SOCKS5 Proxy Servers

You didn't do anything wrong—Chrome has never supported SOCKS5 authentication. It's a documented Chromium limitation (bug 1309413): the browser silently drops the credentials, and proxy extensions can't add them either. Two ways around it: use IP whitelisting instead — at PapaProxy.net, it's the primary access method, so once your IP is in the Dashboard, Chrome connects with no credentials at all — or use Firefox, the only major browser that supports SOCKS5 credentials natively.

On a Mac it's built in: System Settings → Wi-Fi → Details → Proxies → SOCKS proxy — enter the address and port, and it applies system-wide. On an iPhone there's no native option: iOS Wi-Fi settings only accept HTTP and HTTPS proxies, and entering SOCKS5 details there just kills the connection. Use an app that routes device traffic through a local tunnel — Shadowrocket or Potatso — or the built-in proxy support in specific apps (Telegram, for example, lets you enter a SOCKS5 server directly in its settings). One more mobile-specific detail: your carrier IP changes as you move, so when the connection drops, update the whitelisted IP in your Dashboard — it takes about a minute and doesn't require a support ticket.

Usually it's DNS, not the proxy. Many programs resolve the hostname locally first and only then connect to the SOCKS5 proxy IP address and port — so every DNS query still goes out through your own ISP. The fix is remote resolution: in curl use --socks5-hostname (or a socks5h:// URL), in Firefox enable "Proxy DNS when using SOCKS v5", and Chrome always resolves through the proxy on its own. If DNS is clean and a site still flags you, check WebRTC — browsers can expose the real IP through it regardless of proxy settings; antidetect browsers disable it by default.

They solve different problems. A VPN encrypts all of your device's traffic and routes it through one server — good for privacy on public Wi-Fi, but you get a single IP for everything. A SOCKS5 proxy changes the IP for one specific application and adds no encryption of its own — though since most of the web runs over HTTPS, your sessions are already encrypted between your machine and the destination site; the proxy only sees where the traffic goes, not what's inside. For scraping, multi-account management, and automation the proxy model wins: you can run hundreds of IPs in parallel and route each tool separately, which a VPN can't do.

Not by default. UDP associate is a plan add-on: it's enabled with the UDP toggle at checkout and adds 50% to the package price. Web traffic, scraping, messaging apps, and anything else running over TCP work without it, so most customers never need the option. If your workload involves gaming, voice, or video streaming, enable the add-on — the details and setup notes are on the UDP proxies page. The same applies to torrent clients: DHT, magnet links, and udp:// trackers silently fail without UDP support — if qBittorrent hangs at "downloading metadata" through a proxy, a missing UDP associate is usually the reason.