Q3 2026 Entry-Card Rule-Change Monitoring Report — 36 Countries, Daily Checks

Key findings

• 1 domain migration — Vietnam's e-Visa portal moved to evisa.gov.vn, caught by our daily monitor within 24 hours
• 1 fact correction — Japan's paper ED disembarkation card still exists; the 2016 change was a simplification, not abolition
• 1 permanent rule change recorded — Hong Kong abolished all arrival/departure cards (Oct 2024)
• 1 postponed launch — ETIAS delayed indefinitely
• 3 countries deploy bot protection — Australia, Brazil and Saudi Arabia return 403 to datacenter IPs, degrading automated monitoring

The change log

Country	Change	Detected	Status
Vietnam	e-Visa portal migrated to evisa.gov.vn (official notice on the legacy domain)	2026-09-16	Resolved — all wicwic links updated same day
Japan	Fact check: paper ED card still issued on flights; Visit Japan Web is the digital alternative	2026-09-28	Corrected in all 5 languages
Hong Kong	All arrival/departure cards abolished (2024-10-16)	recorded Q3	Informational
Thailand	TDAC electronic arrival card replaced paper TM6	recorded Q3	Informational
Schengen Area	ETIAS launch postponed indefinitely (Aug 2026)	2026-09-03	Informational
New Zealand	NZeTA site appears to rate-limit datacenter IPs	2026-09-21	Observing (issue #62)
Australia / Brazil / Saudi Arabia	403 bot walls on official sites	ongoing	Known limitation
Turkey	Transient Cloudflare 526 on evisa.gov.tr	2026-09-20	Recovered

Trends we are watching

1. Paper → digital migration is accelerating. Thailand (TDAC), Hong Kong (full abolition) and Singapore (SGAC) are all recent moves in one direction. Japan remains the notable holdout with paper cards still distributed on flights.
2. Governments are getting better at blocking automated monitoring. Three of 36 countries now return 403 to datacenter IPs. We log these as access anomalies and supplement with manual verification.
3. Official domains keep moving. Vietnam is the third domain migration we have tracked. Bookmark the official page, not the domain.

Methodology

• Scope: 36 country entry-card/e-visa pages, checked once daily at 03:00 UTC since 2026-08
• Checks: HTTP status, domain redirects, page-size changes (>70% triggers review), keyword fingerprinting for popular countries
• Anomalies are filed as issues, deduplicated (72h for errors, 7 days for size changes), then verified by humans before any wicwic page is updated
• Verification: every change in this report was confirmed against the official source by a human editor. See the public change log at /updates/
• Full data: CSV download

Citing this report

You are welcome to use this data. Please cite: "wicwic Q3 2026 Entry-Card Monitoring Report, https://wicwic.com/en/reports/2026-q3-entry-card-monitoring/"