Cookies on the Beholder site

The Beholder website doesn’t explicitly track your activity, or collect useage analytics. Specifically, Google Analytics were removed from the site many years ago because I grew uncomfortable about revealing your private activity here to Google in return for data that I didn’t really need to have. Obviously, there’s no surveillance-style ad-tracking going on here either, because there’s no third-party advertising.

There are a couple places where cookies are used to manage a “session” if you log in or make preference-style choices that need to be preserved between page requests (the more recent projects on the site use client-side localStorage for this instead). If any cookies are currently set, they are listed below.

Beholder.uk cookies currently not set in your browser:

Planetarium
This is the Planetarium login cookie. It’s a session cookie, which means it automatically expires when you close your browser. While you’re logged in, it contains your readername and some session-specific stuff that the server matches against what it gave you when you logged in, to stop someone else casually faking you.
concuspidor
The Concuspidor uses a cookie to remember your display preferences (if you change them). The original site didn’t do this: it’s a new (well, 2012) thing to make it a little easier to read.
xiiiforum_csrfchk
This is a cookie used by Planetarium to deter ne’er-do-wells from tricking the site into giving them access to the xiii Forum before they are in their thirteenth week (it’s a session token to prevent cross-site request forgery).

Technical note

All the beholder.uk cookies are set with path=/ so this page can “see” them. Also, cookies are used on the Beholder project Fudebakudo, but because that runs on a separate domain, they won’t show up here.