The site did not allow me to sign up unless I turned off my cookie consent popup blockers

[rjdg14]

When I initially tried to sign up earlier today, I got greeted with a message saying that I had to accept consent to cookies from the site before I did so. This is almost certainly GDPR related, but I have various plugins installed on my PC which together remove nearly all cookie popups on the internet, which I generally find a nuisance (you never used to see them until about a decade ago, and they became a lot more pervasive after the GDPR kicked in). The plugins that were causing this which I have installed are "I Don't Care About Cookies" and "uBlock Origin" (the second with a custom cookie filter applied) and in order to get round the error I had to briefly disable them, click the consent approval button on the banner, re-enable the plugins and then I could sign up. On most sites these plugins do not cause any interference when signing up so it would be good if this site could redesign its cookie consent detector so that plugins such as these will automatically recognise that I have effectively given/waived consent. From the best of my memory this would be the first site that I have had difficulty signing up to because of a plugin in my browser.

To the best of my knowledge, based on the design of other sites, the GDPR does not actively require every user to give a button-consent from a popup before signing up. Many of the other forums I use instead updated users with a new terms page when the GDPR first came into force, and show the same page to new users signing up. I feel it would be good if you could replace the cookie based detector that can inhibit the ability to sign in for people with plugins installed like myself with a phpBB screen regarding cookies/the GDPR upon trying to sign up or logging in where I could click "accept" instead. I think the forum software supports this.

[topcat96]

I have to switch off or disable Ublock Origin, Idontcareaboutcookies and my browser's built-in ad blocker before I can post here.

Needless to say, I post here only occasionally now because of this.

[sweh]

Out of curiousity, are you using http:// or https:// ?

I use https and have ublock origin enabled. I have NoScript setting this site to trusted. There are 4 cookies; I gave up on blocking cookies years ago because too many sites break, especially those used for authentication. If you care about cookies then you're better off with a cookie cleaner solution.

And the site works fine (except for those people embedding images with http:// urls 'cos Chrome won't display those on a https site).