AKA it’s impossible to permanently save the game preferences (at least I’m not aware of any way to do it).
And I don’t think that storing OGS settings in cookies is a good idea (for a lot of reasons. One that’s blatently obvious is logging in on different computers/browsers resets those settings that are only stored in cookies).
All game preferences are set in http://online-go.com/user/settings now. We store some persistently, and some in browser local storage specifically so you can maintain different profiles on different computers (many people like this feature)
In that case, how about a “Set defaults” button for the game preferences, which will save the default values for the game preferences server side. (Default values for when no cookies (or whereever you store the settings) are found.)
Seems like a sensible improvement over the current situation, while leaving the “browser profile” behaviour completely intact.
The only downside I can come up with is that it might be slightly confusing to new users (though I think the current behaviour is just as opaque, just a bit more hidden from the users).
And yes, I’m aware this isn’t a high priority issue.
I’ve seen a minor bug that might be related to this somehow. I prefer to have no goban coordinate labels displayed, but at random (at no apparent pattern between site visits on the same computer), they come back and I have full coordinate labels again. Just now, I was looking at a game, but when I clicked on “games with moves to make” button (which happened to be at 1 with that already being displayed) in the upper right, the labels suddenly reappeared around the game I was on. Weird stuff