Operationally, there is no difference between any proxy and one that puports to be an anonymous proxy. All that an anonymous proxy is is one that strips out any data that might be used to track back to the proxy user (often cookies, common server headers, etc).

To answer your question, proxies.dnsbl.sorbs.net will block all proxies registered with it, anonymous or not. Now, it's possible that your understanding of what an anonymous proxy is might be different than that of mine, but I can assure you that they aren't any sort of special beast that is hard to slay. They're just proxy servers.

ok well for example i have that in there but say you go to this site. http://anonymouse.org/anonwww.html try to register on your site with a new name i bet it works. I havent found a way to block these sort of sites yet cause they dont seem to pass the http variables.

The problem with that is that a large number of web "anonymizers" don't get added to RBLs. Whether or not they should is a matter for debate. You'll notice there is a section for known anonymizers/proxies and I have added the IPs of a number of "free anonymous hosting" sites...

I may look at building a "report an IP" function into my next release so I can build on the list of proxies that get past the RBL.

Another method of configuring the RBL checker would be to do the following -

1) Create a new user group based on whatever group your "registered users" end up in and call it "Possible Trolls".
2) Set RBL Checker to allow registration but "autoban" user into the "possible troll" group.

You can now watch these users a little more closely - and if satisfied they're not trolls you can move them to your registered users group.

I have added this to my board but It doesnt appear to work I had a user who is on the sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org list but he was not blocked. I check the that the plugin was active, settings were good. Any ideas why this would occur.

You are correct ... I had tested everything was working but then cleaned up some variable names to standardize all the variables I use in the product and managed to misname one of the variables used in the RBL checking part of the code. Please download and install 3.1 - tha pronblem is fixed and I've also changed the error message for RBL blocked users to include the name of the RBL doing the check (over time this should let people prune the list of RBLs they use down to the most effective one.)

Also - doing some tests with lists of free anonymous proxies and it looks like dnsbl.ahbl.org blocks the most IPs (checking on dnsstuff.com) the only problem is that www.ahbl.org has NO information so I'm not willing to make it the default or use it on my production forum.

Once I can get some information on it I may make it the default - certainly it reports all the open proxies as being such using DNS stuff.

Thanks for pointing out the RBL check wasn't working SinisterPain...

Thanks for the update, as I have been overwhelmed recently with spammers.

might wanna check it again cause its not working still atleast for me

It seemed to work fine now just got my first bust

Which proxy are you using for testing? Works for me with any anonymous proxy I found using a combination of spamhaus.org and ahbl.org I blocked all attempts from anonymous proxies.

Sorry I edited my post above, to say it did work any thank you for this great mod.