Dear Mod / HJ,
Just a quick question about the information gathered by the web site from the browsing public: I run a utility called McAffee Guard Dog on my pc. It warns me if any web site I visit tries to syphon off personal info or infect my pc. Quite neat really- it woofs at you! Anyway, I notice that my pc is interogated by this site every page I visit. Also, occasionally, I get a warning message that credit card information is being downloaded to an unsecure site, ie you. Of course my system blocks this, but what is the policy? Is this intentional? What info do you in fact collect?
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This obviously can't be correct because the only way the site would gather credit card information would be if you supplied it to buy one of the books. So your software is crying "woof". But obviously if I wanted to use something from The Backroom for the Honest John column in The Telegraph I would. Remember, this is a free site. Lots of investment has gone into it. But no mney has yet been made by anyone, including me.
HJ
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Harry,
I run the ZoneAlarm firewall that does just about the same. As I'm working on the internet it is telling me all the time that sites are trying to access my PC.
On the HJ site I think there is a good reason for this. Do you know about cookies? Does your Guard Dog pick these up as unwanted activity?
It is the cookies that tell the site which threads are new and if you selected "collapse threads" etc. If you refuse the cookies the site will not know who you are and your previous history.
It can be a privacy issue but also essential to the best performance of sites.
A top PC boffin should be able to correct/expand on this.
David
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Yes - I think DW is right - I run zone-alarm and it's always popping up during my internet time. People look at cookies as a bad thing but without them things would be slower - and who wants that?
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My bof tells me we have got cookies.
HJ
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Dear HJ,
Don't get me wrong, I wasn't complaining as such - I was interested more than anything else. On the subject of your site I have to say thanks! It's a great resourse, and personally I don't see how you can keep up such a service without charging. Must be costing you plenty!
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Having put the functional part of this site together here is what goes on:
1) The forum here uses software provided by the open source community. It was the best forum we could find. We have had to modify it slightly to run this site. I have not looked further into the forum code, but in your browser preferences you will see that it sets cookies. I think these are used to tell it which kind of view you like - collapsed/ expanded etc. and which items you have already viewed - so that it can put "new" next to the new ones.
2) the rest of the site does not use cookies - apart from the occasions when the designers put a popup on the home page with an offer or whatever and we need to make sure this does not keep appearing once you have seen it and so get on your nerves.
3) as far as the information we pull from clients - we can only get at things like browser type, which platform you are using etc. We use this to send the appropriate style sheet to you so that the site looks the best it can for you. It is not perfect as we don't deal with the older browsers as well as we could or some of the other less well known browsers. The site server also collects the referer information from the client - i.e. which page you last came from so we can get statistics on where visits come from.
4) A final note on cookies.
The rule with these is that they can only be read by the site which issued them. So even if your personal details were entered into a cookie by one site, these could not be read by another site. You might have heard warnings about cookies being used to track which sites and pages clients are going to. This is done by a central banner ad site issuing and reading its own cookies for all the sites it has provided banners for. We don't use a banner ad service like this on this site - we don't even have banner ads at the moment.
So - nothing much to worry about cookies - although remember, as these are stored on the PC - they may hold login information which another user can use after you have finished with your PC. For the secure part of this site, which you can't get to clearly, we time expire our cookies so that the chance of unauthorised access is minimised.
5) If I can answer a point made on another thread about time. The time on the server is updated every night to GMT - so all posts on this forum are timed to GMT and not BST. That's why some posts look awfully early in the morning!
Hope this helps
Stephen
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It looks as though people have done the job for me, and the questions have all been answered. (That's what I like!)
The best thing I can do now is refer you to our Terms and Conditions (click on The Small Print in the navigation bar on the left, scroll down to privacy... it's all there.
Yes, as Stephen says in one of the contris to this thread, we do set cookies, but for ethical reasons only. And No, we do not automatically harvest either personal data or credit card numbers. So the whereabouts of anyone's collection of private mpegs remains a secret between them and their hard disk, as does the size of their bank balance.
Stephen, of Khoo Systems, by the way, is the programmer who has helped me construct this site. He is a genius, so don't ever stand too close to him in case he has one of his brainstorms. But if ever anyone wants something done that is very very clever, he is your man. You'll find contact details for him in the Credits section of The Small Print page.
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