I sent this email recently to urlblacklist.com and have received no response. Obviously, I don’t have to use their service, no one is forcing me into anything here, but I feel their current and potential customers have a right to know what’s going on.

I was strongly considering a subscription to your service for our college, but after looking through the proxy list, I don’t think we can afford to spend so much time going through lists and looking for invalid listings in something that would also cost us financially. I thought lower false positives was supposed to be the benefit of having a ‘managed blacklist’ service. Maybe it actually is better than some of the bot-ran lists, but it sure needs some work.

Perhaps I misunderstand your definition of ‘proxy’, but here’s what I thought it meant:
Any service that is a substitute for what is already provided, typically for the purpose of bypassing said service.

Several listings jumped out at me right away, so I’ll mention them here:

siteadvisor.com – this is something we use, and intend to deploy widely on campus. It is not a subsitute for anything, rather it is in addition to other tools to provide a safer browsing experience.

myspace.com – social networking, chat, even some of the content could be adult (although the primary audience seems to be teens). not sure how this ever got on the proxy list

themafiaboss.com – an online game, i couldn’t find any proxy service advertised

jabber.meta.net.nz – I assume the ‘proxy’ service in question is the ability to use an msn (or yahoo, or aim, or icq) account without actually using the preferred clients for those networks. However, there are many clients, and many, many jabber services that provide this service that are not blocked on the proxy list. that’s enough on that one

lorengordon.com – someone’s personal website, no proxy here

okcupid.com – online dating (guess that’s a proxy for real dating…)

egogo.ru – an artist’s website

imaginarlo.com – they make a web-based msn client, not a proxy. see the above jabber.meta.net.nz listing for more arguments

icodeviruses.com – it’s a forum for people who write viruses. maybe put it in virusinfected

orcit.com – maybe it used to be, but now it redirects to the social networking site orkut.com

meandyou.weblogs.us – redirects to someone’s blog. it’s in farsi or something similar, but you can still tell it’s not a proxy

mikescreation.com – another normal website (created by mike…)

csthis.com – site run by some computer science group. couldn’t find a proxy on their, although it’s highly likely that they’ve discussed them at some point

craig-yvonne.celebrityblog.net – appears to be run by fans of craig yvonne (whoever that is). don’t see a proxy service anywhere

I can see how a couple of these could still be seen as proxy-like behavior (vaguely), but perhaps there should be a ‘bad’ proxy, a ‘good’ proxy, and maybe even a chat-proxy list.

Anyway, here’s the point. The failure rate on the sites I tested was almost 5% (4.56 actually), and I didn’t test every single site, just the ones that jumped out at me. That isn’t what I would call an acceptable rate of failure.

Seems there are 3 possible scenarios:
1. you’re not making enough money
2. you’re understaffed
3. you’re lazy

If it’s #1, sorry, I’m not rich, and I work for a non-profit college, so I can’t help out financially.
If it’s #2, I’ll offer this: Give our school free access to the lists, and I’ll commit (either myself, or one of our staff) to keep the proxy list clean by going through it every week or two (approximately 1 hour per week to justify the normal subscription cost). If you’re looking to hire someone part-time, just a couple hours a week is all I could offer, so I don’t know if that would be worth the bother (paper-work and all that).
If it’s #3, shame on you for taking people’s money and providing a shabby service.

I hope you continue to improve your service, and I wish you the best of luck in whatever course of action you take.