Hi Phil,<:LINEBREAK:>Thanks foryour thoughtful and questioning, yet realistic, message. We at TechSoup thought long and hard about the use of cookies on our site. Indeed, when we first started, we used a concept called Session Variables -- basically, cookies that went away after you logged out. Cookies are one of those annoying, yet necessary realities of Internet usage. As we have continued developing the site, we realized that for many of the features that we were building into the site and that were being called for we needed to implement cookies. When we implemented them, we made sure to upgrade our usage and privacy policies so that we were explicit about how we use cookies. We don't use them indescriminately and completely value our userss privacy. Any data that is collected is anonymous.<:LINEBREAK:><:LINEBREAK:>I hope that details a little bit about our process.<:LINEBREAK:><:LINEBREAK:>Best,<:LINEBREAK:>Matt Florence,<:LINEBREAK:>Director of TechSoup.org

Indeed, the cookies in use on the TechSoup site enhance the functionality of the My TechSoup and TechSoup Community Message Board areas of the site without compromising the privacy of the user in any way. In response to the other questions you pose above, Phil, as a web developer I recommend that all users turn their cookies on. Furthermore, I've never decided against using cookies when I felt that they would enhance the utility of a particular site.<:LINEBREAK:>At least, that's my perspective. I'd be interested to hear an argument from someone of a differing opinion on cookies.<:LINEBREAK:>thanks,<:LINEBREAK:>Matthew Schaefer<:LINEBREAK:>Web Developer<:LINEBREAK:>TechSoup.org

I found a good resource on cookies when trying to find out how big cookies can be. Answer: a cookie can be up to 4K in size.<:LINEBREAK:>--phil<:LINEBREAK:><:LINEBREAK:>Also relevant to me was the following from the useful : http://www.cookiecentral.com/faq/<:LINEBREAK:><:LINEBREAK:>"You CANNOT set Cookies for domains other than those that the document resides in. That is, a page on www.myserver.com can set a Cookie for myserver.com and www.myserver.com, but NOT www.yourserver.com.<:LINEBREAK:><:LINEBREAK:>"The cookie HTTP header must be no more than 4K in size.<:LINEBREAK:>For Netscape, domains can only set a maximum of 20 cookies each on a specific Client. This does not mean the true internet domain, but only the domain specified via document.cookie. If you have 20 cookies for www.myserver.com, and another 20 cookies for .myserver.com, this is allowed. For each cookie past 20, the least recently used cookie is deleted.<:LINEBREAK:>"Also for Netscape, the cookie area may only hold a maximum of 300 total cookies from all sources. For each cookie past 300, the least recently used cookie is deleted. "