Mon Nov 21 2022 -

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FastComments Now Supports Strict Third Party Cookie Settings

What's New

Disabling third-party cookies by default is becoming the norm in privacy-focused browsers. An example of this is Apple's Safari on iOS, where if you leave your email to comment with FastComments, verify that comment, and then come back to that page to leave another comment, or reply to someone, you'll find that any further comments you leave will be marked as unverified.

This will only happen with the default setup that shows an Unverified label on comments. However, this can impact other things like automatic approvals if auto approvals are only enabled for verified comments.

As you can imagine, this can result in frustrating behavior where a user verifies their comment, clicks "Keep Me Logged In", and they are still not logged in when they visit your site or application. Note that this does not apply to SSO integrations, as SSO does not depend on cookies.

Now, with a new setting that can be enabled called Enable Third-Party Cookie Popup in widget settings, this problem is solved by opening a popup that fetches the user's cookie. For now this only occurs if they interact with the comment widget, but the result is that the comment will be posted from their FastComments.com session, marking their comment verified, and so on.

How to Get It & Documentation

All FastComments customers on all tiers now have access to this feature. Checkout the documentation to learn how to enable the third party cookie bypass.

In Conclusion

Like all major releases, we're glad that we could take the time to optimize, test, and properly release this feature. Let us know below if you discover any issues.

Cheers!