Is FlyerTalk available in China without a VPN? I want to know if I can see FT if I am in China.

There's two issues to consider here

If FT is blocked by the "great firewall", and generally the answer is no. I say generally because the configuration of the firewall can vary slightly region to region, and it's not impossible for there be collateral damage where a block on something else impacts other web destinations, but generally the answer is no.

If the Cloudflare protection that Internet Brands employs to protect FT and the other fora they host, yes, sometimes. This is mainly done based upon IP reputation and other telemetry linked to abusive web traffic, and although we don't know the specifics we can observe that IB probably have the dial on this service turned up to near maximum. But it will also frequently blacklist IP addresses associated with many consumer VPN products, not that you're supposed to use those in China.

Generally the best advice for trouble free internet access in China is to use a roaming SIM card that depends on a reputable network - your traffic will be tunneled back to the SIM's home network and certainly the first and probably the second points above won't bother you.

FT works fine in China without VPN. I've been shut out less than five times over the course of 25 years!

FT works fine without VPN. However, Cloudflare doesn't like mainland IP address so sometimes the "check box" runs in a loop.

Yep. I'm being blocked at this moment by Cloudflare on both a direct connection from a Chinese ISP and on a VPN. Can connect to this site only by tunneling out on a non-Mainland sim.

That's odd, I recall having issues indirectly with googleapis.com being blocked so FT takes forever to load and times out.

Hmmm. Perhaps my lack of issues is due to the fact that I have the ad free version of FT.

How does one get the ad free version?

I think it's probably possible to pay for it, but I got mine through my ambassador designation, which is sort of like being a moderator without moderation powers or responsibilities toothless shark). I guess you could call it a token title, but I've always tried my best to help keep this forum orderly. That's not especially taxing in light of our low post//thread volume. I have been planning on trying to clean up some of the sticky posts (e.g. the most important threads thread is about 15 years out of date), and perhaps I will take on that task soon.

If you are interested in becoming an ambassador, pick an unmoderated forum that you enjoy and message a moderator.

The question is what ads? I've never seen any ads on FT.

If you use FT in a jurisdiction where they have to consent the use of nonessential cookies, and you refuse to consent non-essential cookies, in my experience you get no ads, rather than non-targetted ads.

Whilst I am not a seeking to get more non-targetted ads, I do use FT a fair bit, so out of fairness to IB I did point this possible gap in their handling of cookie consent to IBJoel a while ago, and didn't get any traction on it. As I'm happy with an ad free experience I am not going to poke the bear any further

I was in Mainland China in November and I seem to remember I could not access Flyertalk but I seem to remember my conclusion back then was it was not China that was blocking it.

In light of the fact I've NEVER had issues accessing the site while others have, I'm somewhat convinced that the ad servers are the root cause. Think about it, a single ad hosted by a censored company could prevent the site from loading. If that's true, I would say that China is doing the blocking. That having been said I'd like to think that IB is smart enough to steer clear of this obstacle.

I am in China right now and FlyerTalk works mainly ok behind the great firewall. The cloudflare �I am not a robot� box pops up regularly, sometimes needing two goes to pass through. And a few times access has failed completely - a few hours later it is ok again.