I am making a social site where users can post content and the content has views. Whenever a user from a different IP address views the content, the view count is incremented; multiple requests coming from the same IP address do not count. However lately someone is iterating though a list of proxies or something and artificially increasing the view counts. How can I prevent this? Is there something I can do by checking headers or something? Thanks.
The best way to do it is pattern-recognition, since most proxies won't tell you that they are a proxy: if you see certain spikes of traffic, flag them and don't add them to the hitcount.
Alternatively, if (s)he's using the same proxies over and over again, just blacklist those IP addresses. You could also try to detect proxies by using some sort of API proxy list service or checking for listening proxy servers.
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