My biggest frustration while browsing in China was reCAPTCHA. Most websites would load fine, but then they would detect that I was in a new location and this would trigger their account protection bullshit and ask me to complete a reCAPTCHA that...wouldn’t load. This happened ALL THE TIME and is just excruciating.

Sometimes there wouldn’t even be UI that would load to indicate something was wrong. Logins would just fail with cryptic messages.

Because they probably hadn't written specific error messages for "half the auth packets came back destroyed or missing".

IMHO good advice even when you're not looking specifically at China.

I know some enterprise environments are, not surprisingly, not too fond of 3rd-party scripts, and their firewalls could be nearly as bad too.

The Decentraleyes Firefox extension alleviates this somewhat as it caches popular things like jquery (that are often hosted by Google) locally on your device, making foreign websites load quicker.

> - Stop using Google fonts

I think we can avoid Google font CDNs for fonts but we can use them from our assets i.e download the font and use it from your assets instead of Google CDN.

You can still use them, but a different URL. Google has a CDN in China for those fonts and stuff. Also Google Analytics are not blocked at all in China.

Is the CDN different for fonts?

How about Recaptcha?

My bad, what I really meant is: What are the suitable replacement for Recaptcha?

I'm thinking that generally it works but the other night during the nightly internet apocalypse I had to disable it all to use my own site.

Will have to double check...

yep, during the day you don't really notice cause VPNs work etc but once it gets to night, everything stops working

does not load

you are absolutely right.

Stackoverflow use Google CDN. The one to be blamed is the chinese GFW. but it will be much better if they do not use google service. Maybe they do not bother to serve user in china.

I avoid these 3 for every website. I want to be in control of what my website delivers and who can trafk my users

Google Analytics is OK. It doesn't affect performance very much.

Only if the vanilla analytics product without any adwords or partner scheme options (i.e. coming from google-analytics.com rather than anything coming from Google.com). Plus it could disappear on a whim (as did Bing for a couple of days last month), so unless the use-case is unavoidable, why not self-host?

I'm always surprised how Golang got so popular in China in such environments.

well. lot of programmers in china know how to use the internet "scientifically" (科学上网）, which means "use VPN".

PS: VPN is a blocked keyword, so we say "use internet scientifically"