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We recently had a donor call our office who was having trouble donating online (https://secure.wildsight.ca/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=1).

It turned out they had blocked cookies in general and when trying to use the contribution page, the site just reloaded blank after submission (nothing was processed). We are not using a confirmation page.

Is this the expected behaviour? Should users be able to make a contribution without cookies? Should they receive an error message that tells them to enable cookies?

5.19.4 on Drupal 7.69

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  • Probably not relevant, but just in case, we also had a different report of a donor having the page reload blank after using the IOS "Scan my card" function.
    – Lars SG
    Jan 7, 2020 at 15:11
  • I believe they would be required yes, however you should be aware the logs can often show a 'We can't load the requested web page. This page requires cookies to be enabled in your browser settings' when there is actually a different error.
    – EagleUK
    Jan 7, 2020 at 15:47

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Yes, that's the expected behaviour.

I'm intrigued that anyone would try and make a contribution with cookies disabled - presumably they are (justifiably) concerned about privacy on the internet, but there aren't going to be many donation forms that work without cookies.

The reason you need cookies enabled (with civicrm) is because some of the form state gets saved in your session which is tied to you via your cookie(s).

Here's an equivalent issue in Drupal from 16 years ago that's still going. The proposed solution is to provide some notice to users that don't have cookies enabled.

https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2946

Options going forward are:

  1. Build yourself an extension which pops up a warning when a visitor to civicrm has cookies disabled.
  2. Create a PR for core to do this.
  3. Use an existing drupal module to do the same thing.

I'd recommend you start with an existing Drupal module and see how it works. There will be a few different ways to do this, some more invasive than others. For a core patch, I'd only recommend that it pop up after an attempted submission because otherwise you're generated some extra load and risk messing something up.

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  • That's what I assumed was the case, but obviously people do try these things. Seems like a notice would be helpful, worth starting an issue for this?
    – Lars SG
    Jan 7, 2020 at 19:12

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