users accessing site via anonymous proxy servers

Hello All,

Does anyone have any ideas for how we can block or track users that are hiding their IPs by using anonymous proxy servers and accessing our site?

There is a breed of users who are accessing the site only to post spam etc and these are bypassing our normal system checks (IP bans etc).

How can one get rid of these and prevent from accessing the site?

 

What type of site are you running? If it's vbulletin I'd recommend starting with a mod called Duplicate Account Prevention. It works by inserting a persistent cookie that's not deleted when a user logs out of the forum. You can also secure a list of confirmed proxies and and ban those ips. There are some more exotic solutions available like flash cookies, java based hardware detection (NIC#), and user agent / ip range comparisons.

It's impossible to completely block duplicate accounts, but you can slow them down and make it more time consuming for them. You should also think about throttling the quantity of PMs or posts that new users are allowed to send based on their post count or time at the site.

 

I would suggest BlockScript. It's easy to setup and blocks several types of proxies.