Oh Noes! I have to delete Cookies?!?

[Wenchie]

I have a couple of offices who call me, and the assistants or agents I talk to NEVER delete cookies... and appear to freak out when I have them delete the cookies & temp files.

And then there is one office where they are forbidden to delete cookies.... Ummm, ok.

So I found this... and it's now the wallpaper on my work computer!

[Big-box-retail-blues]

I think that is one of the most awesome things I have ever seen.

[Aramika]

I agree, I love it.

[Aethian]

Poor Cookie Monster.

[draggar]

I love that pic, I had to steal it for work.

[LostMyMind]

I rarely delete cookies.....

Cookies really aren't that big of a threat, and I could care less if someone can figure out what sites I like to visit.... Since I only regularly visit maybe 10 sites total.

[XCashier]

That cartoon is hilarious! I'm printing that off and hanging it by my computer!

[wagegoth]

My MIL freaked when I cleaned out all her cookies, temp files and history a few years ago. She had so much spam and so many cookies on her computer that she had given up reading her email. I ended up setting her up with a new mail account on Yahoo! (she'd been using hotmail), and told her to not just type it into any site that asked for it.

The problem with deleting her history was that she had never bookmarked Favorites. She just kept going into her history to return to sites. I did walk her through building a Favorites menu with subfolders to separate work and personal sites, and helped recover several sites for her.

I thought the History thing was unusual, then I watched an episode of Flipping Out, where Jeff, the OCD boss, freaked because someone did the same thing, cleaning out all the crap that had built up for months on his computer, and then he couldn't find anything because he was used to going through his History to find sites.

[SpyOne]

I manually delete old, unused cookies periodically. But I resist any effort to delete all of my cookies because, ...well, cookies exist for a reason. Many of them do things that are quite useful or handy.

For instance, many message boards (though apparently not these here) use a cookie to save the last time you visited, and use that to mark threads and posts that are new since your last visit. I am unlikely to remember the time & date of my last visit, and it saves me the work of sorting out which threads I have already read.

It bothers me that it seems to be Step 1 in everybody's Tech Support Guide to tell me to delete my cookies: yes, they aren't vital to the running of the system. Neither are my Favorites. Yes, some nefarious stuff can sneak in disguised as a cookie, but I've been on the internet for over 10 years and I have never once had deleteing my cookies produce a solution to my problem.

I have to admit that, on at least one occasion, I have told the tech support guy on the phone that I was deleting my cookies when I wasn't.

[Broomjockey]

For instance, many message boards (though apparently not these here) use a cookie to save the last time you visited,

This board here which we're on now? Yes it does. It's just got a 10-day expiry on new threads. And it works best if you click on "remember me" as I remember some odd stuff happening if you don't, including being logged out when you write up a long post.

[technical.angel]

I HATE when people freak out on me for deleting cookies. But, hey, it's either delete the cookies or not get online/check email/do the chicken dance.

I know what I'm doing, and if I say to do it, or more importantely, do it myself, then it REALLY needs to be done. I'm snagging the pic too. I had to take down my wall o' LOLcats, and I don't know where my new one will be.

[otakuneko]

Cookie Monster'd love my computers. I never delete my cookies.

Cookies are delicious delicacies.

[Wenchie]

It bothers me that it seems to be Step 1 in everybody's Tech Support Guide to tell me to delete my cookies: yes, they aren't vital to the running of the system. Neither are my Favorites. Yes, some nefarious stuff can sneak in disguised as a cookie, but I've been on the internet for over 10 years and I have never once had deleteing my cookies produce a solution to my problem.

Not my first step! My first step is usually checking the Privacy setting to make sure that they're allowing cookies in the first place. ^_^ And while I'm there, the security settings and adding our website as a trusted site. And checking the browsing history settings to make sure it's set to check for new versions of the page on every visit... you might (not) be surprised to see how many people have that set to never.

A lot of the time, though, deleting cookies DOES solve the problem while our users... usually only with office computers though, where you'll have multiple agents and/or assistants logging in using the same computers but different accounts. Or not logging out ever so the system times out... When they try to log back in, it thinks that they're already logged into the system. Deleting cookies works in that case.

But it's never MY first step... usually my 4th or 5th, depending on what the problem is and if they're on a shared computer or not.

[edicius]

The whole "NEVER DELETE COOKIES!!!" thing reminds me of a computer/typing class I was in during middle school. The teacher repeatedly insisted that we should never, EVER use 'Cut' and instead ALWAYS use 'Copy'.

Of course, I had been on computers and word processing for a good number of years before taking that class (started on computers at a young age) and used 'cut' anyway. I remember finishing that typing assignment in less than 5 minutes that day and the teacher was baffled - she had allotted over an hour in the lab for this particular assignment.

[MrSmiley]

The problem with deleting her history was that she had never bookmarked Favorites. She just kept going into her history to return to sites. I did walk her through building a Favorites menu with subfolders to separate work and personal sites, and helped recover several sites for her.

The sad thing is that this behaviour is almost justified in the new Firefox 3.0 versions... Typing a word, any word into the address bar searches the user's bookmarks AND user's history by default (dubbed the "awesomebar" feature by fans of it) letting one quickly get to past pages. However because of it's hunting through the history, it certainly doesn't encourage one to be making bookmarks if they haven't already trained to do so. I have to admit that since I've started using it... I find myself with the bad habit of relying on the history to find a webpage again and again and again (including this one) until I finally realize "hey, I should probably bookmark that".

On the other hand, people who don't understand computers don't always know what a 'firefox' is anyway... since they just click the blue e to download the internet.