animated gifs - impact on httpd access.log

[Rod Miller]

Web server administration question to those who allow,
or intentionally include (you should all be striken
by lightening...but that's another issue), 
animated gifs on their server(s).

When these push/pull animations skew your
web server access log beyong all meaningful
recoginition, do you:

a). Pre-process OUT the extraneuous hits the aninmated
    gifs in question create?  A single gifs caused over
    15,000 hits on our server in one month. 

b). Disallow inclusion of said band-width wasting, content
    free, distractions from your server(s).

c). Just leave the hits in there?  

Any other ideas?  I have already banished the offending
gif(s) from our site, and told the user if they want 
goofy little dancing icons, lacking any meaningful
navigational/content/interface value,  to learn to program in 
Java if they want animation on their homepage...and quit 
wasting CPU and bandwidth on our server (politely , of course).

Any views, or flames, on this attitude?

-Rod 

________________________________________
Rod Miller, Systems Librarian
Wyoming State Library
Cheyenne, Wyoming
rmiller at wyld.carl.org
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