I’m sure there are numerous self-hosted WP sites blocked in various countries. And I can find a lot who AREN’T blocked by China. My father’s domain works fine for him when he’s in China.
Show the client this: http://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/
You will not be blocked from China by virtue of using WordPress. You MIGHT be blocked it you post stuff they don’t like.
Thanks a lot. I knew this but I couldn’t find the right words to explain to the client.
I did some investigating and found that if you had content from say, YouTube or Flickr, the site itself will be blocked.
Wow, that is a totally weird way to go about it, China.
(And that doesn’t make sense… I have a lot of YouTube videos, and about 5% of my traffic is from China)
China or HK? In any case, I had some friends from shanghai confirm it too.
I did this:
– linked them to a post with a YouTube video and they couldn’t access it
– linked them to a post with no blocked content on it and they could access it
– linked them to the front page of a wordpress site with blocked content and they couldn’t access the front page
I also tried Just Ping http://www.just-ping.com/index.php to confirm our findings.
But again, my client isn’t a technical person and has only read that WordPress.com was blocked and therefore though self hosted solutions were blocked as well. I’m going to use what you wrote in the last sentence of your reply:
“You will not be blocked from China by virtue of using WordPress. You MIGHT be blocked it you post stuff they don’t like.” because I think that summarizes it just right without getting technical!
Huh. That’s weird. My stats show China proper. Eh. Nothing I can really do about it. Glad I helped 🙂
