If anyone knows that cookies are universally hated — well, I'm the guy.

To quote from Andy's Netscape HTTP Cookie Notes

"A Cookie is a little nugget of information that is sent to your browser from a World Wide Web Server. This block of data can be anything, a unique user ID generated by the server, the current date and time, the IP Address of where the browser is logged onto the net or any other chunk of data that you want.

"After a browser receives a cookie it will then send that cookie (nugget of info) to the server that set it whenever it requests an html page. The browser will only send the cookie to the server that originally set it. This means that I (at my server) can't tell if you (some browser) have cookies that other sites have set. In other words I can't steal cookies I haven't given you by using HTTP protocols."

At Andy's site, he tells you how to set up your Netscape browser so it tells you when a site is trying to set a cookie (it's under Options | Network Preferences | Protocols | Show an Alert Before | Accepting a Cookie) and he has a bunch of other good cookie info. I've got my browser set up to notify me if a site wants to set up a cookie (you can refuse the cookie) and a lot of visitors to WPTS also have their browser set up to warn about cookies — that's where the problem comes in. If you refuse a cookie, you get multiple messages about the cookie and people, quite rightly, get pissed off at having to click "Cancel" numerous times.

Originally, the UNIXGod at our site had cookies set, but after gentle supplications he removed them. I'm thinking about instituting them again, but for a different purpose. As you know, cookies can be set to track pages you've visited and what you haven't seen. For example, if you haven't been to the "What's New" page since it was last updated, you can automatically be sent there.

Let me know if you think this is a good idea or not.