My friend from china has a problem not being able to see the captcha.. And thus not being able to vote.
Thats the main reason I agree adding a Captcha at the voting page is not good. While yes you stop the few people who were automating the voting process you make it impossible for people behind filters like China not being able to vote. And using before anyone mentions use VPN, VPN is a not a permanent solution because they could be sharing their ip with others using a VPN and VPNs themselves are used a lot to evade bans and multiple account voting.
The problem with that is if they are not able to see the captcha and not vote, they would not be able to vote for us on the gtop100 site either, meaning there is no chance for us to get their vote anyway unless gtop100 decides to change their own captcha again.
While in China I have personally used up most of the free trial VPNs that have not been blocked by the government, and I have only been here for 2 weeks (early this year there was a huge crackdown on VPNs after an environmental viral video on baidu). Examples: Astrill, Strong, Vyper. (All others are blocked - at least most). Therefore I don't think its possible for me to vote without purchasing a permanent VPN from providers such as Astrill/StrongVPN (15 dollars/month), since I'm going to be in China for a whole academic year. Astrill/Strong are known VPNs in China since they release constant updates to battle the Great Firewall of China, but recently with the huge crackdowns, even they have problems. (Browsed Reddit for 5 hours in the China subreddit for solutions, tried various programmes such as Amazon EC2, etc)
Does your college not provide you with a VPN? I know NYU Shanghai provides its students with one to use, really not sure about other places tho.
The Chinese college I'm currently at does not provide one (BNU), however my English College does. (But it is used as a VLE, basically to save files to the database so you can access your files anywhere).
I always wondered why the voting page on the website isn't linked to the user account control panel. If you make it so you can only vote if you're logged into the website under the account that you wish to receive NX on, you could dispense with the captcha. As an added bonus, user doesn't have to type in the account name, just click on the "vote" button.
I got recommended Epic Browser from a few international friends that study in China, i'm going to finish downloading it soon, apparently it's just a proxy browser so it should allow voting. I'll update later zzz unfortunately it's not a VPN, so I won't be able to use it to access maple *-*
Took a while to actually load the maple royals webpage (for me), but epic browser seems to work - voted last night and received 8k nx. There are clients on MAC and Windows. It's essentiallly just an Internet browser, that is kinda like tor(?) it browses through a different IP, allowing you to vote. (However I'm not sure how trustworthy it is with your private information - so I don't want to be held liable if anything goes wrong). Personally I will be using this browser till I can afford a VPN subscription with AstrillVPN (they have a 7 day free trial if anyone wants to try it out).
This is a much cheaper VPN provider allowing you to choose from a wide variety of countries to connect from. https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/buy-vpn/ I use it for anonymous browsing as well as for watching videos that have country restrictions on them.
Unfortunately small VPN providers such as those get rkt by the great firewall of China. As my first post mentioned, earlier this year a huge viral pollution video broke out in China, and as a result most normal VPN providers do not work/load in China. (This includes the website, download link and the actual VPN). Only the VPNs that have special China services or target the Chinese market will work, and even then you will still have problems. (Can't even load the link you sent me, I could download it using a different VPN but it most likely won't work, if it did then it would have been posted in the Chinese subreddit). I recommend if anyone is going to get a VPN in China then you should thoroughly research on sites such as Reddit if anyone in China has any experience with the VPN in question to avoid wasting money, customer reviews are the best reviews. Most people on the Chinese subreddit use Astrill (Stealth mode), strongvpn or vypervpn. Especially since they are always the first to tackle any problems that China throws at them, and they have brilliant customer service.
You might perhaps have noticed that Gtop100 recently changed from using Google's reCAPTCHA to using FunCaptcha instead. In light of this we have implemented a fallback to a non-Google captcha service on our end so that players behind unpleasant firewalls may vote, since they are now able to legitimately do so once we send them over to Gtop100. Edit: Gtop100 moved back to reCAPTCHA, it seems.
