About:

In order to provide some services which are "nifty" in my opinion, this site makes use of cookies to save small amounts of information about this site on your computer.

Many people get slightly offended at the mention of the word "Cookie", at least when it's used to describe what we do here; so I thought I might let people know what I'm using the cookies for and how they work.

There are two cookies which this site makes use of. The first is one which almost everyone uses. It's called MsgPrefs, and it's function is to let the server know which way you like the comments to be laid out when you visit the site.

It's stored in plain text with the values separated by the pipe "|" symbol. If you take a look at the cookie, you'll see that it stores the values for threaded or not, your auto-expand threshhold, your default sort method, and your filtering threshhold. The save button on the forum (comment) preferences controls whether or not the cookie is rememebered when you close your browser window.

I perform no logging or storage on this particular cookie. I can't even tell a given user's frequency of visits from it.

The second cookie is one that you get when you login via the user.html page. If you login successfully, a cookie is stored on your system which is called SessionID. This SessionID matches a record in a table in the database, which then allows my applications to lookup up who you are in a secure fashion. The SessionID cookie is actually an SHA encrypted hash of your IP, your username, your password, and some other interesting and seemingly random things. While I can re-calculate the hash (and do for a couple admin things), most of the time, just passing in the correct SessionID is enough to act as tha user.

Again, no logging is performed on your SessionID cookie.

If you are using Netscape, you can find and view your cookies here:
C:\Program Files\Netscape\Users\PROFILENAME\cookies.txt

If you are using IE under windows 98 you can find them here:
c:\windows\cookies\

Under win2k, they are in C:\documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Cookies

All the item information, quest information, faction information, and a good deal of the creatures were compiled by Allakhazam, many thanks to him for running such a top quality information site.

This database is developed in Perl, running on Apache, with the mod_perl plugin for Apache. The database on the back-end is mySQL, which indexes all the information. I've used a system of static search results to speed performance, where applicable.

Due to the incredible large number of creatures in Norrath, some (if not alot) of the information we currently have is wrong, or missing, please help us correct it.

Feedback is always appreciated, please send all comments to Illia.

Illia can be found on the Test Server.