Best practice for dealing with banned countries

[Jeffrey Rosen]

I have been getting quite a few emails claiming that I have blocked their country, with screenshots attached like the following: http://i.imgur.com/irVNQ.png

What is the best practice for dealing with this?  The error page is very cryptic and off-putting for the user.  Is it possible to customize it?  Is there an official Google page I can send people to to explain why the user's country is "forbidden"?

[Ikai Lan (Google)]

I don't know of an official page, but Google App Engine applications are subject to U.S. Customs laws regarding electronic exports. More likely than not, your customers are attempting to access the page from a country that we cannot legally serve. Do you know what country?

--

Ikai Lan 
Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine

Blogger: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com

Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/appengine

Twitter: http://twitter.com/app_engine

On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 1:18 PM, Jeffrey Rosen <jef...@gmail.com> wrote:

I have been getting quite a few emails claiming that I have blocked their country, with screenshots attached like the following: http://i.imgur.com/irVNQ.png

What is the best practice for dealing with this?  The error page is very cryptic and off-putting for the user.  Is it possible to customize it?  Is there an official Google page I can send people to to explain why the user's country is "forbidden"?

--
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[Jeffrey Rosen]

The few I have gotten recently have been from China and Iran.

That's ok if it is illegal to serve pages to those countries.
However, it would be much better to have a descriptive error message,
for example:

"Google App Engine, the web host for this site, is not legally allowed
to serve web visitors from China under United States electronic export
laws. We apologize for the inconvenience."

That would explain to the visitor what is going on in a much more
clear and less offensive way, I think.

On Nov 3, 11:02 am, "Ikai Lan (Google)" <ikai.l+gro...@google.com>
wrote:

> > google-appengi...@googlegroups.com<google-appengine%2Bunsubscrib e...@googlegroups.com>
> > .

[风笑雪]

There are nothing can Google do. The GFW of China has hijacked the ip
of ghs.google.com, so the Chinese users even can't reach Google's
sever.

----------
keakon

> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-appengi...@googlegroups.com.

[Jan Z/ Hapara]

Proxies are your friend here, assuming you can deal with the
architecture and the traffic volumes.

We have users in Iran and China coming across their own and our
proxies...

J