Not sure if this is the case for others, but I've been getting routed to Skritter.cn if I click on the link in the top left corner, or if I type in Skritter.com.

I have a bookmark for my own home page, and it comes to the .com version, but I find it strange for the other links to take me to .cn - if I end up in .cn and then pop into the forum, it seems me as unregistered. Naturally, I'm in China with this happening. Any chance the Skritter team can do something about this, or is it just one of those things that is what it is?

Yeh, I think it's set to do that as it does the same thing to me. What I did was log into the forum which will load using .com and logged in on the .cn - then at least I stayed logged in on both if I was switching back and forth.

The reason it's that way is that we want people who are entering the site for the first time to go to www.skritter.cn if they are in China. In general our proxy at .cn is better able to handle the firewall than .com. It may also be faster for people in China.

However, we know some people in China might prefer to use .com instead of .cn, so we only have the redirect for http://www.skritter.com/, so the redirect can be avoided.

We could see if we can set something up so that cookies across these two domains are shared. That would probably slow down the user's experience though, going through redirects, and might have more people hit the firewall.

As mcfarljw says, you can sign into either or both domains. In the end it's the same backend really, it's just the data is served differently depending on which server you use.

I might also suggest putting your bookmark to:

http://www.skritter.com/home

If you're not signed in, that should redirect you to the login page, so you won't hit the front page where you'll get redirected.

That's already my bookmark, so it's only a problem if I click the Skritter logo or try www.skritter.com. It's not a big issue, just something I noticed, and I wondered whose decision it was, the team's or the GFW's. If .cn is actually faster for in-country types, I might give it a run.

Functionally, is there anything different between .com and .cn? I've always felt like .cn had some pages in their older versions, but that might be based on the fact that I'm not used to the landing page, especially with all the red that kind've clashes with the site's general color scheme. Or that Nick's haircut in that picture gives me strong flashbacks to 1993...

Nope, my hair is the same no matter what country I'm in. skritter.cn uses a Hong Kong proxy and loads all resources from it to avoid the firewall; skritter.com uses a California proxy and loads most resources directly from App Engine for speed. You'd have to try both and see which works better for you.