removed in the November 2015 redesign. Technologies According to Joseph Smarr, one of the Google+ team's technical leads, Google+ was a typical Google web application: it used Java servlets for the server code and JavaScript for the browser-side of the UI, largely built with Google's Closure framework, including the JavaScript compiler and the template system. They used the HTML5 History API to maintain good-looking URLs in modern browsers despite the AJAX app. To achieve fast response times Google often rendered the Closure templates on the server side before any JavaScript was loaded; then the JavaScript found the right DOM nodes, hooked up event handlers, etc. The back ends were built mostly on top of Bigtable and Colossus/GFS, and other common Google technologies such as MapReduce. Censorship Within a day of the website's launch, various news agencies reported that Google+ was blocked by the People's Republic of China. This is part of a wider policy of censorship in mainland China. As of June 2011, Google+ remained unavailable in mainland China. While it was not technically "blocked", it was made impossible to use by slowing it down to a crawl. The Iranian government had also blocked access to Google+ from July 11, 2011, as part of Internet censorship in Iran. Controversies Obama's election campaign On February 20, 2012, Internet users from China realized that state restrictions on Google+ had been relaxed for unknown reasons, allowing them to post on Google+ pages. In particular, Chinese users began to inundate the official election campaign pages of U.S. president Barack Obama on Google+ with often off-topic comments. Nymwars In July 2011, Google+ required users to identify themselves using their real names, and some accounts were suspended when this requirement was not met. Google VP Bradley Horowitz stated that a violation of the terms of service would only affect offenders' access to Google+ and not any of the other services that Google provided. However, there were early reports of account holders being temporarily locked out of all of Google services. On October 19, 2011, at the Web 2.0 Summit, Google executive Vic Gundotra revealed that Google+ would begin supporting pseudonyms and other types of identity "within a few months". Starting on January 23, 2012, Google+ began allowing the use of established pseudonyms. In July 2014, Google+'s policy was changed to allow any name to be used. Commenting on YouTube On November 6, 2013, YouTube, Google's popular