I've been looking into the open proxy blocking functionality today and have found some interesting things. Is this what Wikipedia is using to block open proxies?
One issue that I found is that since proxy_check.php didn't send some client and other relevant headers to the proxy, several proxies replied with "301 Moved Permanently" responses and wouldn't load the SpecialBlockme.php page (which is a really cool idea by the way). I'm not sure why this was - but adding in some fake firefox header information seemed to fix it.
Some proxies seemed to connect to a 2nd proxy before connecting to the final server. For example if I set my proxy to 62.75.167.11:8080 , my IP ends up being listed as 62.75.136.84 when I edit a page, and this IP is not accepting connections on 8080. This unfortunately circumvents the benefits of proxy_checker.php.
SpecialBlockme doesn't have an expiry by default, it might be a good idea to have a more realistic length of blocking especially for something that's automated, like a global variable $wgProxyDefaultBlockLength which could be set to something like "3 months". Also, SpecialBlockme doesn't record log entries for blockingopen proxies, which admins might find useful, so I added this to our setup by adding these lines:
$log = new LogPage( 'block' ); $log->addEntry( 'block', Title::makeTitle( NS_USER, $ip ), $reason, $wgProxyDefaultBlockLength) );
I came across this page:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:WikiProject_on_open_proxies
Is this project still active? If so, is there any easy way to import updated versions of this list in an automated fashion? What's the obscure blacklist that was mentioned in this link, can you tell us more about it Brion?
Travis