The one thing you should get from this post: we are phasing out support for browsers that don't support cookies in favor of allowing search engines full access to roam and index your websites or listings search engines.

I'll explain below, but if you feel your eyes glazing over already, then just know your service will be better for it!

OK, so...many years ago when we started, a lot of Internet users were paranoid and browser security wasn't great, so they turned their cookies off in their browsers.  At the same time, search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing weren't as sophisticated and as essential as they are today.  And many MLSs prohibited us from letting search engines have access to listing content for fear of it being "scraped" off of our system and taken elsewhere.  We made the decision way back then to have ALL of the links in our system use a technique that would allow non-cookie browsers to fully use our system.  All's well in the world, huh?

Fast forward to today: browser security is better, cookies are taken for granted, and search engines are key.  And now NAR has opened the floodgates by saying it suggests allowing search engines to index listing content.  GRRR...Here we sat with THOUSANDS of links, forms, etc. with either CFID/CFToken or JSessionID embedded in them (at least, as far as search engine bots and spiders could see).

The only thing I could do was go through our entire application and remove the code that would embed the session tracking tokens.  MY eyes are glazed over - it was quite a task!  But I can already see that the bots, spiders, and crawlers are enjoying themselves immensely as they troll about!

I'm going to continue to research and experiment with ways that we might be able to support non-cookie browsing.  However, it's definitely becoming less relevant all the time.  Most of you probably wouldn't notice any of this if I weren't pointing it out now, so don't worry about whether your clients will have any trouble over this.