I hate sound. I will never want to have it as part of my Go playing experience. With the previous interface, I could at least disable it with a single click. Now even that’s not possible. I need to go into my settings and disable it there. And of course, that setting is never remembered, so each time I return to the site, it’s been reset to have sound on 
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This should be remembered in your browser, is that not the case? What browser/version/os are you using?
No, it’s not the case. I’m using Firefox 30.0 on Linux.
It’s only “remembered” in a cookie or something, so it’s flushed every time you quit your browser if you restrict cookie lifetime to browser lifetime (which I do, at least). I’d like to have a global setting that is taken as the default if no settings cookie exists, myself, with a settings cookie override. (I often turn on sound for live games, but otherwise I don’t want to hear it.)
Yes, this is definitely something that should be being stored server side associated with the user account rather than in a cookie.
Have you figured out how to disable the sound of stones hitting the board it in real-life? Do you use ear plugs?
It’s stored in local storage, so enable that in your browser and you should be good to go.
There are a lot of people who keep different settings for this for different devices, this is why we don’t make it a server setting - it’s inherently a device specific setting.
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(Note: this is browser local storage, not cookies, very different things. Local storage isn’t the same kind of things as a cookie, cookies are sent back to the server so folks can track you and whatnot, local storage is just kept in your browser to save various settings and cache things and whatnot, there’s no reason to disable this.)
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Nope. I installed an extension to let me check the contents of local storage and OGS is storing nothing on my computer. I haven’t disabled anything on the browser either to make it behave that way. I can’t even find any Firefox settings related to local storage.
I’ll dispute that it’s a browser specific setting also. If I disable sound and configure other aspects of my account, I absolutely want those to follow me on whichever machine I happen to be using. But I guess others might have different preferences on that.
anoek: Browser local storage can easily be sent back to servers by Javascript queries. I flush it, too.
@elb so the thing with cookies is if I’m a user and someone puts a facebook resource on their page, when my browser sends the request back to facebook it will send back the cookies associated with the domain for that image. With that information facebook, a third party having nothing to do with the website I’m visiting, can tell where I’m visiting and in general compile some interesting data on me I might not want them to implicitly have. This is what folks are legitimately concerned about, “tracking cookies”.
Javascript sure can be used to send information back to a server, including local storage information, however it can access local storage associated with the website you are actually visiting. Now an author could explicitly write some code to send data off to facebook or whatever, but that would be an explicit action on behalf of that website as opposed to sticking some graphic in without really knowing any better. Also, they could explicitly send this data off to facebook without using javascript, so it’s not like you’re going to be saving yourself anything by not using javascript, or disabling local storage.
I’m glad you guys are somewhat aware of general internet safe practices, I hope this explanation will help you better understand why cookies can be bad, but most of the time are not bad. Cookies, 99.999% of the time, are completely harmless because it’s just your website storing some state. Local storage solves two problems: 1) the 0.001% problem, getting rid of the possibility of unwanted tracking by big corporations looking to build a profile about you based off of what you’re visiting, and 2) give the programmers more space to work with 
(cookies have to be very small… using local storage, we can allocate a lot more space and do things like cache things on the client to make things faster and all sorts of fun stuff to improve user experience.
@Tethys I promise you it’s there, you don’t even need some fancy extension to see it, simply open up the javascript console and type in localStorage and it’ll dump the browsable object back at ya so you can check it out and see all the various things we store in there
P.S. Tracking cookies are pretty much yesterdays technology, folks that really care about tracking you are already doing other things like pixel trackings and stuff like that… so cookie scrubbing is pretty much doing nothing but making the web less pleasant for ya’ll these days, it’s not actually protecting you against much anymore
@anoek: I understand the difference between cookies and local storage. However, there are fate-sharing problems here, for one (Chrome, for example, has only one preference that controls both), and for two, look through your local storage some time – there’s a fair amount of obvious ad tracking data there.
Yes, I understand that there are a lot of other ways to track users. I use multiple browser profiles with different settings, I use proxies, and I have extensions that block many suspicious behaviors. It’s very hard to protect against everything (and indeed it’s an arms race), but I do believe that scoping the lifetime of cookies and local storage is a reasonable tradeoff. Note that I personally do not block these things entirely – keeping them for a session gives me most of their benefit while blocking some portion of their disadvantage.
I’m not really upset over this, I simply related the reason that the current state of affairs causes me to have to revisit preferences every now and then. It would make my OGS experience, personally, better if I could turn sound off globally across devices with a server-side setting. No more, no less. With or without this feature, OGS is one of my favorite services on the web.
FTR I think there is a case to be made for storing a default setting on the server, effectively doing what ya’ll want, but then allowing the local settings to override these… and that may very well happen at some point, but I certainly want to get a few more core features done before thinking about ancillary things like this.
For now I would recommend just whitelisting the site, or dealing with the pita of updating your settings every time you visit the site.
@Tethys I do encourage you to rip apart our cookies and local storage blobs and verify we aren’t storing anything interesting in there, then once your satisfied we’re not some how harvesting your precious datas, white list us, and presto your problem will be solved As mentioned above, doing server side default options may very well happen in the future, it’s not going to be in the immediate or near future.
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Perhaps you are only using the site on desktop PCs. I do not want the same settings on my phone as I do on my desktop.