Marty, and all,

I was talking to my husband about the errors we've been having with the board. He has a pretty good idea of why it seems to be happening and a possible (minor) solution to the problem. I will let him speak for himself...

The 'Set-Cookie: ' is a HTTP header to ask the browser to maintain a state. The name of the cookie is 'miscellany.read', and the value of the cookie is the rest.

The value of the cookie is url-encoded so that special characters can be used in the cookie. To decode the cookie replace the % (or in this case #) with the ASCII character specified by the two digit hexidecimal number following it, for example is a space and , is a comma. So the first bit of the cookie is ",3067,,3112,,3119,,3128,". Considering the context these are probably the numbers of the articles that have been read in this session (the session being the lifetime of the cookie so that it dies when you close the browser, there are also cookies that live longer than the browser and those are stored in a file). Whenever you look at a new article or comment another number gets appended to the cookie.

The problem seems to be that the cookie is too long for the browser (I believe the official limit is still 1024 characters). So when the browser encounters a cookie that is longer than this limit it gets confused, sometimes the problem is presented in an error dialog box and apparently also just inserted into the page.

The easiest solution is to make the session shorter, close the browser, stop reading for a while to let the cookie expire on its own, etc....