Important Notice about Cookies

[Adam]

We are committed to protecting your privacy. We will only use the information that we collect about you lawfully (in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998 and the EU Privacy and Communications Directive). This includes information submitted voluntarily by you through a form or gathered automatically as you visit this website.

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Some cookies used on this website are essential in order to enable you to move around the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the website. Without these cookies, a forum cannot exist.

Some cookies used on this website collect information about how visitors use a website, for instance which pages visitors go to most often, and if they get error messages from web pages.

These cookies don't collect information that identifies a visitor. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. It is only used to improve how a website works.

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[Simon]

Haha, more laws that assert nearly all users are dumb (spot-on) and thus requires the internet to be dumb-safe (absolutely moronic).

-- Simon

[Adam]

Well said, Simon!

It's a pain in the arse for me, but I'm sure there'll be some way around it.

[ccexplore]

Sorry to hear this, especially surreal since people all over the world can access this forum, including places with different laws.  Sounds like you'll have to implement something like this:

1) for each operation on the forum that needs a cookie, and user hasn't previously given consent, go to a consent page
2) if user not given consent after reading page, operation will have to continue w/o the cookie, even if it might mean something becomes broken to the user
3) if given consent, this is remembered (maybe via a cookie on the user's machine, haha ) so that the next time the user triggers the operation again, they won't be bothered by the consent page again.

Optionally, for future people in process of registering to the forums, the consent page can be part of the registration process, to make it less annoying.

[finlay]

Well... the only thing you use cookies for is logging people in automatically, right? So at the login screen just make the user tick a box to say that they're alright with having it logged in a cookie. Frankly, from what i can tell, it's basically a confusing shambles of a law that nobody really knows how to implement, or what they're meant to do to avoid being penalised. And I don't think you're going to be targeted by it, at any rate. I think it's more aimed at sites that install marketing cookies in the background, and generally being unscrupulous with cookies.

One site I just read said that if it's necessary to log a cookie for the user to use the site, it doesn't really require permission...