',
      data: { dismissed_banner_key: bannerKey }
    });
  },

and that Chrome in incognito mode doesn’t do the required AJAX stuff.

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True that – for some reason (probably some mistake on my part), it wasn’t working when I was testing it. Sorry for the confusion.

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GMTA… I did write to them. But I also thought it needs addressed in the programming.

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Only alternative I can think here is writing a special incognito browser plugin from chrome that would run some custom script every time you enter incognito. Maybe there is a greasmonkey option.

Stuff is working as designed here.

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