Looks like the Great Firewall or something like it is preventing you from completely loading www.skritter.com because it is hosted on Google App Engine, which is periodically blocked. Try instead our mirror:

legacy.skritter.cn

This might also be caused by an internet filter, such as SafeEyes. If you have such a filter installed, try adding appspot.com to the list of allowed domains.

Poll section not loading in the home page

gattosilvestro   June 20th, 2009 10:10p.m.

I'm now in mainland china.
When I load the home page, it stops for a long time, more than a minute, trying to retrieve information from modpoll.com. After that it loads the twitter poll. If I submit my choise it shows the Loading... message for long time, trying to send information to www.modpoll.com, until the browser advises that the time is over.

Today is the first time I can see a poll in the home page. Before today, when the home page took too long to load, I just switched to the practice page, so I don't know if the poll section could be loaded.

Is it something related with the great firewall?

nick   June 20th, 2009 10:32p.m.

Yes, modpoll, the server for the poll, is also running on App Engine, but hasn't worked around the GFW. I realized this yesterday and uploaded a tweak today to load the initial resource from their appspot version, but if they can't work around it, I'll have to code up my own poll widget. Which won't be too bad. It should be a relatively simple fix for them, though.

Hopefully, we'll have it resolved soon. If not, I'll nix the polls so the home page will finish loading from China.

faceleg   June 20th, 2009 11:46p.m.

try JS-Kit polls?

http://js-kit.com/polls/

gattosilvestro   June 21st, 2009 4:06a.m.

Thanks for the answer, nick.
BTW I will move to South Korea on Tuesday. I will participate to the polls from there.

百发没中   June 21st, 2009 4:16a.m.

I don't know whether that has now already been tweaked but whenever I relog into Skritter, I can take the poll again. As a rule I don't because I don't want to let my vote count that many times....but I am curious about what the result is sometimes and to see that I need to give another answer.....

nick   June 21st, 2009 10:38a.m.

The poll is cookie-based, so if you switched browsers or computers, it doesn't remember. I think JS-Kit polls, though they look nice, would do the same thing.

Maybe I'll make it fun by seeing how fast I can make our own poll thing that uses Skritter accounts. Can't do it quite yet, though.

董伴-Dǒng Bàn   June 21st, 2009 11:39p.m.

I have voted like 10 times. Every day I log-in, it asks me the poll questions. Sometimes multiple times per day. Is this a Chrome issue?

ZachH   June 22nd, 2009 2:02a.m.

ditto. I'm also using chrome.

mmx   June 22nd, 2009 4:10a.m.

Same here but I'm using Firefox.

I have found out that this problem only exists when my browser is configured not to accept third-party cookies which makes sense if this module is being loaded from a different server.
I would not mind this behavior if I were still able to see the results without voting again.

Another thing I noticed is that you can click on the heading of the poll-box (which takes you to "http://www.skritter.com/polls") but this page does not exist.

nick   June 23rd, 2009 10:09p.m.

Okay, okay, the old polls were too sucky to bear. I have made a new one and it is much better.

We'll redo the old polls with the new system in the next couple weeks.

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