Get involved further

Beyond discussion, contributors can suggest URLs to check, activate a probe, or send data for their own country or ISP. See the About page for how DNS probes and detection work, or head to Help for concrete ways to contribute.

Return to the Home page for the current list of DNS servers under examination.

Community-driven monitoring of internet censorship depends on participants who voluntarily check how their DNS servers respond to specific addresses. When someone notices that a site is unreachable or returns an unexpected result, sharing that observation helps build a broader picture of which providers are filtering traffic. The practice of comparing responses across multiple ISPs and countries turns isolated experiences into collective evidence, allowing patterns of blocking to emerge that no single user could detect alone. This distributed approach to data gathering gives the project a wide observational reach while keeping the methodology transparent and reproducible for anyone who wants to verify the findings independently or contribute their own measurements to the shared record of how internet access is being shaped in different regions.

Open discussion spaces play a central role in keeping that process honest and well-documented. A community forum allows contributors to post detailed reports about specific servers, debate whether a blocked result is genuine or a false positive, and exchange technical advice on how to run reliable tests. Long-form threads also serve as an archive, making it possible to trace how a particular filtering behaviour evolved over time. Because participants come from many countries and speak about a wide range of providers, the conversation reflects genuine diversity of perspective rather than a single institutional viewpoint, and the resulting body of discussion becomes a valuable reference for journalists, researchers, and curious users who want to understand the real state of net neutrality in practice.

Real-time chat channels complement the slower pace of forum discussion by giving contributors a place to coordinate active measurements and respond quickly to emerging events. When a new wave of blocking appears, IRC participants can share fresh probes, compare DNS responses in the moment, and alert others to investigate before the situation changes. This immediacy matters because censorship systems are dynamic, with providers adding or removing addresses from blacklists without warning. Having a space where volunteers can synchronise their efforts helps ensure that the daily activity captured by the project reflects what is actually happening on the network rather than a stale snapshot, and it gives new contributors an easy way to ask questions and learn how the monitoring workflow operates from more experienced members of the community.

Documentation and shared resources tie the whole collaborative effort together by describing how the monitoring systems are built, what the generated statistics actually mean, and how anyone can join the work. Clear explanations of the probe methodology, the way reports are produced, and the limitations of the data help readers interpret results correctly and avoid drawing conclusions the evidence cannot support. Contributor guides, staff profiles, and public lists of monitored hosts make the project legible to outsiders who want to understand who is behind the measurements and how trustworthy the findings are. By keeping these resources open and accessible, the community lowers the barrier for new participants, strengthens the reliability of the overall dataset, and reinforces the idea that defending an open internet is most effective when many independent observers contribute their time and attention to a shared, transparent effort.