Manage Cookies in Your Browser
This site uses various cookies to enhance your experience (for example, allowing you to stay logged in) and to gather information about site usage (for example, which pages are the most popular). To change the settings on your browser to accept or reject cookies, see the following links:
WordPress cookies
This site uses the WordPress CMS along with the associated cookies (tiny pieces of information stored on your computer) to verify who you are. There are cookies for logged in users and for commenters.
The WordPress CMS uses cookies for authentication. That means that in order to log in to your WordPress site, you must have cookies enabled in your browser.
WordPress Users Cookie
On login, WordPress uses the wordpress_[hash] cookie to store your authentication details. Its use is limited to the Administration Screen area.
After login, WordPress sets the wordpress_logged_in_[hash] cookie, which indicates when you’re logged in, and who you are, for most interface use.
WordPress also sets a few wp-settings-{time}-[UID] cookies. The number on the end is your individual user ID from the users database table. This is used to customize your view of admin interface, and possibly also the main site interface.
The cookies length can be adjusted with the ‘auth_cookie_expiration’ hook
The actual cookies contain hashed data, so you don’t have to worry about someone gleaning your username and password by reading the cookie data. A hash is the result of a specific mathematical formula applied to some input data (in this case your user name and password, respectively). It’s quite hard to reverse a hash (bordering on practical infeasibility with today’s computers). This means it is very difficult to take a hash and “unhash” it to find the original input data.
WordPress uses the two cookies to bypass the password entry portion of wp-login.php. If WordPress recognizes that you have valid, non-expired cookies, you go directly to the WordPress Administration Screen. If you don’t have the cookies, or they’re expired, or in some other way invalid (like you edited them manually for some reason), WordPress will require you to log in again, in order to obtain new cookies.
WordPress Commenters Cookie
When visitors comment on this site, they too get cookies stored on their computer. This is purely a convenience, so that the visitor won’t need to re-type all their information again when they want to leave another comment. Three cookies are set for commenters:
comment_author_{HASH}comment_author_email_{HASH}comment_author_url_{HASH}
The commenter cookies are set to expire a little under one year from the time they’re set.
Google Analytics cookies
This site Google Analytics to log site visitor behaviour (for example, how long people spend on the site on average). These cookies are not required to use the site so you may reject all these cookies (see the links at the top of the page to disable cookies)
Cookies used for analytics help collect data that allows services to understand how users interact with a particular service. These insights allow services both to improve content and to build better features that improve the user’s experience.
Some cookies help sites understand how their visitors engage with their properties. For example, Google Analytics, a Google product that helps site and app owners understand how people engage with a service, uses a set of cookies to collect information and report site usage statistics without personally identifying individual visitors to Google. ‘_ga’ is the main cookie used by Google Analytics. ‘_ga’ enables a service to distinguish one user from another and lasts for 2 years. It’s used by any site that implements Google Analytics.
Cookie consent
The pop-up in the bottom-right corner of the site allows you to accept or reject the cookies used on this site. If you accept, and in order to stop the pop-up appearing every time you visit the site, we set cookie called ‘cookieconsent_status’ which stores your acceptance. This cookie is set to expire in 1 year