[edgeless]

Okay, it does work... but I'm encountering a few problems. And one of them is a fairly serious one.

I'll start with the most serious problem. There is no combination of settings that I have been able to find which will allow registration from what I fear may be many mobile devices. For testing I'm using my own cell phone. The test is to try and use it to register as a new member on my forum site. Prior to each test, I freshly clear its cookies and other private data. The problem is that PApro persistently interprets these efforts as proxy connections and blocks me at the registration page. This happens even with the Tor, LAN, and Web Proxy options set to "no" and the Members option set to "yes". And it doesn't matter if the Registration Only option is set to "yes" or "no". The vB message with the text that I entered for the proxy_alert_registration phrase consistently appears and blocks every registration attempt from this cell phone.

I have a theory about this issue, but at the moment I have no way to test it. My theory is this: The IPs assigned to my phone (its service is through Consumer Cellular) do not have rDNS hosts. That is, none of the dhcp IPs leased to my cell phone can be reverse-resolved to host names (i.e., there are no PTR records for them). If PApro uses rDNS lookup as a criterion to approve each IP as being a non-proxy address, then this may be why these IPs are not passing. But as I've said, I have no immediate way of testing this theory, since I only have the one cell phone. I could have some of my members or staff test this theory with their mobile devices by clearing their cookies and then attempting registration. But that tends to become a bit awkward so I'm holding off for now. And of course users who contact admin due to a registration refusal are usually not the best options as test subjects.

The next matter of concern is that my testing has shown that for some reason when the Registration Only option is set to "yes", my registration attempts through Tor will randomly slip through to my forum's registration form. And this is with confirmation that my Tor exit node IP has NOT changed each time it happens. Again, this issue does seem to only occur when the Registration Only option is set to "yes". I haven't been able to duplicate it with that option set to "no"... at least yet.

My last observation is trivial... but I'll still mention it. It is that even when I have the Location option set to "no" while the Registration Only option is set to "no" as well, the PA popup message seems to only appear on the main forum index page. Isn't the Location option being set to "no" supposed to cause this popup message to appear on all pages? This is obviously not a serious problem. It's only an observation at this point.

Thanks for reading... if anyone has any thoughts I'll sure be interested.


EDIT:
I had one of my staff test the reg process using their mobile device - it acquires IP addresses which will in fact properly resolve to host names. Like my mobile IPs, hers are as well managed by AT&T Mobility; they are just different numerical blocks. She was able to get through the registration process without issue. I think that serves as fairly good evidence that the lack of PTR records for the IP blocks that my phone has access to has been responsible for PApro rejecting the registration efforts from my phone. The 2nd issue, intermittent slip throughs on Tor connections, may require some further testing on my part.

EDIT2:
Okay. I've done some more testing on the second issue. As mentioned, when the Registration Only option is set to "no", all Tor connections are blocked and the "proxy connections are not allowed" message is consistently presented as expected - i.e., registration does not occur and the proxy_alert_registration message is displayed. However, when the Registration Only option is set to "yes", the system will randomly fail to display the proxy_alert_registration phrase and instead moves to the next stage, which is the new member information entry form page. But when this happens, once the member information has been entered and the 'Complete Registration' button has been clicked, no registration occurs -which is good- but the vB message which then appears is not about proxies at all... instead it is: "Your email is marked as spam." Below is a screenshot.

Doing a search for phrases, the above message phrase is shown to be the contents of email_mark_as_spam. I'm unsure though why this message phrase is triggered by PApro ? So that's my first question. And my next question is why, when the Registration Only option is set to "yes", do Tor connections randomly alternate between allowing the user to reach the member information entry form stage (followed by display of the email_mark_as_spam message), or terminating immediately after the birth date is entered with a prompt display of the proxy_alert_registration message? The important thing of course is that this mod seems to block Tor users. It just doesn't do the same thing each time if the Registration Only Option is set to "yes". At least that's what I'm finding.

Any ideas as to why I'm noticing this behavior?