sprungfeld

Hi all,

First of all I'd like to say thanks for all the awesome info you have all offered up through the years! It's great to have a forum like this as a go-to reference for up to date topics and answers to questions. I'm new to posting up here on GFY, but have enjoyed reading many a thread here over the past few years. I have a question that some of you more experienced webmasters might know the answer to.

I have an issue with people using proxies to gain multiple entries. I am not all that familiar with using proxies, but have done a fair shar of reading both here and on other sites as to the types and how they can be used. I have some issues with users having multiple accounts with me, then using these accounts to post to the forums and blogs as fake users. It has become very teidious to remove their posts and it's very evident it is the same few people causing the problems. My question boils down to this:

Is there a way for me to see if the same person is using the same computer via a proxy? I mean even if they went as far as creating separate users on the same machine, is there a way for me to see/log if they are using a proxy via the same machine? Or same user, same machine, but different proxies to log into different users?

Anyone encounter this? I know that some proxies pass HTTP header info and X_REFERRER info and some don't. My guess is that if they are using an annonymous proxy that I would have no way of detecting anything but the proxy's IP. I know that sometimes through some proxies the browser info is passed through, but is that a way to ID an individual machine?

I have read a few recent proxy question threads, but didn't find anything quite like this. Hell even if the solution to this is a paid script I'm interested. I'm just wondering if detecting this behavior is even possible yet. I know some may give me a simple, quick glazing over answer to this, but a little explanation on it would be appreciated.

Thanks guys!

Babaganoosh

What kind of posts are they? Pure spam: e.g. Ch33p v14gr4!!!1. If so, you're probably dealing with xrumer and the only thing you can do is use a better captcha to slow them down.

If it's more manual spam or just fake nicks starting shit, try setting another cookie containing an array of all of the usernames they use. I've had great luck with that on a vbulletin forum. As long as they don't completely clear their cookies you'll nab a lot of people that way.

You could even extend it by not allowing them to register if they have your new cookie set. I haven't done but it would be easy to implement.

robber

Another option would be to block proxy access (maybe just registration or something) but it would stop users from registering using a proxy (that way you have an ip for them all) but the 1 ip per user issue could cause problems with people who use internet cafes or wifi hotspots when they are registering or if multiple different people use the same internet connection then you might end up blocking genuine users.

But I do agree that in general the issues listed above only make up a small percentage of multi-account ip's

Something which would also fool your plan is users who's internet providers have dynamic ip's as their ip would continuously change every few days / weeks, this means that you might not be able to pin down multiple sign ups

Hope this helps in some way

Rob

Chosen

Welcome to GFY

You can detect proxies checking specific environment variables, but not all proxiex can be detected through these variables I guess...

dc0ded

welcome to the forum and I hope you get all the information you are looking for.

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sprungfeld

Thanks for the advice. I'll see what more I can do to try and thwart this.