There’s been an incredible amount of spam running throughout the Blogosphere recently and, judging from the IPs of the messages getting through Akismet, over 90% of these messages are coming through anonymous or open proxy servers. These very same servers are also one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of content theives, scammers, and hackers. By blocking their true identity, these online deviants are capable of carrying out any number of illegal or immoral actions against an unimaginable number of websites.
It’s kind of depressing when you think about it.
Luckily, there are options available for site owners who want to prevent people using known open proxies from using stolen credit card numbers or otherwise stealing content on their sites: IP2Proxy.
IP2Proxy checks the IP Address of each visitor against their growing proxy list. Should a visitor be coming from one of these servers, the site administrator can easily re-direct the traffic to another site, or outright block it. One of the greatest advantages of this system is the ability to save the bandwidth that is often wasted by content scrapers, scammers, and spammers. This alone would save me over 20% of my monthly bandwidth, and my sites are nowhere near being considered “high-traffic.”
The APIs work with MySQL, SQL Server, Access, PHP, VB.net, ASP, ASP.net, C#, and a number of other environments and can be easily integrated into any solution. Heck, for the amount of money that I would save every day in bandwidth, this solution would pay for itself on my server in less than 10 months!
You can find out more about IP2Proxy from their site, and it’s certainly worth a look.