Establishing A Cookie Management Policy - Nortel BayStack Instant Internet 100-S Using Manual

224 Chapter 7 Web cache configuration

Establishing a cookie management policy

Your cookie management policy will be the result of experimentation. Usually
you can view a Web site without having to return cookies, so you can block the
return of cookies and still cache the entry without affecting the data. But some
Web sites, for example, sites that use shopping carts or that allow you to manage
an investment account, require that clients return cookies to pass personal settings
or information. If a Web site requires cookies and you block cookies from that
site, the user may receive an error message indicating that cookies are required. In
this case, you can enable cookies only for that site.
Statistically, 20% to 25% of Web content contains cookies. When you block
cookies, the Instant Internet unit caches Web entries it may not ordinarily cache if
they contained cookies.
To take full advantage of the Instant Internet unit, Nortel Networks recommends
that you block all cookies for all unconfigured Web sites and permit cookies only
for individual Web sites that require them.
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Note: In this manual, the term "unconfigured Web site" is used to refer to
any Web site that is accessed for the first time through the Instant Internet
unit as well as any Web site that does not have site-specific settings. The
term "configured Web site" refers to any Web site that has site-specific
settings configured on its cache settings page.
For example, if you cache entries from www.abcnews.com, and then set
the default Web site option to block cookies for all Web servers, the
Instant Internet unit no longer accepts cookies from www.abcnews.com
because it is an unconfigured Web site that complies with the default Web
site options. However, if you set the site-specific option for
www.abcnews.com to allow the Web server to set cookies, it is a
configured Web site. Setting the default Web site option to block cookies
to all servers has no effect on www.abcnews.com; you can still view
entries with cookies for that site.