CDR: Re: Ho to KICK OUT Junkbusters users

[Igor Chudov]

Bill Stewart wrote:
> 
> At 11:19 AM 10/28/00 -0500, Igor Chudov wrote:
> >Is there any way to detect a user of Junkbusters in a CGI/mod_perl script?
> 
> Most advertising banners come from one of three sources -
> - advertiser.com/whatever
> - ads.website.com/whatever (IP address may belong to advertiser.com)
> - website.com/whatever (website.com's IP address and CGI.)
> 
> The usual way banner-killers work is to recognize advertiser.com's name
> and not download pages or accept cookies from there.
> Some may be fancier and check the IP address as well as the name.
> It's much harder to junkblock banners that are really on your site -
> but that means that your advertiser needs to have a setup that 
> lets you work that way, which most don't (partly for fraud prevention,
> though I suppose it's less of an issue for clickthroughs.)
> Others may look for banner-shaped things - that's hard to stop.
> And then there are folks who turn off images entirely :-)
> 
> Your goal can probably be interpreted as "how to detect whether
> a user downloaded my advertising banner before showing them real content?".
> You can't keep them from seeing the text of your main page before they
> download the banner, because that's what includes the call
> for the banner image.  (You could do one of those initial pages
> that flashes up briefly and then calls the real page, though.)
> If your webserver is bright enough (or if you hack it enough yourself),
> you could keep it from showing future images if the caller
> hasn't read the image.  That's only possible if you know whether they've
> downloaded your banner, which usually means that the banner
> has to be hosted on your site rather than the advertiser's.
> 
> Lots of people turn off cookies - you'd mentioned the issue of
> using cookies to tell if people have fetched your banner.
> But even for people who accept cookies, the cookie protocols
> will only let you fetch cookies with your second-level domain,
> so you also need to use one of the banner locations with your domain.

A thoughtful message. Thanks. Basically my site absolutely relies
on cookies for several things, such as the linear algebra workbench,
standardized testing, and "My Homework". 

Maybe the desire to reject junkbusters users is due to my asshole
personality rather than arational business thinking. I think that Tim is
right, the clueless kiddos who visit algebra.com do not run junkbusters.

	- Igor.