Cookie policy

A cookie is a short piece of text a site asks your browser to keep and hand back on the next page. Most of what is written about them is written by people who want to set a great many; this explains the ones this site actually sets and what happens if you refuse them.

The ones that make it work

A handful of cookies do jobs the site cannot do without. They remember that you are logged in, if you are. They remember the courses you have put on a shortlist, so the list survives a page load. They carry the token that proves a form was submitted from this site rather than by somebody else on your behalf.

These are set because the site was asked to do something, not because anybody agreed to marketing, and they are the reason a cookie banner is not the first thing you meet here.

The ones that count

We look at which pages get read and which do not, because a guide nobody opens is a guide that is written wrongly. Where that counting is done with a cookie, it is asked for first, and saying no changes nothing about what you can do on the site.

The read counts printed on the pieces themselves are counted per browser rather than per person, and they are deliberately rough. They exist so a reader can see what other people found useful, not so anybody can be identified.

The ones we do not set

No advertising cookies. No cross-site trackers. No pixels from networks that would like to follow you to the next site and sell what they learn. If you have ever wondered why a course you looked at once follows you around for a fortnight, it is because of the category of thing this site does not use.

Where a page carries something from somewhere else, a map or a video, that service may set its own. We keep those to as few as the page can manage and name them where they appear.

Turning them off

Every browser can refuse cookies, delete the ones it has, or refuse them from particular sites, and the settings are under privacy in all of them. Refusing the working ones will break the shortlist and the forms, which is a real cost rather than a threat. Refusing the counting ones costs you nothing at all.

Changes to this policy

If this site starts setting a kind of cookie it does not set today, this page will say so before it does, and the date at the top will change.