Site Cookie Usage

The Main Website that I have coded

These are the cookies that my website will explicitly serve, and only between your browser and this site.

• PHPSESSID: the standard PHP sessionid cookie that is used by most websites using PHP. This site uses PHP and PHP session management so this cookie will always be attempted to be served.
  All local site information about your session will be automatically deleted if your session is inactive for 15 minutes.
  • for guest users this is to keep track of what section of the website you are viewing to the correct page headers and menu entries are displayed. You will have trouble navigating through the different sections of this website if you do not allow this cookie. Nothing but the PHP session-id is passed back and forth by this cookie, the sections of the site you are visting are tracked my MySQL table entries which wil be automatically expired 15 minutes after you stop viewing the site.
  • for registered users the PHPSESSID cookie is also used after you have logged on as an index to various temporary MySQL tables to keep track of your logged-on authority levels, what applications you are authourised to use etc. And also a security check, the ip-address you logged in from is also stored in those temporary MySQL tables (if the sessionid appears from another ip-address you get logged off immediately; to prevent sesisonid spoofing).
    As noted above after 15 minutes of inactivity your session details will be expired from the server, and you will need to logon again unless you permitted the below cookid and cookname cookies as well
• cookname and cookid: These cookies will only be set for registered users that select the "remember me" option at logon. They will allow you to continue working (to automatically reconnect) if your session times out, as long as the reconnect comes from the same ip-address you were last using; yes another anti-spoofing thing. Also the cookies expire 100 days after you last visit the site, or if you specifically logoff from the site those two cookies are imediately deleted.
  Personally, I believe you should never select 'remember me' on any site, but if you want to it is available

Third Party Applications on the site

There are various third party open source applications available on this site that may make their own use of cookies, although the only publically available one currently is Wordpress. Additional third party applications are available to registered users.

The purpose of any cookies that may be served by these applications (if any) is unknown; and may change between upgrades of those third party applications. If you use any of these applications available on this site you accept that cookies may be served and that the site owner has no control over the management or use of those cookies.

You should refer to the user forums for those products if curious about any cookie usage on the standard opensource applications used here; I will not be duplicating their documentation on my site.