hey,

anyone else, especially in China, having problems connecting to and using skritter? All other sites seem to load perfectly fine. I mentioned some of it to the makers but they couldn't find any problems so just as you guys.

Skritter.com's practice does not load today at all. sometimes even the whole site (server does not respond or server not found errors). No problems before though.

appspot loads better, but not perfectly,asking me to log in after some reloads, but actually just taking me to the login option screen in stead of logging me in (since i　am still logged in). Also often loads without the layout, so everything is in one vertical column.

When I can practice, i get stuck very often, usually (98 percent) on 维权。

So if you have problems or know a solution, please let me know so I can stop going crazy.

Yes, I often can't load it from China either. Today it's not working at all again.

Try going through a VPN? Sometimes SSL connections are less traffic shaped etc.

http://www.strongvpn.com

(That's just a random site I googled btw, there'll be plenty others!)

If you don't know what a VPN is, it lets you have a secure connection to another computer (say in the US or Europe), so accessing websites would be as if from that country.

Of course, if your connection in China is just awful, it may not help...

I did get some slowdown today though I find that different sites don't work with different ISPs (e.g. when I go to Starbucks).

Same here. From Chongqing - China. Cannot connect and/or huge slowdown.

I have a vpn subscripition actually, didn't try it today though, as even using my vpn i can't access many other sites sometimes. It is a very unstable experience.

I like to do many things at once so i can't afford to always change servers, switch on/off vpn etc..

Maybe change providers? In China I routed mine through my home PC in the UK, and (although slow at times) didn't have too many problems...

hm, so i must be blocked again in some way. What do these guys base their decision on? It usually works fine for me and then some days like earlier this week and today it seem to be blocked (I don't believe it's traffic since all my other things work fine).

I don't want to be too paranoid, but since it started when I had to practice 维权,defend (legal) rights, a few times,　one would start to believe that the meaning of skritter items could cause the internetcops to make it harder to access said site. Most probably not, but hey, stranger things happen here.

Here in Shanghai, I'm having problems as well (and it worked fine last week). But it doesn't behave like other blocked sites, so I'd attribute it more likely to a network problem.

It has been working for the couple hours with no problems just now for me in Shanghai. I do find that sometimes I'll be reading news and several pages on the site will go down for a while - it could very well be content-related (it gets flagged and someone takes a look and unblocks?) or it could just be network issues.

Hit the feedback button next time you can login and let the admins know you weren't able to connect for a day and they will add a day onto your subscription.

yeah i know, but it's not for that, besides they already gave me a lot extra because of one issue i mentioned. I am just frustrated that I can't practice and it isn't their fault either.

The website tester I use:
http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-test.html

It shows both www.skritter.com and skrit.appspot.com accessible from Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong. skrit.appspot.com is inaccessible from Guangzhou, though--a regional issue perhaps?

We will temporarily turn off the direct links from skrit.appspot.com and see if routing everything through www.skritter.com fixes things.

i get a connection reset on trying to open that link, haha

But did your Skritter connection behave any better?

How are connections from China today?

Not so good. I had to restart practicing quite a lot of times, because the flash applet would just hang after learning a few characters.

PS: Interestingly, with SwissVPN, it's not much better. And I can post to the forum just fine, it's the studying that somehow starts to hang more easily.

That's an unrelated bug, I think, that I uploaded last night. Not a connection problem but an obscure error in Flash.

Oh, okay, that explains the weird behaviour. I can reload the practice page easily, but after studying a few characters, it just stays at the three pulsating dots.

The problem seems to be solved today, thanks!

I recommend strongVPN, I use it while in China anytime I see strange loading behaviour. It works, it's fast, it's cheap.