Great Firewall of China : Use this tool to find out if your site or blog is banned in China. WeblogToolsCollection is not. It is interesting to notice that the disclaimer states that some sites might simply not be available for techincal reasons which might have nothing to do with censorship. Some of the obvious culprits that I tried came back with mixed results. Source: Various WordPress.com blogs that seem to be blocked.
This is also a good time to mention that I am going to be visiting various cities in China and Japan at the beginning of December including Shanghai, Beijing and Tokyo and would love to meetup and exchange ideas and contacts with my readers and other WordPress users and bloggers while I am there. I will be posting dates soon.
Welcome to China! I am a long time WordPress user who lives in Guangzhou, China. Before this I lived in Los Angeles, California. So if you have any questions about China, I would be more than happy to help.
Yes, i am
Interestingly, but not surprisingly, http://greatfirewallofchina.org/ is blocked in China. It would be a useful tool for us over here as sometimes it’s difficult to tell if you are being blocked or there is some technical problem.
Hi Alex,
Your website isn’t blocked in Guangzhou. It is very slow though. 🙁
It is kind of funny how wordpress.com is blocked, but wordpress.org is not. 🙂
I am in China and I know http://greatfirewallofchina.org/ does not work for many sites. It shows false positives many times, trust me.
“China” does not block many sites, but many provincial telecoms do, so in one part of China you might find a site blocked, but in another it is fine.
Ironic that you mention this, because I noticed a hit from China in the last couple days. I admit, I was a bit surprised based on what I had heard in the past.
http://www.swollenpickles.com appears to be banned 🙁 can’t actually confirm whether it’s true or not since I’m not in china though.
I found that site a couple of weeks ago and posted about it. It would be interesting to see how accurate that site is?
That is because wordpress.com hosts a lot of blogs. WordPress.org only hosts software that can be used to create blogs that can be blocked.
I’m actually disappointed that my site isn’t blocked.
Dangit! Looks like my site is blocked in China….meh
A friend of mine in Chengdu, China told me my site was blocked a few weeks ago when we reconnected. I confirmed via this site. Must be all those times I mention the Dalai Lama!
The only site that seems to be blocked in Guangzhou, China is Dave’s. All the others can be seen fine here. 🙂
I too live in China, and one of the fun things about the GFOC is that it’s constantly changing. Sites which are blocked today are unblocked tomorrow, and vice versa. Add to that the sketchy nature of China’s infrastructure, and it’s anyone’s guess what will be blocked, and what’s simply unavailable.
I’ve been living in Shenzhen for about 1 year and have blogged our (wife & I) experiences using WordPress. I am a huge fan of WordPress. Feel free to drop us a line.
True, the filtering is by the telco’s own proxy servers and their ‘hot’ keywords.
Some pages you can open,some not under same domain due to this filter.
The results they provide is kinda rubbish as they have problems itself. My collegues in China tested it thru all networks for my clients to see if they are on the ‘safe’ list, and well, it’s safe, but the GFWOC test site says nope!Funny thing is, the sites I tested have a local presence in Beijing thanks to Singapore Telecom and Telekom Malaysia itself.
azrin @ http://www.azrin.net
I have used this tool before, their checking method isn’t very accurate, would falsely report some unblocked sites as blocked. For instance my site is accessible in China but is listed as blocked.
Google.com is blocked in China. How sad.
yes i have blocked.
http://www.swollenpickles.com is accessible for me in China. If the webmaster checks logs he/she will see my IP from here. What is a “swollen pickle”?!
Listen, not sure who is behind greatfirewall.org, but it ain’t accurate.
Welcome to China! I am a long time WordPress user who lives in Guangzhou, China. Before this I lived in Los Angeles, California. So if you have any questions about China, I would be more than happy to help.
Yea! I’m not blocked. But, considering all of the things I write about immigration, I’m surprised.
My weblog is blocked in China. :'(
Hello Mark,
my blog isn’t banned too!!! 🙂
have a nice weekend
all the best
Hi, dandyna! Your weblog is not blocked in China. I can reach it without problem from Shanghai. May be its just another false positive at greatfirewallofchina.org. //cheers.
Hmmm , heard of such thing , seems like they want to hawe theyr internet safe , they have strict rules in china , so probly they don’t want theyr internet comunity poluted with illegal stuff etc …
It appears I’m blocked in Red China. Maybe because I call it Red China.
Affirmative.
Welcome to China 🙂 Hope u will have a good time in China, people here are warm hearted to foreigner friends.
BTW, not Chinese goverment ban the sites, most of them are banned by China Telecom, biggest isp in China 🙁
I hate them but have no choise though
It seems to be getting worse these days. Several free hosts are blocked, including WordPress.com. What’s more disturbing, personally, is how normal all this is becoming.
Blogspot blogs are intermittently blocked/unblocked.
Wordpress.com sites are ususually inaccessible too.
Same goes for livejournal nowadays too.
There doesn’t seem to be any consistent criteria though, I expect that the internet nannies in the CCP are likely just sitting around drunk rolling dice…
🙂
Fortunately my website http://thinkabdul.com is not blocked in China including the one on web censorship -http://thinkabdul.com/2006/02/26/bypassing-company-proxies-and-filters/ which was featured on BoingBoing. Surprisingly, BoingBoing is blocked.
My blog, arsgeek, seems to be banned in China. Or at least, in certain parts of China. The GFoC program shows it as banned, however I know folks in Guangzhou can see it.
Ah! Mine is not banned… phew!
Interesting – but all of my sites that i tested all were blocked :(.
Here is another site which is accessbile from China and where you can test if your website is blocked in China: http://www.websitepulse.com/he.....-test.html .
It tests from multiple cities in China
Hey , I am in Beijing, China. Feel free to contact me via my gmail.
I am looking forward to your visit 🙂
My experience is, that in Beijing sometimes all wordpress.com blogs are blocked. However sometimes you can get access to the text but not the pictures. Last time wordpress.com was blocked the entire week I spend in Beijing.
Ouch I didn’t get to test mine.. seems like greatwallofchina.org is down ATM
Well my site must be that banned I cant even check wether Im banned I get this ……Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access / on this server.
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Apache/2.2.0 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.0 OpenSSL/0.9.8d DAV/2 PHP/5.1.6 Server at greatfirewallofchina.org Port 80