Porn link on Guangzhou govt website closed after 4 months
- Source: Global Times
- [00:06 June 16 2009]
- Comments
By Ji Beibei
People in Guangzhou will no longer be able to access pornographic material via a government website, after a troublesome link on the site was fixed Sunday, an official told the Global Times yesterday.
Since February 20, a link on the municipal education bureau’s website, which should have taken visitors to the site of the Liwan district education bureau, instead redirected them to a porn website, the Guangzhou-based Nanfang Daily reported yesterday.
On May 12, an Internet user posted a comment at a forum at Dayoo.com alerting people to the link.
“Click it and you get porn pictures popping up. It’s been like this for a month,” it said.
“We update the site and conduct maintenance work every day,” an unnamed official from the bureau told the Global Times.
The address for the bureau website is Gzlwedu.net.cn, while the address to the porn site is Gzlwedu.net.
Because of the similarity of the two addresses, the technical staff must have made some mistakes when developing the site, he said.
He did not explain why the problem had taken four months to rectify.
Another employee, surnamed Li, said the bureau had 10 people managing the website, but he either had no answer to why the bad links had not been spotted.
“What is really bad is they neglected their duty for months. Where were the managers and Web police when mistakes like this happened?” Guangzhou resident Liu Mengfei told the Global Times.
“It’s quite common for errors like this to happen,” Yang Fengchun, dean of the Academy of E-government at Peking University, said.
“They were unfortunate that the links redirected people to porn. If they had linked to something else, I doubt it would have received so much attention.”
Guangzhou office worker Wu Zhipeng said, “Government websites are supposed to provide a platform for communication between the public and the authorities.
This case shows that these sites are not being properly managed.”