Setting Cookie in this Forum – problem ?

[David J]

It also affects me – I had to reset my cookie yesterday when the forum refused a posting. Had lots of trouble like this a little while ago which seemed to have gone away till now.

I went through the ‘reset cookie’ link which seems to have fixed it this time.

[Craig Howard]

Thanx David ( atleast I am not alone or imagining this)

I have reset cookies link a “million times” and it just wont “stick”.

Weird that it’s only an issue on one of my machines.

[Eric Bliss]

Okay, this may be stupid, but…

Does the browser that you’re having problems with actually have cookies enabled?

If cookies aren’t enabled, cookies won’t work no matter how many times you set them. The other thing to check is if you have too many cookies set for the Cow. Browsers do have limits on how many cookies they’ll accept for any given website. If you use the “Mark Thread As Read” function a lot, you may be running into the limit of accepted cookies for the browser. Try clearing your cookies for the Cow (some browsers allow you to clear out all cookies for individual sites), then try updating your cookies.

Eric Bliss

systems design and integration
CreativeCow.Net

int main(void) {
printf(“Hello World!\n”);
}

[Craig Howard]

Thanx Eric.

I checked again and the cookies are enabled and this problem does not occur on any other site (forum). – and as previously mentioned, only on one of my machines.

Does the cookie used by this forum have name. ?

Craig
Shooter Film Company
Auckland
New Zealand

(Premiere Pro 1.5 / Matrox TRX100 XTreme Pro)

[Eric Bliss]

Well, here’s a few different cookies for you – all of them should be listed as belonging to domain .creativecow.net …

cowname – the value of this cookie should be your posting name – you’ll probably see a %20 in it – that’s the spacebar.

cowemail – the value of this cookie should be your posting e-mail address. %40 is the at sign.

cowadd_signature – T or F – add your signature to a post by default.

cowview – t d, or s – default view for “View Posts” – [t]hread, [d]ate, or [s]ummary.

cownotify – T, A, F – Response Notification via Email – T: Message only A: Entire thread F: None – kinda cryptic now, but it was from [T]rue, [A]ll, or [F]alse.

cowtzo – number – minutes away + or – from GMT/UTC/Zulu Time (a.k.a. local time for Greenwich, England)

cowage_(forum number) – number of days back to show posts for that forum.

Those are the core cookies for the site. More are coming, but that’s what you should look for right now.

Eric Bliss

systems design and integration
CreativeCow.Net

int main(void) {
printf(“Hello World!\n”);
}

[David J]

I’ve just dropped out again when trying to post a response and had to reset my cookies again after many days of normal service.

I’ll be very surprised if the problem isn’t in the farmyard, since all other cookies work, and continue to work, without such problems.

[Eric Bliss]

Three questions…

1. How many different Cow forums do you visit on a regular basis?

2. How often do you use the “Mark as Read” function in the thread view?

3. What browser are you using?

Eric Bliss

systems design and integration
CreativeCow.Net

int main(void) {
printf(“Hello World!\n”);
}

[David J]

1. I don’t remember visiting any other Cow forums since the previous dropout.

2. I read lots of posts and do not make any conscious selections of ‘marked as read’, but the forum notes this automatically.

3. I use Avant Browser (currently 10.1 build 021, the latest, but the problem happened with several previous versions as well). Avant sits on top of IE 6.0.2800.1106. I’m running Win XP Pro SP1 in 2Gb RAM.

Resetting the cookie using the Cow wizard overcomes the problem for a while without any housekeeping at my end.

[Eric Bliss]

Okay, you probably aren’t having an issue with the number of cookies on your system then. As far as “Avant Browser” goes, you’ve got such a niche browser that I hadn’t even heard of it until I went to Google after you mentioned it. So I can’t say that we support your browser in particular. Overall, though, you’re talking about an overlay on top of IE, which means that you have all problems that IE has, plus any problems that the Avant browser has on top of it. As for me personally – I think a third party overlay on top of a Microsoft security hole just sounds likely to have some issues.

Now that I’ve said all that, there are a few other things to consider…

Cookies have a set lifespan. Once it’s reached, they’re automatically deleted. Also, many browsers have settings that allow you (whether you realize it or not) to kill cookies before they’ve lived out a full and prosperous life. Indeed, some of these will kill cookies the second that you close your browser.

Cookies reside on your browser. They do not reside on the server. This means that cookies are not fully under our control. While most people are not having a problem with their cookies, most people are also running browsers that have very significant market share – on PC: IE (original, without addons) or Firefox. On Mac: Safari, Camino, or Firefox. We use all of these browsers ourselves, and if there is a problem, we can test it to find out why something is breaking. We do not use Opera, Avant, Mac IE, Netscape, etc. Each additional browser that we have to support takes another increasing chunk of a very limited supply of time. So, we have to pick and choose what to focus on.

As you have said, your cookies will work for many days, then stop. But, if you use the cookie reset mechanism, they work again. So the cookies that we send you do work when we set them. However, at some later point, either the cookie in your browser becomes corrupted, or your browser just deletes the cookie altogether. We have no control over this.

Finally, I should point out that less scrupulous individuals in the world are not above trying to steal or modify information just because they can. Those inbred slimeball children of babboons have methods of altering and stealing information stored by web browsers. There are steps you can take to protect yourself from those degenerate orangutans, but they discover new methods of breaking security all the time, and we cannot control what your browser may get exposed to, and have no way to know if a representative of that sorry convention of genetic defectives has corrupted your system.

By the way, you can’t tell that I despise those phreaks that give hacking a bad name, can you??? 🙂

Eric Bliss

systems design and integration
CreativeCow.Net

int main(void) {
printf(“Hello World!\n”);
}

[David J]

Mmmmm.

My reply to your last post triggered another bad cookie response, so you’ll have to wait for it to be moderated.

Twice in one day is a first. Farmyard smells are wafting through the air.