Proxy Detection in Collaborative Docs: How Real-Time Co-Editing Betrays Users

Proxy Detection in Collaborative Docs: How Real-Time Co-Editing Betrays Users

Most proxy operators cut their teeth on web scraping, e-commerce automation, or bulk signups. They learn how to dodge basic IP bans, burn cookies, randomize headers, and even fake device entropy. Then someone hands them a real-time, collaborative doc workflow and asks for the same stealth—and that’s when the pain starts. Co-editing isn’t just a list of HTTP requests. It’s a streaming, bidirectional, millisecond-logged session, with every keystroke, cursor move, and field focus piped through event streams that were never designed for privacy. You’re not just sending packets. You’re singing your identity in real time, and the backend is recording the whole performance.

If you’ve never lost a proxy pool to real-time doc logs, you will.

What Actually Gets Logged in Collaborative Docs

Forget static requests. Collaborative docs—Google Docs, Notion, Office 365, Coda, Quip, whatever—are built for:

• Real-time event streams: Every keystroke, backspace, undo, selection change, and even cursor “hover” is logged as an event—often with wall-clock timestamp and user ID.
• Cursor presence and focus: Your live cursor’s position, its color or avatar, and even whether it moves “like a person” or “like a script.”
• Typing cadence: How fast you type, how often you pause, how many words per minute, and even the rhythm of edits (bursts, pauses, corrections).
• Field switching: When you leave one field, edit another, then return, all tracked by time and session.
• Collaboration graph: Who is in the doc at the same time, what IPs they’re coming from, what accounts are tied together by shared edits.
• Latency and lag: How fast your changes show up for others, whether you have packet drops, stutters, or sync issues.
• Conflict resolution patterns: When edits collide, do you resolve them like a human (wait, review, merge), or like a bot (immediate, unblinking overwrite)?

It’s not just the content you write—it’s how you write it, and how your “colleagues” show up and act.

Field Scar: The Night a Pool Died in Notion

We ran a pool for a data annotation gig—multiple accounts, multiple “locations,” every session piped through a rotating mobile proxy and unique browser context. Everything looked clean: device fingerprints randomized, mouse and keyboard noise layered in, timing varied, even the order of document edits switched up.

It worked for four days. On the fifth, one pool got shadowbanned. Then another. By the end of the week, every session was ghosted—no errors, just no new work, no pings, no human review. We got a friendly tip-off: “Your team doesn’t type like people. They move like ghosts.”

What flagged us? The docs were fine. The edits made sense. But the cursor “dance” was all wrong. Our bots typed in perfect, unbroken rhythm—no hesitation, no overlap, no “mistake and correct” entropy. The backends compared us to real teams and saw a group that was too clean, too coordinated, and too distant to be real.

The proxies hid our IPs, but our session dance gave us away.

How Detection Actually Flags Co-Editing Sessions

• Keystroke timings: Real users type in bursts, pause, make mistakes, go back, retype. Bots (or clean stacks) type with inhuman regularity—too fast, too slow, always the same.
• Cursor sync: Native users’ cursors appear, drift, and sometimes “lag” due to real-world latency. Proxy users (especially if running headless or remote) either never show up, or move with robotic precision.
• Account/IP graph: Even if each bot uses a different proxy, if the accounts always show up at the same time, in the same order, or from the same subnet pool, it’s an easy cluster.
• Session entropy: Humans leave and rejoin, sometimes go AFK, sometimes drop packets, sometimes get interrupted. Bots don’t—they’re always present, always “on.”
• Editing overlap: Real teams sometimes collide, edit the same paragraph, have to resolve in-app merge conflicts, or chat in comments. Bots avoid or “solve” conflict too perfectly.
• Presence artifacts: Most collaborative stacks log when you load, when you close, how often you refresh, and whether you “live” in the doc or just drop in for edits. Session length and presence patterns build a behavioral fingerprint.

If you ever wonder why your doc bots don’t get new work anymore, it’s probably not the content. It’s the ghost in your timing.

Why Proxies Alone Never Cover Real-Time Leaks

• Network lag is a tell: Real-time apps expect a certain “local” lag profile. Proxy hops—especially from faraway exits—add extra delay or even weirdly “perfect” latency. Either one can flag you.
• IP rotation breaks presence: Rotating proxies mid-session can kill your connection, make you “blink” in and out of the doc, or cause conflict errors. Native users don’t do this.
• Session cross-linking: Even if you rotate proxies, if your accounts are always the same group, at the same time, with the same workflow, the backend sees it.
• Headless ghosts: No mouse movement, no focus shifts, no accidental selects, no “getting lost” in the doc—bots or VMs leave a very obvious void.
• Copy-paste leaks: Bulk pastes, perfect formatting, or no spelling errors are another flag. Humans mess up, copy too much, or forget to format.

