Our website uses cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allows us to improve our site.
A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that we store on your browser or the hard drive of your computer if you agree. Cookies contain information that is transferred to your computer’s hard drive.
We use the following cookies:
- Strictly necessary cookies. These are cookies that are required for the operation of our website. They include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of our website, use a shopping cart or make use of e-billing services.
- Experience enhancing cookies: These cookies are non-essential but make the experience of using the site more pleasant.
You can find more information about the individual cookies we use and the purposes for which we use them in the table below:
CookieNamePurposeMore Information
| Destination | destination_url | This experience enhancing cookie records the page on our site on you were on when you were redirected to the login page in order that you can be redirected back there after you login. | This cookie only lasts as long as your web browser is open and is only set if you are not logged in. Not accepting this cookie has no serious effect on your experience of the site. |
| Session | _forum_session | This strictly necessary cookie records the fact that you have logged into the site and enables content specific to you to be served to you (for example your user preferences page) and to enable content you post to be attributed to you. | This cookie is set to only be sent with secure (encrypted) connections and it only lasts as long as your web browser is open. |
| Token | _t | Recognise you when you return to our site | This experience enhancing cookie, the token cookie, enables you to be automatically logged into the site on each vist, it is only sent with secure (encrypted sessions) and is set to last for two months, after this time, or if this cookie is deleted, you will need to login again. |
| Images Guardian | iguard | Experience enhancing cookie : allow you to access images. | This cookie is set when you login to the site and is set to expire a week in the future (this is a rolling expiry date, it is continually reset to be a week in the future) and it allows you to load images from the site. If this cookie is not set all site images, apart from the main site logo etc, will return 404 not found responses. This cookie is removed when you log out and it is set to only be sent with secure (encrypted sessions). |
You block cookies by activating the setting on your browser that allows you to refuse the setting of all or some cookies. However, if you use your browser settings to block all cookies (including essential cookies) you may not be able to access all or parts of our site.
Except for essential cookies, all cookies will expire after you close your web browser.
Other cookies in use by our site:
Google Analytics
We use Google Analytics to see which areas of our web site are the most popular. This data does not tell us anything specific about you such as your name or address, but it does allow us to make observations like “95 people visited from the UK last month and 51 of them viewed our contact page”. The names of the Google analytics cookies are:
- utma
- utmb
- utmc
- utmz
ShareThis
We use the ShareThis plugin to help us distribute our content. ShareThis offers online services and applications that allow users to share content on the Web more easily.
ShareThis creates a number of cookies in order to identify a particular device that was used to interact with their service for the purposes of tracking usage.
ShareThis creates the following cookies:
- ShareUT
- stOAuth
- __ar_v4
- recents
- __stid
- __stgmap
- __stdlxmap