Last updated September 2026.
Cookies are small text files a website stores in your browser. We set one, and we set no cookie for analytics, advertising or tracking of any kind.
How we count our readers
We do count how often our pages are read, but we do it on our own server and without a cookie: for each page we record the day, the address of the page and the site that linked to it. To tell one reader from another on a single day, your network address and browser are turned into a one-way code, salted with the day, and that code is deleted within a few weeks. Your network address itself is never stored, nothing follows you from one day or one site to the next, and nothing is shared with anybody else.
The cookie we set
- nara_session. The single cookie we set. It keeps you signed in and carries the token that protects every form against cross-site request forgery, so the site cannot take a sign-in or a submission without it. It holds nothing but a random identifier, is readable only by our own servers, and is removed when you sign out or two hours after your last request.
Cookies other companies set
A few pages load software from other companies, which may set their own cookies while they are on screen: PayPal on our donation pages, Stripe when a membership payment is taken, and Cloudflare Turnstile, which checks that our public forms are filled in by a person rather than a machine. Card payments finish on PayPal’s or Stripe’s own pages, under their cookie policies. Map tiles come from OpenStreetMap and set no cookies. Links to Join It, HamStudy, the FCC and other external sites are governed by those sites’ own cookie policies.
Why we do not ask your consent
Consent rules cover cookies a site does not strictly need. Ours is strictly necessary — it is the sign-in itself — so there is nothing here to opt out of, and no banner to click past.
Managing cookies
You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings. Blocking our session cookie will prevent you from signing in, but the public parts of the site will still work.