Online Help
Enabling Cookies
Certain resources on the web require the visitor to sign in to the web site before the content can be accessed. If you do not have cookies enabled then you will find you cannot access the content. To enable cookies in your web browser, follow the instructions below.
To find out what a cookie is, see the text at the bottom of this page.
- Click on Edit, then on Preferences
- Click on Advanced
- Select Accept All Cookies.
- Click Ok.
- Click on Tools, then on Internet Options
- Click the Security tab
- Click the Custom Level button
- Scroll down and find the cookies options
- Click the radio button to enable cookies to be stored on your computer
- Click the radio button to enable per session cookies
- Click Ok.
- Click on Tools, then on Internet Options
- Click the "Advanced..." button
- Tick the "Override automatic cookie handling"
- Select "Accept" under "First-party Cookies"
- Tick "Always allow session cookies"
- Click "OK" to save and close the "Advanced Privacy Settings" window.
- Click "OK" to save and close the "Internet Options" window.
What are Cookies?
A cookie is a text string that gets saved into the memory of a browser. This string contains the domain, path, lifetime, and value of a variable that a web site sets.
Cookies are used for various reasons. Some web sites use cookies to identify you with during your current visit to the site. These are called session cookies, and are deleted when you close your web browser. Persistent cookies on the other hand are given a certain lifetime when they are created (for example one year). These are used by web sites to identify you when you visit a site on multiple occasions.
Disabling Caching
A few years ago, when Internet connections were slow, it could take quite a bit of time for a web page to load fully in a web browser. To overcome this problem, web browsers (e.g. Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer) started to keep copies of previously requested web pages and images in memory. This meant that if a person browsing the web visited a page they had been to recently, their web browser would be able to present them with a copy of the page straight away, without the need to download anything. This process of storing web pages in memory is called caching.
Increasingly today, the content of a web page is created dynamically (on-the-fly), at the moment that a person requests the page from the web server (i.e. when the web browser loads the page). This means that each time a person visits a web page its content may be quite different.
Unfortunately, browsers are still often set up to cache web pages, which means that your browser may be presenting you with old versions of pages. In order for your browser to always show you the latest version of a web page, you need to follow these instructions:
- Click on Tools, then on Internet Options
- Select the 'General' tab (it should be selected automatically)
- Under 'Temporary Internet files' click the 'Settings...' button
- Choose to check for newer versions of stored pages Every visit to the page
- Click 'OK' to close the 'Settings' dialog, and 'OK' to save your changes and close the Internet Options dialog.
- Click on Edit, then on Preferences
- Click the 'plus' to expand the 'Advanced' menu
- Select 'Cache' from the sub-menu
- Set 'Document in cache is compared to document on network' to 'Every time'
- Click 'OK' to save your changes and close the dialog.
