Remove unused jquery.cookie dependency and add no-cookies notice to f…

[Wdhanashri]

The jquery.cookie library was loaded but never used Added a privacy notice to the footer confirming the site does not use cookies or tracking. Addresses #49

[MakisH]

@Wdhanashri thanks! How did you confirm that no cookies are set? We should be rather sure before adding such a notice.

What happens in pages where we embed from YouTube, for example? Here is one: https://precice.org/community-contribute-to-precice.html

[Wdhanashri]

@MakisH I verified by auditing the codebase:

• Removed the unused jquery.cookie library (loaded but never called)
• Plausible Analytics is cookieless by design
• Algolia search does not set cookies unless we explicitly enable useCookie: true in search-insights, current preCICE site doesn't use search-insights.
• YouTube embeds already use youtube-nocookie.com (privacy-enhanced mode), which avoids cookies until a user clicks play

The only edge case is YouTube after playback — if we want to be fully accurate, we could soften the notice to "No first-party cookies" or "No cookies on this page" on pages without embeds.

Happy to adjust the wording.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR removes the unused jquery.cookie dependency from the site header and adds a privacy notice to the footer stating that the site does not use cookies or tracking (Issue #49).

Changes:

• Removed the jquery.cookie CDN script include from _includes/head.html.
• Added a “No cookies. No tracking.” notice with an icon to _includes/footer.html.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 2 out of 2 changed files in this pull request and generated 2 comments.

File	Description
_includes/head.html	Removes the unused jquery.cookie script include from the global page header.
_includes/footer.html	Adds a privacy/cookie notice to the site footer.

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[MakisH]

@Wdhanashri again: consider Copilot for what it is and address what you feel makes sense. I just wanted some help in reviewing.

[MakisH]

Thanks for all the updates! The footer currently looks like this (looks a bit of an outlier, but still):

I am leaving this open until I get a second opinion.

@chlorenz since you briefly looked at this at some point, what do you think? (I hope you read here)

[fsimonis]

According to Firefox Dev Tools, it looks like the new mailercloud newsletter uses a challenge from challenges.cloudflare.com, which adds a cookie.

We could just add a subscribe button and link to the standalone webform instead. What do you think @MakisH

[MakisH]

We could just add a subscribe button and link to the standalone webform instead. What do you think @MakisH

I agree. This would also make the page lighter.

[precice-bot]

This pull request has been mentioned on preCICE Forum on Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://precice.discourse.group/t/gsoc-2026-dhanashri-wankhade/2754/1