We've been getting a bunch of reports from people that www.skritter.cn is inaccessible or just really slow connecting from China from time to time, which kind of defeats the purpose of that domain to make Skritter accessible in China.

It appears to be due to the Hong Kong server we're using for www.skritter.cn, so we're going to try switching www.skritter.cn to the same proxy server www.skritter.com uses, with www.skritter.cn still using the same mechanism to bypass the GFW's blockage of Google App Engine.

In the meantime, and in case www.skritter.cn doesn't work for some reason during the migration, I've set up ios.skritter.com as a backup. If you're in China, try using ios.skritter.com and let us know if the performance is better than you've experienced lately with www.skritter.cn. Thanks!

Thanks! I'll give a report in a couple hours when I log on for my regular study, but if it improves the performance of the .cn address, I'm all for it.

I still don't understand why www.skritter.com doesn't work properly here, it's not as if we're anti-China around here, and it doesn't take business away from Chinese sites, so what gives?

.cn always works fine for me

in southern china

.cn also have not given me any problems yet, but I use it very seldom when I am not Skrittering on my own computer. I use n proxy permanently on my notebook and use the .com site.

Just got done with an evening's Skritter session on the .cn address. It wasn't perfect, but the delays were relatively rare and short - miles ahead of yesterday when I couldn't study four items without a delay of several seconds and up to a minute.

We just did the switch over a few hours ago, and the propagation should be complete by this time tomorrow (www.skritter.cn should point you to 96.126.192.247 now). I did a quick check and looks like it works fine, but let us know if you see any issues.

@FatDragon: the reason it's partially blocked is because we're on Google App Engine. All GAE apps are served from the same IP address, technically, only differentiated by their domain names. To go directly to our site, you'd go to write-way.appspot.com, for example (except that we have you automatically redirected to www.skritter.com). But since the IP address is shared with every other app, if any one of them is blocked, we're all blocked.

So to get around that, we use a reverse proxy. It's the server that actually responds to www.skritter.com. The reverse proxy takes your requests, passes them on to write-way.appspot.com, gets the response and returns that. This way you're only interacting with our proxy, so we effectively have a different IP address from the other GAE apps, and sidestep the blockage.

However, it's not as fast to go through the proxy as directly fetching from appspot.com, and making your webpage snappy is important. So we have the initial HTML go through the proxy, but all the resources, like images, css, javascript, etc, are fetched directly from appspot. But, if appspot is inaccessible, you don't get those resources, just the bare web page. So www.skritter.cn instead has everything proxied. If you look at the source for a www.skritter.com, you'll see all the resources point to write-way.appspot.com, while for www.skritter.cn, all the resources point to www.skritter.cn. So www.skritter.com is faster, but www.skritter.cn is more durable.

But for some reason the server we have in Hong Kong is having trouble being accessed from parts of China from time to time as well. So we're hoping our server here in the states ends up being more accessible than the Hong Kong one. Give it a try tonight and see if you notice any difference as well.

Funny, I always thought it was because some people were studying Chinese words that threw up a red flag with the censors!