[ic] how to turn off session id use only cookies

[Philip S. Hempel]

Grant wrote:
>>Is there some way to completely turn of sessions and only
>>use cookies?

That is exactly what I was hoping to hear.


> I'm a little confused as to why Philip's initial suggestion of turning off
> the URL session ID has not been commented on.  People have been very helpful
> in giving alternative suggestions, but I don't think anyone has commented on
> whether or not his initial suggestion would be feasible.  Obviously, cookies
> would then be required, but the last set of statistics I read said that over
> 99.6% of web surfers have cookies enabled these days.  Wouldn't losing that
> .4% be worth having the search engines properly index your site? 

This .4% loss is worth it, since without that loss so far I lose the
another 98% of the people that could come if they could find us.

[RANT]

To repeat what was said in my previous post "One thing we never had to 
do until two years ago was depend on the web store for sales, but due to
the fire that destroyed our business this was what was left to work
with.

Our problem is we sell a product that has about 20,000 sites that do
related items to what we sell. Big thing is that we do not do EXACTLY
what they do. From those 20,000 sites, information for our product get
buried in them.

The searches that would create sales for us normally would
come out of the 10,000 people that look for what we do (around 3% to
5%), but since we cant be found it is less than .02%. And with
that said we get around a 10% to 20% hit to sale ration from the people
that do find us mainly do to the ease that IC has made it for the
customer.

In the big world of money this ratio is very high. But if I only get 40
hits per day then you can see the problem.
I just could not understand why this last year our sales dropped so
much, to the point that it has hurt our business (I know everyone has 
felt this as well) but when related sights look like crap don't
function, or look like someones home page off of AOL get such high
rankings and then sales this did not make since. So I spent some
time researching this and learned a few things.

So I spoke with some people just recently that know about
search engines and Google was one topic that came up. They state
that Google is one of the most particular about dynamic sites.

Google takes the road of just not traversing most sites that have this
dynamic data, not our fault and Google insist that this is the only
way to prevent problems related to being sucked into a site and then
polluting the database like Lycos has. (By the way, if IC programmers
were programming the bots for these engines this would not be an issue)

[/RANT]

> Is there just currently no means to get rid of that session ID in the URL?  Is that
> what mv_tmp_session will do?  I'm a little confused as to what
> mv_tmp_session is exactly.  Mike says it never issues an ID or writes
> anything to disk, does that mean all session information is stored in a
> cookie?  Also, will mv_tmp_session still allow a mv_pc that includes a
> letter to be set at the beginning of the session (included with the link to
> the store), so that [data session source] can be kept track of?
> 

This I think is what he meant I would love to hear a diffinative
answer as to wether or not urls would still look like this

http://your.site.com/cgi-bin/store/link.html?id=asdjfZf1

once using the mv_tmp_session.

If this is true I have one hard to ask question.

Is 4.9 close enough to to be beta enough, meaning no api changes, (hard
part next) to use on a production site? I love IC and will never
change this is why I ask. I ask this really stupid question since
anything I do will not take affect on the net for at least 4 to 6
months.

I would hope that some simple work around could be
managed but I feel that it may not be (simple).


-- 
	-------------------------
	    Philip S. Hempel