Cookie blocking - with self set cookies - a solution

[gpaciga]

How is this solution different from using the built in StatCounter blocking cookie? Is it just the until until expiration is much longer, or is there something deeper about it? There doesn't seem to be any obvious reason why this version will avoid being erased by AdAware or the browser clearing its cookies. Correct me if I'm wrong.

[webado]

The bigger problem concernng the Statcounter cookies is that one tends to accumulate rather a lot of them (login, forum, each project, from each website you visit that also uses Statcounter). There is a limit of 20 cookies that can exist in a browser from any one website (here we are talking only Statcounter). As soon as the 21st cookie shows up, the oldest one is deleted.
So your own blocking cookies set by Statcounter are likely to vanish just because of that.

Ad Aware will not delete this cookie since it's set by your own site, it's not a third party cookie. Or if it wants to delete it, just place it in the ignore list and it will never be selected again, unliek Statcounter which gets selected every time because it is already on the list of tracking sites.

Because you are not competing with the tons of Statcounter cookies, this one, set by your own site, has a good chance of not getting automatically deleted by the browser when there are more than 20 cookies from the same site or mroe than 300 cookies from all sites.


In any case, you have no other choices. If you have to use blocking cookies, that's the way things go. If you can block your hits by IP that would be a lot better - but you need a static IP.

[ed]

I'm tired of clearing session cookies in order to retain the blocking cookies, and interested in trying Crisooc's client-based method. I'm surprised, though, that there haven't been any reports about it here since the last post of 07-27-2006. Has anyone tried rewriting the code and creating folders/files as Crisooc suggests, and has it solved the disappearing blocking-cookie problem? tia, ed

[webado]

I used to use it myself until I got a static IP.

If you don't make any mistakes in the code, and if you remember to first set your cookie on each of your sites, it works.

And of course if you don't delete all cookies whenever you clean up.

[ed]

Originally Posted by chrisooc

I used to use it myself until I got a static IP.

If you don't make any mistakes in the code, and if you remember to first set your cookie on each of your sites, it works.

And of course if you don't delete all cookies whenever you clean up.

Cool, I'll do it. Thanks for your analysis and fix. - ed

[paranoid87]

hey guys..i just downloaded the zip file..the readme.txt thanks again chrisooc

[kma221]

i 'll be downloading it once i get some time since statcounter is on lots of pages in mysites its gonna take a while to do that but thanks for the nice code

[theBast]

By the looks of my cookies file, this is still an issue..

BTW, the official cookie "standard" is only a guideline.. FireFox, and MSIE don't always limit cookies to 20/300, depending on a number of factors which aren't all consistent or documented by the browsers. Right now, I have 50 cookies for .statcounter.com., which includes my blocking cookies, tracking cookies, login cookies, etc.

If the SC webmasters/admins are watching, look into the various cookie handling functions in PHP. There are a number of options which let you "stack" multiple data items onto a single cookie. 4K is actually a lot when you realize each item of data in each cookie is only a few bytes.. 4K = 4000 (or 4096 base2, if you're picky) bytes.. at 20 bytes max per site, one cookie can store tracking data for 200 sites in one cookie. Even more if you use additional techniques, such as binary cookies (converting to base64) or gzip compression to reduce the data size even more.

Of course, the downside to this is the additional overhead of unpacking each cookie, processing it to find the desired information, and repacking it to re-set it with any modifications. Other solutions (with similar overhead problems) could be using one single cookie, which simply identifies the client with a row in a database that contains much more additional information.

There are also various hybrid schemes which attempt the best of each solution, such as using one-cookie-per-subserver/subdivision, but each of those cookies can stack say, up to 100 sites/users. Then if my siteid/userid was say, 413678, you could look for cookie "sites_4136", which contains an array of cookie data, with my specific info being at index 78. Only the most immediate and common data would be stored directly in the cookie, while less commonly needed data could be stored off in a database on the server side, with only an index to the data stored in my cookie. And so on.

HTH, HAND.
TB