Nyaa now have an announcement on their page (may be hidden - you can check the source code if it doesn't show normally):


(nyaa.lol also redirects to the URL)

So I guess Nyaa is clamping down on proxy sites, their recommendation being to not use them.


My opinion / Rant

I don't buy their reasoning. Yeah, proxies can steal your information, give you malware, or strip you naked, tie you up and make you the laughing stock of the internet, just like any other website can. Heck, torrents on nyaa.si itself could be doing the same thing too.
The reality is that the vast majority of proxies don't do this - most of them will proxy the content and maybe inject some ads onto the page. It's likely that there's at least some which try to do something more malicious, as is the case with the internet in general, but as with anything in this domain, there's always some degree of user caution required, and I doubt their little blocking exercise will do much in the overall scheme.

Of course, their suggestions miss out some key reasons why people use proxies, such as those in restricted environments (i.e. no admin access to change DNS or install software), or something that can be conveniently shared with less technically inclined folk.

Speculation on my side, but this announcement feels more like a convenient excuse than the real reason.
Nyaa has historically blocked IPs that hit them too many times (has happened with AT's scraper despite throttling in place). This is understandable, as too many requests causes a lot of server load. Proxies somewhat get around this though, as Nyaa can no longer see the client's IP (assuming it's not being added in headers) and block excessive requests - they have to rely on the proxy to handle this.
Perhaps they had a case where a proxy didn't do this so well (let's just say, nyaa.lol perhaps?), caused some issues, and now they just don't want to have to deal with it again in the future. What's the easiest solution? Block them all, obviously.

This also lines up with their behaviour so far:
- last change to their code was over a year ago, and that includes not accepting any pull requests
- user registration and anonymous uploads have been disabled for many months, because they're tired of dealing with spam

Again, speculation on my side, but as someone who has watched many sites come and go (as well as experience it to some extent), these are obvious signs that the admins have started losing interest in maintaining the site. This won't have any obvious immediate effects (as can be seen for how long it's been going), but it will have an impact over the long term.

So they block proxies now, suggesting users use Tor/VPNs, and the one or two malicious proxies out there will just redirect their traffic over Tor/VPNs and continue with their business unaffected. But once malicious clients start flooding requests over Tor/VPNs, it doesn't take a genius to figure what'll be blocked next...

Anyway, I'm not here to chide or blame Nyaa staff in any way. It's their site, their direction and I don't think they owe anyone anything. However, considering their popularity, due to kids these days all congregating to a single place, their future developments are something worth keeping in mind. Just don't act all <surprised pikachu face> when Nyaa realises it's easier to take the site down than deal with all the hassles of maintaining such a site.

I think it was put there in early 2014.