[thelist] mod_rewrite and session IDs

[Simon Perry]

Hi All,

I am about to embark on my first foray into the exciting but scary world 
of mod_rewrite and I have a few questions about best practice.

I need to handle affiliate tracking across the site which brings up the 
question of session IDs for initial visitors not just registered and 
logged in ones. Usually I don't like to rely on cookies but append the 
session ID to the URL, using mod_rewrite where do I store the session 
ID? First before my normal path and vars? Or am I going to have to bite 
the bullet and use cookies to present a more unified front?

Obviously I don't want spiders to follow affiliate sessions. Are there 
any tricks to catch them, maybe based on them hitting robots.txt?

Any other comments, suggestions or pitfalls from  are also most welcome.

Thanks

Simon