Re: Banner ad blocker ? Anyone with a good blocklist or better code

From: Bill Wichers <billw@dont-contact.us>
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 1998 18:46:06 -0500 (EST)

There is some C code for a faster redirector floating around (someone sent
me a copy a while back). If anyone has the time, it would be nice to have
a cache user maintained site somewhere of regexes, and have a C redirector
take this list as a config file. We could then write shell scripts to
automatically update the list every night or so.

Yes, it is possible to redirect a user's "banner clicks". I replace all
the ad banners at some of my sites with a banner for our company, and if a
user clicks on one of these banners they get our company's homepage. It
takes some work to get them to work right, and there are several sites
using non-standard sized banners (notably a few square buttons on
AltaVista) that make the banner we use look really wierd. We save many
megs by blocking banners (thousands of hits a day), so I think the effort
is well worth it.

A lot of pages load a lot faster when they don't need to bring up the ad
banner, which is yet another plus!

        -Bill

On Thu, 12 Mar 1998, Armistead, Jason wrote:

> Hi
>
> I've been running a Perl redirector script, which with a careful
> analysis of the Squid access.log file has been able to help me filter
> out URLs which are nothing more than banner GIF files, and then to
> redirect the request to a locally served & stored GIF image (I use
> several different URLs, though I should probably eventually stick to
> one, easily changed one for all add sites). This is a valuable upstream
> bandwidth saver for us, and also has the advantage of keeping these
> files out of the cache (disk /memory requirements are smaller and we get
> a better hit ratio).
>
> For a small ISP, this could be a good cost saver, and a chance to put
> your favourite motd (Message Of The Day) or similar onto some well hit
> sites (as long as the viewing public don't then try to go to the
> underlying URLs in the HTML (which could also be redirected I guess - I
> just never bothered with it).
>
> So, I've had a look on the net for a definitive list of blocked ad
> sites. I found http://internet.junkbuster.com, but a search for their
> recommended phrases on AltaVista revealed only one site
> http://www.teclata.es/junkbuster/english/blocklist.html (better than a
> kick in the head I guess). The only other sites which helped was one
> from http://www.markwelch.com/bannerad/ who appears to be a banner ad
> consultant (I have yet to go through his HTML pages and extract all the
> URLs for inclusion into the add breaker)
[stuff deleted]
Received on Thu Mar 12 1998 - 16:00:29 MST

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