Cookies...

Shiminay

Can anyone point me in the right direction of some websites that'll teach me the fundamentals of all thing's webby and biscuity???

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All the best,

Dav
@B^)
My page of stuff

Pretence

Where I started was the following site tis good and a fair few links
http://htmlgoodies.earthweb.com/

zenith

http://www.cookiecentral.com/ is oldish, but okay. How were you thinking of using them, and where? From perl, or from ASP, or from IIS or what?

Shiminay

Cheers for that lads.

My plan is...

I've got a pop-up (I warned the client about the annoyance of this) and now they realise what a mistake it is to have pop-ups. So, they want a cookie to remember when there's been a visitor and so it won't pop-up if they've been tehre before.

---

All the best,

Dav
@B^)
My page of stuff

Kali

dont know much about other languages but if you want to use php:
just check for its existence before you call the popup:

<?php if(empty($mycookie)): ?>

javascript popup code whatever ye like.

<?php SetCookie("mycookie", $whateverinfoyouwant, time()+14400+7200, "/", "www.mydomain.com"); ?>

<?php endif; ?>

and contine on with html.....

some notes about cookies.. some browsers have to have perfect variables in the Set_Cookie header.. e.g. the path, domain, and time variables all must be set and be valid.

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http://www.filmsoc.com

Shiminay

Nicely done Kali - not sure if the server supports PHP, but I can get that sorted - I HAVE THE POWER!!!

Taht said, I might just jam it into a language that it does support (prolly JAVA-Script).

Thanks again folks!

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All the best,

Dav
@B^)
My page of stuff

Bard

hmm... ultra-paranoid people may have cookies disabled in their browsers... now you *could* say fúck'em, it's their loss, - or couldn't you do the same thing, but using ASP or some other solution instead?

just curious

[This message has been edited by Bard (edited 09-06-2000).]

Hobbes

People tend to disable cookies because they don't like people spying on them. Take the Chat Ireland.net banner. That attempts to put a cookie on your system. I see no reason why they should.



[This message has been edited by Hobbes (edited 09-06-2000).]

Trojan

Personally I've all cookies stopped by Junkbuster which also stops outgoing http GET requests from certain addresses and/or directory paths.

E.g. *.doubleclick.net, www.theregister.co.uk/images/adverts/ , www.mercurycenter.com/advert, /cgi-bin/webadverts - that last one stops the banner appearing on this page.

It also nukes the user-agent info sent out, instead says I'm running whatever I tell it to - I say user-agent Mozilla/6 (Macintosh; I; 68K) hehe (actually have a 33MHz 68040 mac at home)

Of course nuking cookies kills some pages so you can let in from certain sites with another file...

Al.

Kali

just a tad bit sad imo...
of course if your on a 14.4k modem perhaps cookie requests and banner ads loading are a burden on anything else its pointless paranoia.
OH MY GOD they know where i'm dialling from.
OH MY GOD they're trying to build up user statistics to see what browser their users prefer.
OH MY GOD they're trying to make money by putting banners on their pages!

zenith

Yeah, you could, but you'd have to use usernames and passwords and logons and stuff, and people hate those more than cookies. You'd have to get each and every person to log onto the site, and get them to log on again before they come back, and then decide if they should get the banner or not.

[This message has been edited by zenith (edited 09-06-2000).]

Shiminay

Thanks for all that guys - I've warned the client that cookies are not a foolproof way to do this, but as usual they won't listen to me...

They'll learn soon enough

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All the best,

Dav
@B^)
My page of stuff

Hobbes

Originally posted by Kali:
just a tad bit sad imo...
of course if your on a 14.4k modem perhaps cookie requests and banner ads loading are a burden on anything else its pointless paranoia.
OH MY GOD they know where i'm dialling from.
OH MY GOD they're trying to build up user statistics to see what browser their users prefer.
OH MY GOD they're trying to make money by putting banners on their pages!

The problem isn't reading the site you first got the cookie on, its the sites you visit after that.

There is a known bug with some versions of IE which allows sites to view all your cookies. Some of your cookies contain personal information (eg. passwords+logins). Heck B+N or amazon.com had a "one click" cookie, which meant that someone mimic'ed the cookie they could order anything they wanted from the site.