COOKIE POLICY
Cookies are text files sent to your computer and used by your web browser to store information. The cookies we use allow your browser to remember whether you’ve visited our site before and what your preferences are.
As with most websites we use cookies to improve your user experience by enabling our website to ‘remember you’, either for the duration of your visit (using a ‘session cookie’) or for repeat visits (using a ‘persistent cookie’). There are also use two different types of cookies – first party (which we own) and third party (where we allow a third party, such as Google, to set cookies on your computer or mobile device).
Cookies do lots of different jobs, like letting you navigate between pages efficiently, storing your preferences, and generally improving your experience of a website. Cookies make the interaction between you and the website faster and easier. If a website doesn’t use cookies, it will think you are a new visitor every time you move to a new page on the site – for example, when you enter your login details and move to another page it won’t recognise you and it won’t be able to keep you logged in.
Although the cookies we use on this website are quite harmless and do not reveal your identity, not everyone wishes to have text files downloaded onto their computer or mobile device. If you prefer, it is possible to block some or all cookies, or even to delete cookies that have already been set; but you need to be aware that you might lose some functionality on this website.
You can manage how cookies engage with your computer or mobile device via your browser (e.g. Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Android), so you are alerted when cookies are sent or you can refuse cookies altogether. You can also delete cookies which have already been set.
There is also a very useful website explaining how to control your interaction with cookies – please visit this site for more information:
The BBC website also has a clear and comprehensive section explaining what they do and how they work. Please be aware that this section is aimed at users of their website, which employs more cookies than our own.
On this website we use only a small number of cookies. They are:
| Cookie | Vendor | Purpose |
| __cf_bm | Cloudflare | Cloudflare’s bot products identify and mitigate automated traffic to protect your site from bad bots. Cloudflare places the __cf_bm cookie on End User devices that access Customer sites that are protected by Bot Management or Bot Fight Mode. The __cf_bm cookie is necessary for the proper functioning of these bot solutions.
This cookie expires after (at most) 30 minutes of continuous inactivity by the End User. The cookie contains information related to the calculation of Cloudflare’s proprietary bot score and, when Anomaly Detection is enabled on Bot Management, a session identifier. The information in the cookie (other than time-related information) is encrypted and can only be decrypted by Cloudflare. A separate __cf_bm cookie is generated for each site that an End User visits, and Cloudflare does not follow users from site to site or from session to session by merging various __cf_bm identifiers into a profile. The __cf_bm cookie is generated independently by Cloudflare, and does not correspond to any user ID or other identifiers in a Customer’s web application. |
| _ga | Google (Analytics) | Used to distinguish users. |
| _gat_* | Google (Analytics) | Used to throttle request rate. |
| _gid | Google (Analytics) | Used to distinguish users. |