14 February 2008 - unplanned downtime

You may have noticed that today and yesterday we all experienced some unexpected downtime on the Kabissa server. The server went down Wednesday morning for 30 minutes, and again several times on Thursday morning for similar time periods. I would like to apologize for the inconvenience caused.

The downtime was related to a high level of activity on our server this week, most likely caused in part by new attention to the Kabissa online community website, which we quietly launched on February 2nd. Today it was publicized on some very popular African blog sites. We also were attacked by a spammer who used a script to add tens of thousands of spam comments to blog posts on our new site within a short time period.

The spam comments have of course all been deleted. We were hoping to be very open in allowing anyone to comment on posts, but in response to this attack we have activated some anti-spam measures on the site so these types of attacks will no longer be possible.

You will be hearing more from us in the coming weeks regarding the new site. In the meantime, feel free to visit http://www.kabissa.org to explore the new site and to log in (click "login" and then "password reminder" to get your password emailed to you) and take advantage of the new features. You can now maintain a more useful profile page for your organization, add people that work with you, and add blog posts, member announcements, events and resource listings to share with the community. Your hosting account is unaffected.

As always, please do not hesitate to get in touch with support@kabissa.org with any questions or concerns regarding this downtime on the Kabissa server.