# Wordreference practically unavailable in Russia



## Awwal12

Moderator note: The comment below was taken as a side note from a WR thread on another topic, along with the first response to it:

Wordreference seems to become practically unavailable in Russia without a VPN or similar means. Direct connection is extremely slow for both Rostelekom and Megafon, and pages don't properly load at all most of the time.

Other forums and sites beyond Runet don't seem affected by that, as long as they aren't explicitly blocked, of course.


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## bennymix

Awwal12 said:


> Wordreference seems to become practically unavailable in Russia without a VPN or similar means. Direct connection is extremely slow for both Rostelekom and Megafon, and pages don't properly load at all most of the time. Other forums and sites beyond Runet don't seem affected by that, as long as they aren't explicitly blocked, of course.


I do hope you manage to stay around, by one means or another.


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## mkellogg

Awwal12 said:


> Wordreference seems to become practically unavailable in Russia without a VPN or similar means


Hello, we made a change a few weeks ago to stop showing ads in Russia and a few other countries. Maybe that affected things.  Are you referring to the dictionaries or the forums or both?

Whatever the case, I will have someone get in touch with you to troubleshoot the problem.


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## Awwal12

mkellogg said:


> Hello, we made a change a few weeks ago to stop showing ads in Russia and a few other countries. Maybe that affected things. Are you referring to the dictionaries or the forums or both?


The forums. Curiously, the dictionaries seem to work just fine.


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## mkellogg

This is a little technical, but let's try it.

In Chrome, right-click the page and choose Inspect to load the DevTools. Click on the Network tab, then reload the forum page.

After the page finishes loading, are there any lines in red in the network tab? If so, tell me the domain name listed in the Domain column.  This might be the problem.


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## Awwal12

Well, the experiment suddenly revealed one thing: for some reason in Chrome on my PC the forum works fine *even without a VPN*. I had little chance to notice that as most of the time my Chrome runs with a VPN extension turned on, working as a side browser.
So the forum remains technically unavailable:
- on my PC under Firefox (100.0.1 64-bit);
- on my PC under IE (11.0.9600);
- on my smartphone under Chrome (94.0.4606.71);
- on my smartphone under Mi Browser (V13.2.2-go).


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## Awwal12

It seems it comes from some sort of interaction between the site, the VPN, the browser and, potentially, some intermediate blockings.

I've installed a VPN application on my smartphone and entered the forum with it on Chrome. Then I turned the VPN off... and still can use the forum on Chrome from my smartphone as well (but still not on Mi Browser). Mysterious. May be related to the cookies somehow, need more experimentation.


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## mkellogg

Can you see if other people are having this problem? Just send the link to friends and see if it takes a long time for it to load.

You might consider clearing the browser's cache. That might work or help us understand the problem.


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## Awwal12

Well, at the moment I can tell that two more fresh attempts to load the forum page from Russia yielded similar results:
- Chrome on a smartphone (MTS);
- Chrome on a PC (also Rostelekom).
The page may even actually load in a minute or two, but that's obviously... impractical.


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## TheIntricateWillows

Well, I hope that you can still access this resource. I know that the ongoing war is affecting Russians when it isn't exactly their fault.


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## mkellogg

Awwal12, is it still difficult to connect to the forums?


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## Awwal12

mkellogg said:


> Awwal12, is it still difficult to connect to the forums?


No, at least for me the problems have gradually disappeared.


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## mkellogg

Great.


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