Cookies or cookieless ?

I just have a look at some stats on one of my project and I discovered that more than 53 % of the users of this website are still blocking cookies.

I'm surprised because I was quite sure that the cookies was now accepted by most of the Internet users. I am not sure where this coming from, if it's the type of users (teachers, schools, parents, kids) but it's a bit strange.

Thankfully I don't use any registration process on the site, but sadly I lost for these users the ability to track their session time on the site. For example the stats software is unable to give me an accurate number of new vistors versus returning visitors.

The solution I know will be to switch in cookieless mode, but I don't like really the ugly Url I have with this option.

Anybody there who had the same issue with cookies ?

On the stats subject, regarding the issue I had today with a spammer (Thanks to Scott Galloway for his comment), a good way to track quickly if you have any strange behavior from your server (in case somebody try to hammer your server) is to check in your stats package the average time to serve the webpages.

It help me to confirm that something went berzerk today with only 113 requests served in 178,999,375  milliseconds.
A huge peak when usually the graph should stay almost flat.

Something to notice is that you can clearly also see in this stats section the way that a IIS 6 server wake up a web site asleep, on the morning after resting few hours in the night !