Timeouts within mainland China

[Jeremy_Williams (Jeremy)]

Our Discourse site appears to be timing out from within mainland China after about 30 seconds. The browser gives up and reports that the connection has timed out. Has you seen this issue before and is there any way to resolve this issue?

[supermathie (Michael Brown)]

We see frequent complains about this, both for self-hosted and sites we host.

This is almost definitely the work of China’s Great Firewall:

Great Firewall

I (speaking personally) would suggest that your users use a VPN to bypass the firewall.

[Jeremy_Williams (Jeremy)]

Thanks Michael, this was our suspicion as well. Are their any typical suggestions for getting around this that wouldn’t be considered offensive to the PRC?

[supermathie (Michael Brown)]

There’s some suggestions for this already on meta, I would recommend searching and going through the results.

For example:

Our Discourse is blocked by The Great Firewall of China, any tips?

Discourse itself, as a general technology, doesn’t appear to be on any permanent blocklists. In my experience, the key to not getting a given site blocked by the GFoC is to not piss off the Chinese Government. That means: Don’t have any talk about Falun Gong, criticism of the regime, or similarly politically controversial topics on your site. Don’t compete with anything run by a Chinese company. Mirroring of content to anywhere else outside of China is unlikely to last long, as they’ll fin…

@Jeremy_Williams

wouldn’t be considered offensive to the PRC

Unfortunately I suspect any recommendation other than “behave well and hope you don’t get quietly blocked” would be offensive to the PRC.

[schleifer (Andrew Schleifer)]

The GFW uses a few different methods of blocking, but the most common is by blacklisting IP addresses. If your content is not something specifically disapproved by the censors, then you may be on an address or in a netblock that was blocked previously. Changing your IP or hosting may help.

If you don’t have HTTPS enabled, then do so, as that will bypass the naive keyword blocking that sometimes happens. Also, do you use a CDN for assets? Many are heavily throttled or outright denied. Enabling Google Analytics is another possible cause.

[hawm]

Is your domain be blocked? If yes, change your domain, no other options.
Is your IP be blocked? Contact your provider to change IP or deploy your site behind the CDN which not be blocked by the GFW. Some provider most IP is blocked, so you need to change to a new provider.

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Enabling Google Analytics is another possible cause.

Google Analytics isn’t blocked.

[Jeremy_Williams (Jeremy)]

We attempted to create a new domain name and then CNAME over to the site but that didn’t seem to have any affect.