 Number 262 - March 2005 |
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| C is for Cookie Or, what the heck is a cookie and why should we accept yours? | |
| by The Motley Fool: www.fool.com/ | |
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All right, class, it's time for a pop quiz:
Cookies are NOT... If you answered C, give yourself a gold star and a big pat on the back. There's a lot of misinformation about cookies out there. Some of the more ridiculous claims are that cookies allow people to view things that are on your hard drive, or to get personal information from you against your will. Neither could be further from the truth. In reality, cookies are tools that help us help you. Cookies are critical to us because the Web page you're reading right now isn't on our server. It's on your browser. Though it seems like you're in The Motley Fool, you've actually called up a snapshot of our site. Because the page essentially "died" when you called it up onto your browser, we need some way to keep the interactive conversation going. The cookie allows that to happen. Our cookies are not used to gain any secret information from your browser (a myth and, our counsel points out, not even possible) and they do not hog your disk space. In the spirit of openness and Foolish honesty, let's go over how we are using cookies on our site. On the first visit to any page on our site we try to write out a temporary cookie with the word "Welcome" in it ("Hullo" for the UK site). If you accept that cookie, we then overwrite it with a permanent one on the next page you go to. The things we put into this cookie are as follows: a random unique string, today's date, and your user name once you login or register. That's it, pretty simple. Once all this is done, we don't touch the cookie anymore or try to send you anymore. There are a few exceptions to this, like ads and the search results pages, which also write a few cookies. So, what does this much maligned little fellow look like? Here is what an average Fool cookie looks like: Fool USERNAME=YourName FIRSTVISIT=1/5/99 10:23:27 PM UID=E21999y1m5d22h23m27s121.8225 fool.com/ |
(This is how our cookies look as of May 1999. Of course, in our efforts to continue to improve the site, we will make revisions over time.) [TOGGLE Editor's Note #1: Though written in 1999 the points made are still valid.]
What good is all this? A number of things. It allows us to not waste precious Web page space promoting the virtues of registering for our site if you already have. It also helps us know how many unique visitors come to our site. This is very important for the Marketing folks, and helps determine what we can charge our advertisers, our primary source of revenue. Some other notes: Our cookies can only be read by our site, no other site can read them. We can put nothing in them that you have not already told us about yourself, for example, your user name. Our cookie is about 150 bytes long, making it smaller probably than any graphic that your browser has downloaded, or about 1/10th the size of this message. We can use up to twenty cookies, but have chosen to keep things lean and neat with one or two cookies. In fact, if you ever had one of our older cookies, we delete it when setting the new one, cleaning up after ourselves. We hope this information helps you understand cookies, and we hope that you will turn cookies on in your browser so that our Web site can be a better experience for you. You can always turn on cookie prompts so that you can see exactly what is being written and when. Cookies get a whole lot of bad press (often by companies that want to sell you some kind of anti-cookie software), but in fact are quite benign. We hope you enjoy The Motley Fool, and we hope that you'll agree that the benefits of cookies outweigh the inconveniences. Please know that The Motley Fool will never willfully disclose individually identifiable information about its customers to any third party without first receiving that customer's permission. That's it. Hope our explanation makes some Foolishly good sense to you. For more on cookies, here's a helpful Q&A put together by Netscape: TOGGLE Editor's Note #2: This article was written in 1999 so the referenced sites are no longer valid. However the Motley Fool web site is still up |
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Number 262 - March 2005
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