Cookie Policy

What are cookies?

A cookie is a small text file that a website saves on your computer or mobile device when you visit the site. It enables the website to remember your actions and preferences (such as login, language, font size and other display preferences) over a period of time, so you don't have to keep re-entering them whenever you come back to the site or browse from one page to another.

How do we use cookies?

This website (cheltenhambranch.org.uk) collects no personal information about any users. The only personal content displayed in these pages is by consent. Until complying with the EU Cookie Law, we previously saved no cookies except by explicit consent. Since complying with the law, we now save a cookie recording your consent to cookies so that you are not plagued by the consent banner. That previously mentioned exception affects about two people in total. The only other cookie this website will ever save for use with this website is a voluntary cookie called 'creds' which a calendar maintainer may choose to create. That means for all visitors except about two calendar maintainers, you get only one 'CookieScriptConsent' cookie from cheltenhambranch.org.uk.

We do use a 3^rd party tool to track where visitors have come from for a bit of fun. Something the website maintainer is now considering a mistake due to the nausea created by the EU Cookie Law. The 3^rd party cookies are placed in your browser by ClustrMaps. The result of that tracking can be seen below.

We also use two 3^rd party tools such as the "W3C Markup Validation Service" and "W3C Link Checker" to check the published content. The first checks the content is HTML standards compliant (mostly...), and the second that the links are not broken. These services will both implant your browser with a maximum of 4 cookies if and only if you click on the "Validate HTML" or "Check Links" links in the footer banner.

How to control cookies

You can control and/or delete cookies as you wish – for details, see aboutcookies.org. You can delete all cookies that are already on your computer and you can set most browsers to prevent them from being placed. Deleting cookies associated with the cheltenhambranch.org.uk domain will only bring back the cookie settings banner, and inconvenience those maintaining the calendar!

As indicated on the Cookie Settings, the only performance cookies that show up in our website audit are those that are delivered by a 3^rd party website only on clicking through to their domain, i.e. leaving this website. They are completely outside of our control and the responsibility of validator.w3.org who are probably not bound by EU law being based in the US. These cookies show up in the audit most likely because a link was followed by the auditor tool. If you don't click through to that domain you don't get their cookies. As such this option has precisely no effect and changes nothing. This is a limit of the audit tools trying to support website maintainer getting their EU Cookie Law compliance right.

The only 'functionality' cookie this website cares about is for the benefit of the small number of calendar maintainers who get to explicitly choose at the time they logon or change their password if they want a cookie for convenience. As explicit consent is given at this later time, this option has nothing left to amend. It therefore has no effect. It is the limit of the Cookie Banner tool that this is mandated anyway. The Cookie Banner tool goes deliver some cookies of their own which are classed as user preferences and therefore 'functionality'. We cannot vouch for the mechanisms Cookie Script implement for their cookies, but it is fundamental to cookie management and one assumes they are EU law compliant!

Perhaps it would have been simpler for this website to make gratuitous use of cookies in order to conform with the norm of other websites? It would have avoided the need to explain why cookies showed up in an audit, why they are misleading and why we have checkboxes on the Cookie Banner that change nothing!

My Site Cookie Settings