[thechat] Calling all whisky fans...

[Martin]

Martin wrote on 19/11/01 7:30 am

>>***The agecheck cookie is pretty obvious if you're
>>watching what
>>it sets: agecheck = y ****
>>
>>How do you check,verify the age with a cookie??? 
>
>It's a cookie that says you've hit the button saying that
>you're of legal drinking age in your country, and that
>you're not in a country which bans alcohol advertising.

To explain a bit more if you've not been to the site:
When you hit the site, you get a couple of cookies -
both are to do with working out whether what we're
doing is working, and neither are able to be used to
send you email (the only email you'll get is if you
register and sign up for newsletters).

The first time you come to the site, no matter what
page you're heading for, you'll get an eligibility
check page, which has a scrollbox containing the
Ts&Cs, a checkbox saying something like
"I confirm that I'm of legal drinking age where
I live" and a submit button labelled "I accept the
Ts&Cs" or similar.

Once you've hit that, you get a third cookie set which
basically certifies that you've accepted the Ts&Cs and
certified that you're legally entitled (old enough and
not in a country where it's banned) to view the site.

If you don't have the cookie, you will continue to
get the agecheck page. If you do have the cookie, you
won't be agechecked again.

We chose doing it like this because we wanted to
facilitate deep linking, from search engines[1],
from individual users, and also via ecards and
'mail to a friend' links. This meant that we couldn't
simply have a gateway before the homepage as most
alcohol sites do - we had to be able to do the agecheck
for every page on the site and redirect to the requested
content once the check has been passed.

The other options for permitting a single agecheck
with uninterrupted viewing thereafter were:
* One agecheck page like a splash page before the
   homepage - already discussed above.
* Remote IP - doesn't work because of DHCP &
    proxies
* Session querystring - we couldn't afford the delay
   or the developer time to get this working reliably -
   there are bits of the site where the query string is
   already used which complicated matters somewhat,
   and it would have taken a larger rewrite of the
   packaged CMS than we were able to do.

Cheers
Martin

_______________________________________________
email: martin at easyweb.co.uk             PGP ID: 0xA835CCCB
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