block settings and how they persist...

My customer called me today and said something like "james, I was at this site the other day helping a student and when we changed block settings, they did not stay."   As I tried to explain what should happen, I realized I was not completely sure how the settings were stored.

The bottom line is this.  Block settings persist with the account, not in the browser or in a cookie.

I proved how the block settings persist by taking the following steps.

1. I opened browser a on machine a and logged into a test account
2. I opened browser b on machine b and logged into the same test account.
3. I added some blocks while logged into machine b
4. I refreshed machine a and saw the changes I had just made
5. I then made some changes in machine a, then refreshed machine b and saw those changes.
6. The final check I made was to log off both accounts on machine a and b.  Then logged into the same account from machine c and saw the most recent changes as I would expect.

The changes I made to the blocks were, adding new blocks, moving blocks from right to left, docking blocks and un-docking.
 
Clearly the changes to the blocks are stored in the DB and associated with the user account.

The end.