Setting Cookie in this Forum – problem ?

[Ron Lindeboom]

[David J] “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.”

David,

Your post was moderated because we do NOT in any way, shape or form have any desire to support D.M.N. and you insist on trying to make posts regarding them. As I told you in the private email I sent you (which you choose to ignore), we received from them a total ‘in-hand payout” of $100 for a site into which we had poured 4-1/2 years of work (before we were “acquired” by them) and into which we had poured over $130,000 of our own money over the years.

Regarding cookies: You by your own admission site behind a firewall with spyware, anti-virus and other filtering software…

How do you think that stuff works??? It turns OFF anything it remotely feels fits their definition of the tactics used by those who try to defeat your security. Unfortunately, they error way to the side of caution and even though our cookies are quite public and benign, they still will turn them off.

I have personally been looking into the cookie problem, and indeed it seems to be happening to about the same percentage of users that it has always happened to over the last year or so. There are always some people that have these issues. Once most of our users reset their cookies when we changed over servers, they had no issues. There are always some who do have issues and with all the cookie checker software, anti-virus and spyware and firewall security stuff that is so prone to error to the side of near-paranoia, we aren’t going to worry about it. We cannot control how people’s systems work, we can only make sure that our cookies follow standard guidelines, which they do.

Ron Lindeboom

[David J]

I have replied off the list.

Let’s drop this. I was not trying to pick a fight, even though you seem to think so.

[Craig Howard]

I still have the issue on one of my machines.

Internet Explorer is the browser, no automatic virus screening or firewall or active cookie killer.

Followed the relevant parts of the above thread and can not quite see a solution. Its no big deal ( just a nuisance really)

What is the name of the cookie (if it has one) ?

Craig
Shooter Film Company
Auckland
New Zealand

(Premiere Pro 1.5 / Matrox TRX100 XTreme Pro)

[Ron Lindeboom]

Have you gotten the moderation function lately, Craig?

Eric is looking into a possible glitch in the code which *may* (we do not know but are looking into any issue we can think of) cause the cookies to blow out. As I said, most people are NOT getting these cookie errors.

Thanks for any feedback you may have.

Ron Lindeboom

[Craig Howard]

Havent seen anything that I recognise as “the moderation function”.

Craig
Shooter Film Company
Auckland
New Zealand

(Premiere Pro 1.5 / Matrox TRX100 XTreme Pro)

[David J]

In an altruistic attempt to help you track this problem, despite the unfriendly responses already received, the following additional information may be useful.

Normal log-on to the forum is unaffected by the ‘lost cookie’ problem. The issue only arises when trying to respond to existing threads.

Lost cookies appear to be specific to particular threads. Once a thread has been rejected, it remains rejected until cookies are reset.

Other threads are unaffected, even after one thread has exhibited the problem, and continue to allow responses even though cookies have not been reset and the original problem thread remains locked out.

This is why I suspect it is a problem at your end, not mine.

[Eric Bliss]

Now let me explain why I now KNOW that this is a problem on your end.

All cookies in this site are set on a SITE-WIDE basis. Indeed there is only a single type of cookie in the site that refers to individual threads, the “Mark As Read” cookie. The only thing it does is to mark links inside of a single thread as “read” rather than “new”. And it sounds like you don’t even use that one. And the only cookie that is specific to a single forum is the cookie that tells the number of days worth of posts that you want to display on the main page of that forum. No user identification is contained in either of them.

All other cookies we have are global cookies that are the same no matter where you are in the cow. Our mechanisms don’t distinguish between individual threads when it comes to holding on to your posting info. There is only one cookie that holds your screen name across the site, and only one cookie that holds your e-mail address across the site. That’s all. Any problems you are having with the cookies disappearing in particular threads is your own problem, induced by your browsing setup, firewalls, pop-up blockers, funky IE/third party hybrid browsers, and all.

Eric Bliss

systems design and integration
CreativeCow.Net

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

[Ron Lindeboom]

David,
It is funny that you interpret things as being “unfriendly” when you repeatedly try to get us to assume some level of responsibility for an issue that arises on your machine which by your own admission uses a firewall, has multiple kinds of anti-spam and other forms of filtering going on and — if you go to all that kind of trouble — I highly doubt that you’ve forgotten to add anti-banner software to the mix.
With all this filtering that is going on, we simply throw up our hands and do not know what to tell you.
If that is unfriendly, then I guess that is the best we can do under the circumstances…
As Eric said in his last reply to you — and which will be his last as I have told him that enough is enough — nearly all our cookies are universal, sitewide cookies and the only ones that aren’t have to do with tracking “read-entire-thread” and “mark-these-threads-as-read” cookies. But you do not use that interface option. Therefore, when you say that most all threads work but some don’t — when we only use a single cookie sitewide — it will either work or it won’t. The intermittency is on your end and is the outcome of all the filters, use of an unsupported browser, etc.
But if you wish to think it’s our mechanism, please feel free to do so.
Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net