Thoughts on Proxies?

Whats your thoughts on Proxies? And how do you deal with them/prevent them?

 

To me there are two types of proxy users:
- Responsible users
- Non-responsible users

Responsible usage would include, being forced to (dial up), using to bypass a firewall at work / school, or to prevent snooping (some people are paranoid for some reason).

Non-responsible usage would be pretty much to circumvent bans, trolling, or cheating a system (duplicate accounts to inflate reputation or in our case XenTrader).

If you want to see what a user's real IP is instead of the proxy IP (vBulletin), there was a neat mod I used to use back in the day and according to the last page it works up to 3.8.2 (might work beyond that)

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=120082

 

Yea proxies are not always used for bad reasons, and yea people can be paranoid so thats why some use it to keep their private information hidden. But 90% of the time Proxies are not used for good reasons.

 

See, I don't mind but to an extent. If it's a member trying to by pass a ban then yeah I'm annoyed but if it's someone wanting to be secret I don't mind that much.

 

Yea, most of the time its used for bypassing bans, and I have had members do that often. Very annoying.

 

I found out that an active member was actually behind a proxy and he caused over 300+ messages of spam

 

So he did all that spam on his original account?

 

I dislike proxies, the only thing they are good for is checking if your IP is banned off servers, etc.

 

I agree with proxies, if they are used for a good reason. I don't agree with them when they are used to bypass bans etc. But overall I disagree because thats pretty much why they are used.

 

If the member in question isn't breaking any rules or laws, I don't care how many proxies they use.

 

How would you know if the member was a banned member and broke rules in the past, you wouldn't since they are using a proxy.

 

The only time I would use a proxy was if I had a hard time logging on to a forum. I used it on the old Chatting Time once last year, when we had the old database, as no matter what I tried I couldn't get in. I think I was the only one having this problem as well. Turns out it was something to do with our router; I had to reset it.. But that's the only time I'd use it is if we had internet trouble or to check and see if the downtime was on my end or not. Overall I'm kind of against using proxies, especially since they're more commonly used by repeat offender spammers.

 

When I was on free hosting back in the day I would get many errors like that where the server would randomly block me, and the forum would be unavailable to me until I'd reset my router, and the only way I could access it was through a proxy.

It still happens on free or paid hosts, but the reason for that is a crappy host. Its not a problem on your end. So when you see many times others saying a site isn't working for them, but is for others than thats the case.

 

Well, I haven't had this problem for quite some time, so it doesn't bother me now. So yeah.