On Sat, Oct 28, 2000 at 11:19:52AM -0500, Igor Chudov wrote:
I have a website (www.algebra.com) that makes money from banners. I have a suspicion that a small percentage of my users uses Junkbusters proxy in order to avoid seeing my banners.
I do not want to serve such users at all and I do not want them to use my bandwidth.
I don't think you're going to get a lot of sympathy by wanting to force people to view ads. Although it's your bandwidth at the server end, it's the USER's bandwidth (& time) at their end. I nearly always leave images turned off in Netscape so I don't need to wait for ads to download via a modem.
Is there any way to detect a user of Junkbusters in a CGI/mod_perl script?
Good question, I'd say the answer is 'yes' but it's but probably not worth the effort. Your basis would be what files they download (and yes, it seems you could automate assessing this). It seems that you could configure your Web server software to stop serving data to hosts that don't also download the banner images (if the images are coming from YOUR server; this isn't clear -- if not, you might be able to redirect through your server to get the images). This would also block: - people using Lynx (e.g., many blind users or people at public access text-only stations) - people with their images turned off - people who press their browser's STOP button before everything is downloaded Let's assume you could catch Junkbusters users this way. Their workaround might be to GET the banner file, but abort the connection before the file transfers. Much tougher to catch.. You're be burning far more CPU cycles than just for regular Web serving. It's not clear to me that the current Junkbusters (or their Guidescope) software could do be modified to work around such blocking. Your question was whether you could do this type of detection using a CGI/mod_perl script. It seems you could "tail" the server log file to get the data you'd need (& combine with the regular client info you can get from the Web server). You'd also need to maintain a state variable across multiple hits to the server so you know what clients have downloaded the whole set of files you're testing. Seems feasible, but potentially error-prone. -- Greg