The news
- Nairaland has been taken down twice by its host, because the popular Nigerian forum ignored an abuse report lodged on December 14.
- The forum founder, Seun Osewa, says that an unplanned maintenance procedure caused the ongoing problem. At first, Osewa believed the takedown to be a technical outage.
- Nairaland has since removed the offensive content from its website, but the host has yet to respond or restore the website.
Explaining the situation on his page on X, Osewa said after the website was first taken down, the Nairaland team worked for hours to get support to bring it back live. However, just minutes after restoring the forum, the host took the server down again, this time without warning.
But the Nairaland team would learn later that its server host was “punishing” them for not responding to an abuse report quickly enough. The team did remove the abusive comment as soon as they found out, but it was still cached on its CDN (Cloudflare)'s servers, where the host could still see it. Nairaland has since cleared the caches.
“The technical support team has informed me that only the abuse team has the power to reinstate our server, that their review could take up to 48 hours, and that nothing can be done to speed up the process,” Osewa said.
As of the time of this report, the host, however, has yet to respond to Nairaland. All the Nigerian-based forum can do now is wait.
This incident has raised questions about how Nairaland deals with issues of abuse on the platform.
Osewa took to X, seeking advice on how to address the issue with the host's abuse team since he and his team have little experience in that area.
Founded in 2005 by Nigerian entrepreneur Seun Osewa, Nairaland has come under fire multiple times from users who insist that the platform has remained stagnant despite its obvious potential.
Besides, this is not the first time the platform will be going offline. On June 22, 2014, hackers gained access to Nairaland and wiped the content of its host server and backup. The forum came back online three days later after savaging its remote backup.
[UPDATED December 19, 2023, at 9:21 p.m.] Article updated to correct the earlier misconception that Cloudflare took down Nairaland's servers. Cloudflare is a content delivery network utilised by Nairaland for security and caching purposes. It is distinct from the sever host.
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