What Are Cookies?
Cookies are small text files that websites use to help recognise you as you browse. They are found on almost every website, because they enable useful things like logging in, allowing the browser to remember the state of a page, or helping site owners to analyse how the website performs.
How Are They Used?
As of July 2023 the Google Analytics method that was previously used to track usage of some pages was made defunct, and I have not replaced it. The only other cookies that this website uses store client-side data to enable page functionality, which is not accessible to me. No personally-identifying information about you is captured or stored anywhere.
If you do not wish to accept the functional cookies, then you may wish to either leave the website or disable cookies in your browser settings. If you do some pages will break (particularly games, where cookies are used to store save data).
What cookies does this website use?
The following is a list and explanation of the cookies historically used by this website. Part of this information is taken from Google's summary of Google Analytics cookies. The Google Analytics tracking method that creates them is now defunct and I no longer gather or use this data, but the scripts remain on many older pages so it is possible that cookies may still be set.
| Name | Description of Cookie |
|---|---|
__utma |
Each unique browser that visits a page is provided with a unique ID via the __utma cookie. |
__utmb |
The Google Analytics tracking for ga.js uses two cookies to establish a session, __utmb and __utmc. |
__utmz |
When visitors reach a site via a search engine result, a direct link, or an ad that links to a page, Google Analytics stores the type of referral information in a cookie. This cookie gets updated with each subsequent page view; it is therefore used to determine visitor navigation within the site. |
civ civ2 (etc) |
I've written a couple of javascript games and utilities. Some of them allow the user to save game data in a cookie or HTML5 Web Storage (an alternative to cookies which offers greater capacity) so that they can play/interact over multiple sessions. |
Is there anything else I need to know?
The only other tracking performed on this site is by my hosting provider, who keep server logs. I do not ordinarily have access to these logs, and there is no personally-identifying information contained within these (as far as I am aware). As with all hosting providers, private server logs may store things like IP addresses and session information as required by policy and law.
No changes to site tracking are planned, but should anything change in the future this page will be updated.