The Junkbuster HTTP proxy can block banner advertisements by using a blocklist similar to that used by censorware. This has some of the same drawbacks as censorware: very often throwing out the baby with the bathwater. This opens up a few ways to confuse Junkbuster:
- If you serve all your images from the same CGI script on the same server (e.g. images.slashdot.org) and you don't namespace your ads conspicuously, Junkbuster won't be able to tell the site's logo or navigation graphics from a banner and will block all images if it blocks any at all.
- If you haven't already burned your GIFs, use animated GIFs for all GIF images on the site. The user won't be able to detect this because the animations will be simple two-frame animations with the second frame completely transparent, but if Junkbuster is set to throw out all animated GIFs (for sites that pull tricks like in 2), it'll throw out all GIFs.
- OK, now the user has either succumbed to your banners or turned off all images. You can still advertise to them, and even to those using character-cell web browsers such as lynx or w3m, by putting a sales pitch in the alt attribute in the <img> tag.