Linda please fix the Cow Magazine Advertisement

[Eric Bliss]

Who’s Linda??? Don’t know anybody here by that name…

I’m afraid that the problems you’re having with the magazine ad have to do with the fact that you’re wiping out your cookies every day. When the page tells you “This will only come up once or twice a year”, it says that on the assumption that you actually let your browser KEEP your cookies. When you click on one of the buttons on the page, it sets a cookie telling the mechanism that you’ve already seen this ad, and not to display it again. However, if you insist on destroying your cookies every day, then it’s going to be displayed every day, because your browser is telling the site that 1) you use cookies, and 2) that you don’t have the cookie set that means that you’ve already seen the ad for the magazine.

Your “third option” of ignore this ad forever, would also need to be kept track of with a cookie, and so you would still be getting the page every time you wiped out your cookies. So that isn’t really going to work.

If you keep destroying your cookies like this, I’m tempted to ask why you even bother allowing cookies to be set at all? The point of cookies is to allow your browser to remember information about your preferences for different websites that you visit.

If you never want to see the ad for the magazine, you either need to stop deleting your cookies, so that the site will be able to know that you’ve already seen the ad, or you need to turn cookies off completely in your browser. If you choose the second option however, many useful features of the Cow will no longer work for you (things like automatically filling in your information for posting, keeping track of the post view settings you prefer for each forum, etc.). Of course, I can’t really say how well any of these features is working for you right now, since you keep deleting that information.

You’ll need to decide what solution best fits your needs, but I’m afraid that this is something that will require you to change the way that you surf our site in order to have it stop occuring. Either stop deleting your cookies, or else disable them completely. Either solution will cause the ad to stop displaying, but I leave it up to you to decide which way you want to do things.

Eric Bliss

systems design and integration
CreativeCow.Net

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[Peter Wright]

Thanks for that information Eric.

I am using Opera 8.5, I have Cookies enabled, I never delete them, yet I have to reset them every time I reopen the browser and visit here if I want my name in Red etc, and I also get the magazine reminder each time like Rob.

Under Tools / Advanced / Cookies, there are three lines inside the creative cow folder,
“cowforum_24 …”, “cowtzo …” and “magazine_subscribe …”

I get recognised as soon as I visit other forums, so is there some difference in the way Cookies are recognised?

Thanks

Peter

[Ron Lindeboom]

There is no Linda here… Just Lindebooms. ;o)

As Eric points out, there is no way to keep that page from coming up for those wishing to destroy their cookies everyday.

We purposely set it to where “most” people will only see the page once a year. This assumption is based on the fact that most of our people do not wipe out their cookies everyday and secondly, that most people who come to the Creative Cow are going to subscribe to the magazine. Those who don’t will get a gentle reminder once a month that the magazine exists and they can sign up for free. Those who who wipe out their cookies everyday are going to get a daily reminder — or at least a reminder everytime they come to the Cow.

We can do nothing about that, Rob, as cookies are the *only* way we have to track this for you. So if you blow out your cookies everyday, you are deleting the information our site uses to keep from bothering you.

We do not track anyone or keep information on anyone. All our cookies are user-side resident and they do not report anything back to us. They merely hold your name and email so you do not have to manually enter them everytime you post, they keep track of the default time period of posts that you like in your favorite forums — and they tell our mechanism that you have already either signed up for the magazine, are not interested or that you are new to the site and so it presents the page to you.

By blowing out your cookies, the site thinks that you are new and treats you as a new visitor.

As Eric says, there is nothing we can do about that as you are the one destroying the cookies we use to keep things under control here in the pasture…

Sorry, but we have no better news for you…

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow,net

[Ron Lindeboom]

Hello Peter,

We wish we could support all the browsers that everyone uses but the truth is that Opera accounts for less than 1% of our traffic and so we spend absolutely no time whatsoever testing, debugging or developing for that browser. We do not develop for Opera as based on our past experience, Opera is very quirky and follows its own path and so we gave up trying to develop for it as it always seemed to be needing some workaround that was much more time intensive than was reasonable considering the incredibly small number of users that use it here in the Cow.

Just as Adobe quit making their Production Studio for the Mac — because it didn’t make sense to spend 50% of their time and developmental budget to develop for a market that was a small percentage of their market — we have had to make the decision that we cannot develop for all browsers and so we build and test on the following ones only:

[Peter Wright]

Thanks for explaining Ron,

I appreciate your position – I’ll keep trying to fix this as it’s worked for years ok with Opera until recently – maybe I need to check my Zone Alarm Pro settings.

Peter

[Richard Klimesh]

Peter,

I’m using Opera 8.51 and had a the same problems with the Cow forum but got them resolved. Email me if you want to discuss it off the forum. videos”at”horsekeeping.com.

[Ted Snow]

I use Netscape 7.2 and I have my cookie pref set to ask me about every cookie. I can then check a box as to whether to always allow a certain site to set cookies or not. This way you can allow cookies from the sites you want and not allow them for the sites you do not.