Trouble accessing Chinese-forums in Mainland China with VPN?

[gato]

Are people experiencing problems? Please take a vote.

I've had trouble getting on from Shanghai without VPN for at least the last months. It's been on and off (maybe half the time I need VPN). For example, it's not accessible without VPN at the moment.

[icebear]

I usually load much faster without a VPN.

[roddy]

For what it's worth....

 

1) I'm seeing no widespread drop off in visitor numbers from China. 

2) Loading speeds from China ARE slow. Slower in fact than they are from Russia or Kenya or Ghana or Kazakhstan, but faster than Rwanda and Nigeria. That's the kind of league we're in. Move over the border to Hong Kong and you speed up by a factor of 4. 

[gato]

I should clarify that the question in this thread is not about speed, but whether the site can be opened at all without VPN or proxy.

On the other hand, the site has been more accessible since I posted the question, so thanks, whoever you are

[self-taught-mba]

Hi Roddy, I went and searched out this form because I'm having pretty bad issues loading right now. It's almost unusable. Trying to send a message wouldn't go through and then I finally found that it has been posted four times. I'm using Google Chrome and often says that it's trying to establish a secure connection. Switching on and off the VPN doesn't seem to be of much use. On the positive side, this has forced me to join the 21st century and download tapatalk. It's a little bit better, but I had to keep refreshing just to get the list of the threads in the subform.

[roddy]

Tip from icebear - check your VPN is actually handling traffic for this site.