As is obvious to the crickets that follow this site I have not posted anything here in quite a long time; a few years in fact. I’ve been posting on Flickr, Facebook and a bit on Instagram. I also have a new website where I post info. on my adventures in amateur radio (ham radio). It is doubtful that I’ll be adding any new content here.
There has been a recent uptick in the number of user registration attempts performed by bots. The goal for these is to post spam comments with links to all sorts of nefarious content/sites. I’ve disabled the ability to register for the site and limited content posting to existing registered users. I’ll leave the site up for the few projects detailed here, like the grandfather clock interior lighting build, that still get a few hits a month.
So I’ve had to implement a ‘captcha’ system on the site. Since I ‘fixed’ things up a few weeks back there has been a deluge of spam comments & registrations. I frankly don’t have the time to review this trash so I’ve added some ‘resistance’ to the process to impede the bots. Hopefully, you, the real folks, will not be impacted.
So I guess it’s been a minute since I’ve reviewed the pending comments. Rather than spend the next few days sorting these for the 2 actual comments I’m going to mark them all as spam and move on with my life.
Apologizes to the two actual humans that posted comments – it’s nothing personal; I’m sure I’d like you.
Contains custom information set by the web developer via the _setCustomVar method in Google Analytics. This cookie is updated every time new data is sent to the Google Analytics server.
2 years after last activity
__utmx
Used to determine whether a user is included in an A / B or Multivariate test.
18 months
_ga
ID used to identify users
2 years
_gali
Used by Google Analytics to determine which links on a page are being clicked
30 seconds
_ga_
ID used to identify users
2 years
_gid
ID used to identify users for 24 hours after last activity
24 hours
_gat
Used to monitor number of Google Analytics server requests when using Google Tag Manager
1 minute
_gac_
Contains information related to marketing campaigns of the user. These are shared with Google AdWords / Google Ads when the Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts are linked together.
90 days
__utma
ID used to identify users and sessions
2 years after last activity
__utmt
Used to monitor number of Google Analytics server requests
10 minutes
__utmb
Used to distinguish new sessions and visits. This cookie is set when the GA.js javascript library is loaded and there is no existing __utmb cookie. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to the Google Analytics server.
30 minutes after last activity
__utmc
Used only with old Urchin versions of Google Analytics and not with GA.js. Was used to distinguish between new sessions and visits at the end of a session.
End of session (browser)
__utmz
Contains information about the traffic source or campaign that directed user to the website. The cookie is set when the GA.js javascript is loaded and updated when data is sent to the Google Anaytics server