Proxies mask the route, but not the dance.

Pain Points—Where Co-Editing Pools Get Burned

• Bulk assignments: Pools that “solve” multiple docs with the same timing, order, or edit rhythm get clustered.
• Same subnet exposure: Even with rotation, if proxies come from the same ASN, the pool is still visible as a group.
• Scripted comments: Bots that “collaborate” by adding pre-written comments at set intervals—no real chatter, no delay, no messy back-and-forth.
• Doc churn: If every edit is in the same style, timing, and order, the backend sees an obvious bot cluster.

We once watched a group of accounts lose access overnight because they all “worked” 3-5am UTC—no human team, no real presence overlap.

Edge Cases—Stealth Fails You Never Expected

• Idle timing: Humans get distracted—sessions go idle, then wake up, sometimes minutes later. Bots rarely simulate this.
• Tab focus: Real users switch tabs, apps, or even lose connection. Session logs pick up these “gaps.” Bots are too smooth.
• Undo/redo: Real editing has a lot of mistakes—undo, redo, delete, retype, reformat. Bots are always correct, or “fix” errors the same way every time.
• Link previews: Real users sometimes hover links, preview images, or open reference docs. Bots never “look around.”

Every bit of “mess” is a survival feature. Clean is death.

What Proxied.com Had to Unlearn—and How We Live Now

We tried it all: IP churn, device rotation, browser entropy, humanized typing scripts. None of it was enough.

• Started using real people as a control group—logging typing patterns, focus shifts, session overlap.
• Built new bots to simulate “mess”—pauses, wrong edits, conflict collisions, comment chatter, idle breaks, even random refreshes.
• Forced field switching and doc hopping, never letting two bots run the same workflow twice.
• Injected errors, typos, fixes, and abandonments—sometimes a bot just bails, or “leaves” a session in the middle.
• Swapped proxy ASNs, mobile carriers, and even locations, never running a pool from a single country or backbone.
• Reviewed logs for cluster patterns—any sign of matching timing, order, or cursor movement meant the pool got torched.

Our best pools live short, messy lives. That’s the price of stealth.

Survival Playbook—Staying (Sort of) Alive in Real-Time Docs

1. Never script a perfect edit—inject mistakes, idle, and backtracking.
2. Make bots “fight”—let two edit the same line, resolve it like real people, even leave a merge conflict.
3. Vary typing speed, focus shifts, session length, and doc order.
4. Switch proxies, carriers, and countries—never from the same ASN or mobile region.
5. Mix human input and automation. If you can, have a real person “bless” the session by moving the mouse, typing, or adding a comment.
6. Accept that most pools will burn. Don’t get greedy—run short, small jobs, and churn fast.
7. Never let presence or edit rhythm cluster. If it starts to pattern, kill the pool and start over.

Stealth in collaborative docs is about being as messy as you are in real life. That’s the only thing that blends.

Field Scars—Burns You Never Want to Repeat

• Ghost team ban: Bots banned for never chatting, never making a mistake, never moving their cursors “off task.”
• Rhythm cluster: Pool flagged because everyone edited in the same order, with the same interval, every time.
• ASN dragnet: A single mobile carrier ran a whole pool—one ASN cluster got the group flagged as synthetic in three days.
• Headless invisibility: Accounts running in VMs or headless browsers never showed presence or cursor—silently ghosted after a week.

If you think a perfect session is safe, you haven’t read your own logs.

Proxied.com’s Live Playbook—Entropy and Abandonment

Today, we survive by maximizing entropy and letting pools die as soon as the rhythm gets stale. We treat every session as disposable. Human-like mess, churn, and loss are the cost of doing business in real-time docs. If you can’t live with failure, you won’t last a week.

Final Thoughts

Proxy detection in collaborative docs is the death of “clean” ops. The app doesn’t care about your IP—it cares about your rhythm, your dance, and your chaos. In 2025, you don’t win by being invisible. You win by being as messy, unpredictable, and unreliable as the rest of the world. Don’t let your bots look like ghosts—or your stack will die with them.