Suggestions for the future on your web site: (was cookies, and before that Re: Dreamhost hijacking my prefix...)

Jean-Francois Mezei jfmezei_nanog at vaxination.ca
Mon Jan 21 07:45:13 UTC 2013


On 13-01-21 01:19, Matt Palmer wrote:

> Things that require me to worry (more) about scalability are out, as are
> things that annoy a larger percentage of my userbase than cookies (at least
> with cookies, I can say "you're not accepting cookies, please turn them on",
> whereas with randomly resubmitting forms, I can't say "please stop changing
> your IP address" because that might not even be the problem).

There comes a poimt when the user confirms the order where you have to
store the data on your server. And store the credit card, send the
transaction, store authorisation etc.

If a person needs to login before proceeding, you will need to store
some info in a server side database to indicate a valid session and
timestamp of last transaction (so you can time out sessions at the
server level)

You need to update this record everytime the user does a transaction to
reset the timeout and keep the session alive.

Might as well store cart information in it too as more and more items
are added.


One advantage of server side storage is that you have a record of users
abandonning their transactions, can look at possible trends that pont to
something that causes customers to go away before completing
transaction. This would be important informatioon to help improve the
shopping experience.

Either way, you still need to have either a cookie or a hidden form
field for some session ID token. Advantage of cookie is that you can
switch to a static page (when you display standard shipping iformation
for instancem or a help page, and you don't have to convert all those
pages to a form that sends the session ID as a hidden field.






More information about the NANOG mailing list