Settings keep getting lost

In particular: “Advance to next game” (I like that off) and “Show offline friends” (likewise). I can’t say how many times I had to twiddle these, and it is not because I wiped the local site data.


Ian

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Any hints? (OS, browser, versions etc)

And are you using one device, or more than one, to access OGS?

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MacOS BigSur, with Firefox 91.10.0 (ESR).

Nope, always the same device. MacOS BigSur on a 2019 MacBook Pro.

Update: I do use multiple Firefox profiles, but it’s always the same one for OGS. Purely hypothetically, I can image a Firefox bug where the OGS session is somehow hijacked by another profile and the settings stored there.

I just hate client side state. It’s not how the web was supposed to be.

This is a curious phase “was supposed to be”.

If you had said “is supposed to be”, then it would make more sense - we learn about how the web might best operate, and you would be saying “you think that client side state has been established as a bad thing”.

But “was” … I think the original conception of the web was purely client-side state. WorldWideWeb was afterall a client-side editor. The web “was supposed to be” a distributed set of resources - the only server side “state” being the content itself.

That being said, I personally haven’t given much thought to the choice of where we store OGS settings up to this point - it’s been “it is what it is”.

@anoek do you have thoughts on the matter?

Sounds like local storage isn’t persisting correctly, do you have strict privacy settings / clear cookies often? (We don’t store in cookies, but that clears local storage too)

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The meta question is “do we have local storage of settings for a ‘reason’, or is moving server-side something we’d consider?”

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Depends on which setting you are talking about. There are some that users will clearly wish to have the same on all devices while others are much more likely to be device specific.

This isn’t exactly a setting but I for one wish that the information about what chat I have already seen in chat channels would carry over from one device to another (and indeed from one tab to another).

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Is there anyone who actually likes to read their chats once on each device?

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Probably not but I don’t want to hijack the thread. I just thought it was a good example of how some things definitely shouldn’t be device specific.

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Probably the only setting I have a huge “needs-to-be-per-device” preference for is volume. I like my personal laptop to have sound, and everything else to be silent…

Edit: oh also click-to-submit settings. I prefer to use the submit button on mobile, where I am likely to fat-finger things :grimacing:

Edit2: on the other side of things, I have the profanity filter turned off on all devices, wouldn’t mind if that carried over.

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Right, so these are examples of “where I want the settings depends on what the settings is” as opposed to “client-side state is not how the web is meant to be” eh?

I guess the nice thing here is “chose per setting (or set of settings)” is the kind of direction we were heading in with the somewhat-recent data updates, so we are inching towards “the right thing” :slight_smile:

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Yeah I don’t understand what @genbeart was getting at with the “how the web was supposed to be” comment. Cookies have existed since the 90s!

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So, normally I keep myself logged in, but this time I logged out, and sure enough, it happened.

I double checked my browser settings, local site data is set to persist. This is Firefox ESR in a Mac.

I wasn’t thinking of users with multiple devices … yeah, in that case you probably want the opposite than myself. Tough, I really don’t know how to satisfy both of us.


Ian