What is a Proxy Judge?

A Proxy Judge is a script that is hosted online that outputs visitor's information that was sent to that server. The main purpose of such script is to check and validate proxy servers. The way most proxy checkers test and validate proxies, is by making a proxy connect to a proxy judge and parsing its output to determine what kind of information that particular proxy reveals, and then derive its level of anonymity, performance metrics, and other features from that information.

Without a proxy judge, a successful connection made to some random website through a proxy would only tell us that the proxy server "works", but it doesn't tell us much else such as the additional information sent with each request and the level of anonymity that that particular proxy provides.

Typical text response sent by a proxy judge.

Where can you find reliable Proxy Judges?

Setting up a proxy judge is very easy and it can cost nothing so there is no shortage of proxy judges on the Internet and finding them is easy. The problem is that most of the public proxy judges are unreliable because they are hosted on slow or unstable servers, so if a proxy judge gets too popular, then the server slows down or even shuts down. If that happens, then tests done with a proxy judge will either fail or timeout marking the proxy server as dead even if it's alive.

List of Proxy Judges

Instead of compiling a huge list of every proxy judge we could find, we decided instead to list only the most reliable and established proxy judges that are not likely to disappear.

http://azenv.net/

Is a default proxy judge used by our online proxy checker and other software made by us and other people. It is one of the oldest proxy judges on the Internet that has been online since at least 2011 and is unlikely to ever go offline, because so many software applications depend on it. It is the default proxy judge for testing proxies on Elite Proxy Switcher.

http://www.eliteproxyswitcher.com/proxyjudge.html

Default list of proxy judges used by Elite Proxy Switcher

http://proxyjudge.us/azenv.php

Online since 2012 and is being used as a default proxy judge by many premium proxy list providers.

Parsing information from Proxy Judge

If you are using some popular proxy-related piece of software, then all you need is to input the URL of the proxy judge that you wish for it to use, and the software will automatically figure out how to connect and parse information returned.

However, if you are building a custom piece of software, or your own script that requires testing some proxy server, then parsing that response is not as obvious. One popular use, for example, is figuring out client's IP address which is returned by "REMOTE_ADDR" of proxy judge response. TODO: figure out country and precise location that that proxy served is based at.

Hosting your own Proxy Judge

If for some reason you decide to host a proxy judge on your own server, you may do so by following these steps. First you need a server that supports either PHP or Perl. Once you have your server set-up, then you need to download these azenv script files and extract the downloaded archive into some folder.

Depending on what scripting language your server supports, upload one of those files to your server and you are done!