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 some 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 few places where cookies are used to manage a “session” if you login or make preference-style choices that need to be preserved between page requests (the more recent projects on the site use local storage 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.

knotreader

This cookie is used as a lightweight login token for the “Readers Only” section of the Knot-Shop Man pages.

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.