Exceeds Block Gas Limit – Ropsten Exceeds Block Gas Limit Issue

Update - 25th March 2017

Ropsten has been revived!

We are pleased to announce that the Ropsten testnet has been revived! Thanks to a generous donation of GPU hashpower, the Ropsten chain has been cleared of the spam blocks that had accumulated in a recent attack.

https://github.com/ethereum/ropsten/blob/master/revival.md

Update - 18th March 2017

From the https://testnet.etherscan.io/ homepage:

Announcement: There are currently at least 2 forks of the Ropsten network, so depending on which fork you are connected to there might be a mismatch of block data and transactions. Once the new TESTNET has been decided by the community and made public, "testnet.etherscan.io" will move over to the new testnet chain

Update - 6th March 2017

Ropsten should be considered dead. See the answer from 5chdn - (and upvote it!) - for details on its replacement.

For users running Parity, there was a workaround published on the Parity Gitter channel:

So the procedure would be [corrected]:

• download the ropsten-543210.snapshot
• restore from the snapshot: parity --chain=ropsten restore ropsten-543210.snapshot
• grab the ropsten-revert.json
• run parity --chain=ropsten-revert.json
• mine on it as much as possible

Edit:

The below instructions for Geth don't actually work, presumably due to the Parity and Geth chainspecs (genesis.json formats) being incompatible, though Geth won't tell you this when you pass it to geth init.

And the equivalent for Geth using the same ropsten-revert.json file:

• Remove your current ~/.ethereum/testnet/chaindata folder
• Initialise with the new .json file: geth --testnet init <path/to/ropsten-revert.json>
• Start Geth with whatever options you normally use, e.g.: geth --testnet --fast --rpc --rpcapi db,eth,net,web3,personal --cache=1024 --rpcport 8545 --rpcaddr 127.0.0.1 --rpccorsdomain "*"

I would recommend to clarify your topic as to whether or not you are talking about the ropsten testnet and just that, or the ropsten testnet and a local testnet that only exists on your node. I'll touch on both though

1) Geth node doesn't match block count on https://ropsten.etherscan.io

Give your node time to download the entire blockchain, ropsten has millions of blocks to download, and even more millions of state entries to download. To watch your progress when attached to a geth console you can use the eth.Syncing command.

2) roptsen testnet and local testnet not the same

Block 0 is the genesis block, and is the only block generated by a human, and sets the initial settings for the blockchain. You can use the same genesis file in different networks, but it doesn't mean that the two networks will be the same. For both your local testnet and the ropsten testnet to match you would basically have to redo every single transaction from ropsten, to your local testnet.