Cookies are small text files stored in your web browser on your computer. They help you navigate websites efficiently, by remembering settings and choices you make during your visits to a website.
There are two types of cookies: 'Session Cookies' are used to store information about your visit to a website, so you can easily pick up where you left off when you leave a page and then return to it. They are temporary cookie files, which are erased when you close your browser. 'Persistent Cookies' help websites remember your information and settings when you visit them in the future. This results in faster and more convenient access. These remain on your hard drive until you erase them or they expire.
The cookies we use on this site remember settings and choices you make during your visits to our website. If you were to block cookies via your browser settings you would not be able to log in to our site as a community participant. Doing this may also prevent you from using some websites altogether.
Cookies also let us see how visitors use our website: we use cookies to tell us what pages our users visited, how long they spent reading our information, what part of the world they came from, and similar. These cookies enable us to improve your experience on our website. For example, we might notice that our web users are consistently going to a particular place looking for directions to our facilities, and we could then place this information where users expect to find it.
We never use cookies to track what products and services you look at on a range of different websites. These sorts of cookies are used to create targetted advertising. We do not - nor will we ever - give information about you or your use of our website to any outside organistations for any purpose.
For more information about cookies visit allaboutcookies.org or aboutcookies.org.
We only set a single session cookie, with a name starting with SESS (e.g. SESS02e14f7d190b25f2a722a938926637b8). As this is a session cookie, it expires when you close your browser.
Our Content Management System, Drupal, sets these cookies to store user interface preferences.
We use Google Analytics to monitor the traffic to our website. We set the cookies named in the table below to do this.
Name | Use | Typical content | Expires |
---|---|---|---|
_utma | Used to determine if you are a unique visitor to our site. | randomly generated number | 2 years |
_utmb | Used to track continuous usage of the site. | randomly generated number | 30 minutes |
_utmc | This cookie is no longer used by our site, but is set for backwards compatibility by Google | randomly generated number | when you close your browser |
_utmz | Used to store information about how you got to our site. | randomly generated number and information on how the site was reached | 6 months |
For more information about the cookies named above, please visit Cookies set by Google Analytics.
The EU Cookie Law is amended privacy legislation that requires websites to obtain informed consent from visitors before they can store or retrieve any information on a computer or any other web connected device - taken from http://www.cookielaw.org/.