I am surprised it's blocked in the EU. My first guess is that this student newspaper doesn't have a lot of technical folks on staff and didn't see much point in investing in being Europe-friendly. Their hosting site, https://townnews.com/, doesn't look super legit at a glance but perhaps someone else knows more.
If you do insist on tracking, make it opt out by default.
If you keep permanent logs with information about users, then yeah that is a problem. But it should be a problem, that is a big potential security/privacy issue.
Students! Learning! (Continents!).
I’m not sure how I’m supposed to parse this. Maybe the “continents” is meant to be a correction from “countries’ laws”, but that would be a mistake because the EU isn’t a continent but rather a union of sovereign nations, and “countries’” is plural possessive so the original wording is correct.
But as a general web consumer myself, all I've noticed is that nearly every website I visit has a banner at the bottom saying "We use cookies, click Accept". Very rarely is there some kind of "Please Don't" button. It's just tacit acceptance, or else close the browser tab to opt-out.
How does a nontechnical user with little knowledge of GDPR know if he needs to display a cookie popup (he may not even know what a cookie is or whether or not his software uses them or in what capacity). What about email addresses in user accounts? Is he now collecting private information and making himself culpable for expunging that information on request? He may not even know how to expunge in the case of log files or other artifacts. “Not much harder” my arse.