Stopped lurking because of this issue. I'm a foreigner living in Korea, so the site is blocked for me as well, though free VPNs easily bypass the issue.
To explain the situation, e-h.g was blocked by most all Korean ISPs ages ago by government order and ex was, for a little while, a safe haven or last bastion for koreans looking for doujins, after several translation groups were issued police summons after their work which they hosted on their own blogs and servers was somehow considered "production of illicit materials" despite that they were only translating text. The sudden influx of Korean translations on the galleries is because of that and because Korean censors were unable to bypass the sadpanda image that displays for people not in the know of how to get in for a long while.
Yesterday at approximately 10PM Japan time, ex was blocked by the South Korean censors for anyone living on the peninsula with the exception of one ISP, Korea Telecoms or KT, though that's not likely to continue as the blocking is ordered by the government who has an agenda against pornography.
As to why pornography is being blocked, there was a case a few years back where a man was charged with raping (and if I remember correctly) killing a child. He then went on to blame pornography. Sex crimes were the next hot thing on the news for a short period after that. Incensed by this, various lobbyist groups in South Korea including the Women's & Childrens' Rights board and fundamentalist Christian groups pushed to have pornography banned under the grounds that it makes men into rapists. Though this is all despite the fact that the prostitution business is more than thriving here. More info regarding the block available here: [
www.usatoday.com]
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2...a-porn/1758277/Sites that have been blocked include fakku.net, danbooru.donmai.us, konachan, "normal" 3d porn sites, and others. The amount keeps rising. The funny thing is, is that the blocking is initiated by parents or people actively searching the web for porn to report to an "internet police". It's rather safe to assume that some idiot in South Korea got caught by their parents or teachers browsing the site and the site was reported and thereby blocked.
If there's one thing I've observed though, mirrors are more or less ignored by the censors, ie hijiribe.donmai.us for danbooru, so if a mirror site could be made, people in South Korea might be able to still access the site. It may just be that changes in the url are able to bypass the block.
Unfortunately, until there's an alternative to ex found, or some exception made to the VPN rule for uploading, the Korean doujin scanlation scene is more or less going to be killed off because of the block.
I think it'd be great if a system were put in place to allow Korean groups to contact the admins to have exceptions made for the VPN group, but I can't really speak for them, nor do I really know how to get in contact with said scanlation groups. If someone who's better in the know regarding the Korean scanlators could let me know who to contact regarding this, I would not be against acting as an intermediary to help alleviate this issue if at all necessary. Though that's really entirely up to the site admins as to whether or not they'd want to help.
Thanks for reading.
This post has been edited by LURKING_BASTARD: Dec 5 2013, 16:27