My name is Jon-Mark Davey, owner, editor, and webmaster of the QuakerVille family of web sites. When you open a page on QuakerVille.com, quakerville.com, Planetparrot.net (.com, .org) ParrotFoundation, Quakerman.com, PositivelyParrots.com,  Hatchdate.com, or any of the other QuakerVille sponsored or hosted web sites, your computer is asked to allow a cookie to be placed on it in order to provide a better, more stable communication between your computer and the server where the web site services are located. No private information is being extracted from your computer except that which was placed there by the server itself in order for the server to keep track of the web page or sequence of pages you are viewing. Many of the web pages on QuakerVille and it's sites are multiple pages that require some form of sequencing or identification in order to work properly. The cookies also work to make the QuakerVille slide shows operate properly. Cookies used by the QuakerVille servers are made so that the server and your computer will connect properly and maintain a more "constant" state of communication. QuakerVille.com is using very old technology so creating cookies on that server for this purpose is sometimes slower, while quakerville.com and the other web sites are using a much more sophisticated server to send pages. Since the web sites are served from 3 different host companies from multiple servers across the USA, each web domain site will have a different combination of securities and/or cookies. 

Logins... If you are an administrative member of QPS, RAPP, administrators or editors of the sites, or power user, then you have to have a login and password to access some parts of the site(s). The information gathered during the administrative process is used only for internal purposes and not given out or sold to 3rd parties. A "cookie" is nothing more than a small quantity of information about you (you will provide that information) that is stored on your computer's hard disk. Once cookies are accepted by your computer, you will be recognized much quicker in the future. Login cookies for the bird societies are maintained for about 20 minutes and then deleted. In the future I may enable a longer lasting login cookie but for now the Time To Live (TTL) is about 20 minutes.  

Credit Card Information ... QuakerVille does not ask for credit card information for any reason at this time. All credit card information is processed by the company where purchases are made. QuakerVille does not "pass-through" or store in cookies any information of that nature. The commercial or 'associate' company handles all credit card sales and is responsible for the security of credit card transactions. 

Guest Books ... I am in the process of re-programming the way all the guest book results are  presented. Several of the older guest books show visitor's e-mail addresses and could produce spam mail. In the future, the Guest Book information will be much more controlled and little more private.

Passwords --- Passwords on QuakerVille and related sites are NOT encoded and secure. Due to the nature of the systems they are clear TEXT. PLEASE do not use passwords that are associated with your financial accounts on this site. I'm not saying that anyone will steal your information but I don't use SSL or 128 bit encryption like the banks use on this site. 

Page Hits on QuakerVille.com is accurate and seen as "sessions" at the bottom of the page. Each year I reset the "sessions" count to show the current year's session count. quakerville.com is still experiencing some calculating transitions as the program is fine tuned. On an average there are between 280-400 sessions per day on .net and viewers are reading between 850-1200 pages daily on each domains. Last year, 2000, I served over 500,000 pages on QuakerVille.com. Since quakerville.com went online in July, 2001, .com dropped off slightly to about 8500 visitors/month and .net is serving about 7200 visitors per month. September 2001 saw the sites drop to about 6000/month until mid October 2001. This of course was due to the attacks on the US.

I hope this answers some of your questions about how QuakerVille works.

Jon-Mark Davey, Owner