From China.
I consider it’s should be a forum issue rather than my own, because i can visit other sites at same time.
I hope this is a good news, our user traffic on the forum has increased significantly?
I am browsing from Japan. I have not had any problems connecting to Crystal Forum recently.
Flagfox (Firefox extension) speculates that the server is located in Canada, but of course I do not know if this is correct.
Anyway, here’s an interesting map of submarine cables around the world, and although Crystal users are scattered all over the globe, they can communicate with each other thanks to the infrastructure.
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I wanted to write “they can communicate with each other”, but I noticed that LLM had translated it as the exact opposite, “they can’t communicate with each other”, so I have to fix it. Did AI want to say something? 
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In fact, we surpased the limit of 100k views/month and I’m always in fear that at some point Discourse will shut us down until we start paying the next tier 
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Scrap that, I looked again and there was a mistake in Discourse. Now it shows a bit more than 30k pageviews per month. I guess the marker for “you are surpassing your tier” was wrong (and it’s now fixed).
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The internet is a network of networks, and faults can happen anywhere and lead to all kinds of partial disruptions. Being able to reach a set of sites does not mean you can tell whether you would be able to reach any other site.
It’s entirely plausible that there could be some connectivity issues somewhere along the path between you and the forum server.
I’m not aware of any issues in general forum availability apart from what’s listed on https://status.discourse.org/
Please see following screenshot.
This issue happen on yesterday and the day before yesterday, connection was created, but very slow, finally result in timeout, will investigate for more details if happen again.
Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone can help you with this.
You’ll need to do some digging on your end to try to figure out what’s causing these connectivity drops. Could be related to your network configuration (DNS, proxy, VPN etc.), or outside of your control (e.g. network peering). Tracing the route to forum.crystal-lang.org could help to pinpoint where the connection fails.
This issue happen again
I start found this issue at 2024-11-08 04:20 UTC, forum start to work at 2024-11-08 04:25 UTC,
mtr output loss 94.4%
Following is the traceroute output compare for the first time (failed) and second time(success), but ignore all same part.
I don’t know how to trace this issue, the only reason I can guess is that the server was overload, causing a downtime, because at the same time, i can visit all others often visited site.
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Hi,
I think that Discourse is hosting not just the Crystal community forum but other communities as well on the same instances, which could lead to outages due to traffic or DDoS attacks.
I also noticed that https://status.discourse.org/ doesn’t show probes for APAC, South America, or Africa.
The HTTP headers suggest there’s no CDN like Cloudflare, and the site is served directly by Nginx.
The IP is from a Canadian hosting provider, Hurricane Electric LLC, so the issue could be with the hosting provider.
My trace for compare:
$ traceroute forum.crystal-lang.org
traceroute to crystal-lang.hosted-by-discourse.com (216.66.8.75), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 <removed>
2 <removed>
3 b-eh2-i.b.de.net.dtag.de (217.5.101.18) 7.546 ms 7.468 ms 7.301 ms
4 80.156.162.199 (80.156.162.199) 6.952 ms 6.819 ms 7.114 ms
5 bei-b3-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.112.90) 6.727 ms 6.600 ms 6.100 ms
6 * * ffm-bb2-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.136.76) 24.041 ms
7 prs-bb2-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.122.138) 28.362 ms * 28.626 ms
8 ldn-bb2-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.133.238) 32.148 ms 33.933 ms 33.911 ms
9 ldn-bb2-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.133.238) 38.592 ms
nyk-bb2-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.139.246) 112.137 ms
ldn-bb2-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.133.238) 37.775 ms
10 toro-b2-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.123.109) 174.695 ms 139.205 ms 126.434 ms
11 toro-b5-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.117.228) 184.600 ms
toro-b2-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.123.109) 130.687 ms *
12 unitasglobal-ic-376038.ip.twelve99-cust.net (62.115.42.43) 130.481 ms 121.780 ms 122.894 ms
13 router02.yyz.discourse.cloud (216.66.8.255) 124.538 ms 138.762 ms 121.512 ms
14 * * router02.yyz.discourse.cloud (216.66.8.255) 130.129 ms
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I’m asking out of curiosity, but what is the situation regarding access from China to Western SNS/media platforms such as Slack, Twitter, Element, Discord, and Reddit? Is it often the case that these platforms are inaccessible?
我出于好奇想问，从中国访问西方媒体平台，比如 Slack、Twitter、Element、Discord 和 Reddit 的情况如何？这些平台是否经常无法访问？
It’s not occasionally inaccessible, it’s always inaccessible.
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I see, so internet restrictions are stricter than I imagined. Can you access services like Qiita and Zenn in Japan? Where do you exchange information about IT in China?
I’ve used CSDN and Gitee.
I don’t know what these things are, most services outside of China require access through an proxy, even Github is inaccessible, although, visit Crystal forum no proxy needed.
if you said https://zenn.dev/ and https://zenn.dev/, both of them can visit without proxy.
Where do you exchange information about IT in China?
Specific forum? as crystal forum.
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There are a lot of Chinese engineers working on GitHub, so I’m a little surprised to learn that there are cases where GitHub cannot be accessed from China. What is the “proxy” you are talking about here? Do you need to sign up for a paid proxy server to access GitHub from China? Is this the same as what is called a VPN (Virtual private network)?
Most people probably use paid proxy service for visit website e.g. Github, they certainly need to log in, but there are also people like me, there’s is a linux VPS in Azure(Hong Kong) with a software like xray get deployed as a springboard, latter is more safe and less risks.
If you’re interested in how these work, you can look at my deployment script, client are typically deployed on a router or a side router.
Is this the same as what is called a VPN (Virtual private network)?
It can be used as a VPN, the main purpose is to bypass GFW.
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The trace you posted actually shows a 0% packet loss to the forum, the correct figure is at the bottom of the list. It doesn’t look too weird of a trace either. Are other forums hosted by discourse, i.e. https://try.discourse.org/ affected? In that case, please report this to discourse since we have no control over their network.
This is a post created two months ago, 
never meet visit issue recent days for our forum, i will do it next time.
Living in Japan, one notices that there is a large IT cultural sphere nearby that is clearly technologically advanced, but is hardly referenced in Japan, or even overseas. Weibo instead of Twitter, Zhihu instead of Reddit or Quora.
Many Japanese people, myself included, would not want to lose to China. In fact, the way the two countries think is completely different. However, while the Chinese are enthusiastic about learning technology on GitHub, even going so far as to use VPNs to circumvent the Great Firewall, we are not necessarily able to learn from China’s achievements.
The problem of Chinese people being unable to access the outside world from within GFW is always pointed out, but what about from the outside to the inside? For example, if there is good material or a forum about Crystal inside GFW, can you access it stably? Is it really them or us who cannot access it?
(This is a bit of a nitpick, but Chinese services often require your cell phone number, and once you register your phone number, it is likely leaked via a “friend” and you start receiving nuisance calls in Chinese from overseas, claiming to be from the “embassy” or the “Chinese police.” I always answer the phone and leave it alone, to deal a financial blow to these scammers, but it’s still creepy.)
(Google Translation)
You should always be able to access services within China, aside from speed and registration requiring a phone number.
if there is good material or a forum about Crystal inside GFW, can you access it stably?
Not exists, if it exists in the future, it’s most likely that I create it? AFAIK, there may be no more than 5 people who can speak Chinese in this forum.
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