nciku down?

[tai4ji2x]

currently back in the states, and recently (past week or so? don't remember the last time i used it before then, could've been a month or more) nciku.com and nciku.cn seem to show up as invalid domains. i'm using verizon fios. anyone else have any luck?

[Koxinga]

Both .com and .cn work (and worked) for me. Maybe you should try to use a different DNS server. OpenDNS is quite good.

[Eranee]

Both seem to be working fine for me. hmmm!!

[roddy]

Any chance you had a VPN turned on? I'm finding a lot of requests to Chinese servers from my VPN (Witopia) are getting blocked - turn the VPN off and it's fine. I would have thought Nckiu would be hosted outside China, but just tried with and without the VPN, and sure enough it didn't work with it on.

[Guest realmayo]

Both .com and .cn were down for me yesterday and still are today, I'm in the UK.

[roddy]

Hmmm, can't get it with ISP DNS, can get it with Google's.

[Guest realmayo]

If by that you mean you can get it by clicking on a link returned by a Google search (?), well, I can't.

[roddy]

Nope. You could try these instructions.

[Guest realmayo]

Oh I see. Well, I can live without nciku, found jukuu.com yesterday which was a fine alternative for my purposes.

[googed]

It's been down several times a day for the past few weeks now. I'm looking for a good alternative myself.

[daofeishi]

I use http://www.iciba.com as an alternative whenever nciku is down.

[Manuel]

Broadly speaking I haven't had much luck with nciku since I came to China. When it works it's a great source of example sentences. However, the handwriting recognition tool is irritatingly sluggish. I am also often unable to access the the website at all. Today the website is genuinely down for maintenance, as is the case today, but some times I can access it only via proxy because either our friends the censors or the primates who run IT in my school routinely limit bandwidth and randomly block and unblock websites. We already had a dispute last year over random and severe limiations that were being imposed to get us to sing up to China Mobile to obtain a more reliable service. As it turned out, the school had a cheeky agreement with China Mobile to get comission for every student that signed up. Eventually about 50 of us started to complain about this and exposed the dirty landry, which resulted in the limitations being lifted and a couple of greedy individuals in the International Students Office being very embarrased.

Thanks Daofeishi for recommending iciba, I wasn't aware of it but I've just checked it out and it was both fast and useful. For example sentences I usually turn to Google, Baidu or even Taobao (reading product descriptions is a great source of vocabulary). For handwriting recognition I find that nciku was too sluggish to be usable, so I use Sogou's built in handwriting recognition, which is just a tiny .exe that will run stand-alone if you don't want to use Sogou input method.

[Tiana]

I don't seem to be able to access nciku.com in the last week or two. I wonder if it's gone or it's just my connection or me.

Will appreciate it if someone could try it and let me know. I'm in the UK.

Thanks,

[li3wei1]

I'm getting it fine, also in the UK

[liuzhou]

Working fine here in China - with or without VPN.

[Tiana]

Thank you for replying.

I've got no luck. I've cleared the cache but still no luck.

My browser is IE8 and I don't know if this has to do with it in any way.

Only when nciku is unavailable, it's worth is appreciated

[AucklandLove]

I could not access it two days ago when doing my homework, very annoying. It works today though (from Beijing) without VPN.

[tominchina]

sometimes yes sometimes no, I'd also like an answer to this one. I don't have a vpn here so its not that for me.

[roddy]

FWIW, I can get .com, but not .cn. In the UK. I notice on their blog they've recently shut down services to reduce server load - if their hosting is struggling then it wouldn't be too surprising if you can't get their site sometimes.

[Tiana]

I think it has to do with my internet connection. I could not connect to nciku via my main bt broadband line but I've just now tried the free "bt wifi", I access nciku ok. What this means is I'll have to switch internet connection every time I want to use nciku. It's a pain...!

Updated: Having been able to access, I now can access normally via bt broadband. So it seems that the connection is made through the cache. This is the message for the problem I had: dns error