Cookie notice: appears on some homepages, not others, then reappears

[nuriapenya]

Problem

During our audit, we realise this cookie banner appears and reappears in different landing pages randomly

Go to the homepage in an incognito window. Notice no cookie notice. Click "Get started", notice a cookie notice. Dismiss it, complete the onboarding flow, go to the editor, and see the cookie notice appear again, even though it was already dismissed.

Where

Multiple places throughout WordPress.com.

For example:

Expected result

Until you dismiss the cookie notice, you should see it, the same notice, on every page you can visit, and once you do dismiss it, you should never see it again, regardless of where on the site you go (inc. subdomains and otherwise).

[github-actions]

OpenAI suggested the following labels for this issue:

• [Feature Group] Site Settings & Tools: The issue revolves around the settings related to cookie notices on different pages of the site.
• [Feature] Legal TOS & Privacy: This issue pertains to a cookie notice, which is often tied to legal compliance and privacy policies.
• [Feature] User Interaction & Engagement: The problem highlights a broken user experience where the cookie notice does not behave consistently, affecting user engagement.

[niranjan-uma-shankar]

Something to keep in mind is that cookie banners will not show up when proxied, unless forced via a feature flag.

In Landpack landing pages, you'd have to append ?flags=a8c-analytics.on, so https://wordpress.com/?flags=a8c-analytics.on for the LOHP. Calypso uses a different flag, you'd have to use https://wordpress.com/setup/onboarding/user?flags=ad-tracking,cookie-banner. Otherwise, best would be to not proxy and then test the entire flow.

cc @Automattic/martech-bumblebees who know more about cookie banner stuff.

[claudiucelfilip]

Go to the homepage in an incognito window. Notice no cookie notice

I retested without proxy and was able to see the cookie banner on the homepage. As @niranjan-uma-shankar mentioned above, visiting the homepage while proxied (and without ?flags=a8c-analytics.on) won't show the cookie banner, which is an intended behavior.
@nuriapenya can you confirm that you can see the cookie banner on the homepage while unproxied?

However, there is an issue when switching between Calypso views (such as /plans) and wp-admin views (such as Posts or Pages) where we're switching domains: wordpress.com vs {SITE_SLUG}.wordpress.com).
In this scenario, the dismissal of the cookie banner on the root domain doesn't carry over to the subdomain (and vice versa).

Opened fix for this here: 176691-ghe-Automattic/wpcom

[claudiucelfilip]

The fix has been deployed. 🚀

[nuriapenya]

Thanks @claudiucelfilip 👌🏼 just re-tested and everything works as expected. While unproxied, I was able to dismiss the cookie banner and it didn't show up when visiting other pages, which is the expected behavior.

[claudiucelfilip]

Thank you @nuriapenya for retesting. Unfortunately, we had to revert the fix ( 178185-ghe-Automattic/wpcom) as it was affecting automattic.com.
We'll come back with another fix.