Jeremy, that's exactly what happened to me. I was reading a news article and was fed up by all the ads on the page flashing, bouncing, and whatnot distracting me from what I was trying to read, competing with each other in an arms-race of attention-getting devices.

That's what motivated me to do something about it.

If I had the ability in IE to disable GIF animation, that would probably have been the end of it and I wouldn't have looked for other software

After installing GuideScope, I learned about "web bugs" and how cookies are used to trace your surfing. So distasteful ads aside, I definitly want to filter out "bugs", and I filter cookies except where invited.

Funny thing... I've never seen a banner ad on PerlMonks. Ads do show up on some sites, such as Space Daily (who takes care to only animate three cycles and then stops). That means PerlMonks must be using one of the "bad" systems.

The number-changing thing has never fooled it, and I've never noticed it to be an issue. I suppose the ads are coming from a domain that's filtered totally? I don't even see the URL's, so I don't know.

Forcing the browser to re-download an ad instead of relying on a cached copy is evil. It's a bandwidth hog that should be banned just like huge billboards on an ocean-side freeway. For counting, if the server got the GET, isn't that enough? It answers "no change", but you still were informed! If that's not good enough, you can download a header that contains a redirect. The former is never cached, but the latter is! There are better ways.

—John