Putting a Fork in the Proxy List

Boys and girls, it's finished. The Proxy List is now in maintenance mode. I may add a few extra Hinky Links to polish it off but for now it's running like a well-oiled machine.

What started out as 1010 proxies dwindled down to 389 after I discovered I had a serious duplicate problem. I meditated on that issue Sunday, and wrapped it up on Monday. Since then the number has crawled up to 420 proxies as the harvester bash droids continue to mindlessly skim the public proxy lists.

And... I must admit to doing something a little evil:

Yes, boys and girls, it's the dreaded extreme-dm.com Web bug. I warned you about this back in March.

mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa

I did it for one main reason: I'm one cheap son of a bitch. I want to see how much traffic the list gets but I don't want to pay for the extra service on GoDaddy. $3.95 per month is killing me as it is. That's almost a gallon of gas!

I could have hacked out a HinkyBug on my own (and frankly I'm still thinking about that) but the only Web server I have on DinkNet is an extremely slow piece of crap and the uplink bandwidth is required for other things, primarily the UT99 servers.

With the extreme-dm.com bug, all it costs me is a few extra SPAM emails per day (grumble grumble).

And it's already showing some interesting results. I've only got a handfull of hits, but Google is treating me well, especially overseas. I'm not sure why that is, but most of the Google referrer hits are not domestic. In fact, it intrigues me and it's keeping me awake at night.

If you're interested, go to the page and click on the bug at the bottom. It will show you everything.

In order to try to "pump the page" a joined a few Yahoo Groups that specialize in proxies. God, what a vast wasteland that is. The first group I joined was run by some guy calling himself "Baron von Assmunch" that just uses it to pump his Web site. The next one was years and years worth of newsgroup SPAM. So was the next. And the next.

What a joke.

I did find one or two, dropped my link, and lost all interest whatsoever in Yahoo Groups.

I'm going to see what kind of exposure I can get elsewhere.

So anyway, it's there, it's stable, and in the spirit of "eating my own dog food" I am using one of the listed proxies myself (speedy little sucker running SQUID in Belgium) for a few "special" sites.

No, it's not what you're thinking.

You filthy-minded bastard.