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.

If any cookies are currently set, they are listed below. There are a few places on the site where your progress or choices are preserved between page requests, but those use client-side localStorage instead of cookies (so they never leave your machine).

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.

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.