Last month we suffered from two service outages that took the Kamusi Project offline for a total of almost two weeks. These outages were debilitating, but there was nothing we could do about them. We rent server space from a hosting company that had a some system-wide malfunctions that knocked all their customers offline. For those outages, we were just stuck, like airline passengers stranded in an airport during a blizzard.

What may be more frustrating, though, is a problem we just found out about yesterday. When we got the site back online after the first outage from our hosting company, we apparently changed something in an obscure configuration file. (For tech-heads, the problem was in the Drupal browsercap module.) This setting made it difficult or impossible for some users to access the site - but for several weeks we had no idea the problem existed.

This is why WE REALLY NEED YOU to write in to shida {at} kamusiproject {dot} org with bug reports whenever you encounter a problem. Our website is complex, has tens of thousands of pages, and we are undergoing major behind-the-scenes development. However, sometimes we make a change that works fine on our computer set-up, but turns out does not work universally. So we need your eyes and ears on the Kamusi Project Rapid Response Team to alert us if something goes wrong.

In this case, the problem was isolated to the Internet Explorer web browser, which is used by 60% of our visitors. Visitors who browse with IE were being denied access to the site, and we did not know it. In fact, the development team regularly tests the site on IE, although we habitually use Firefox or Chrome as our personal browsers. We were encountering annoying errors accessing IE, but we assumed that the problem was a cache issue related to the hosting outage. Doing a page refresh usually solved the problem.

Then we started getting a few bug reports from remote users, all of whom were having problems using IE but could access the site fine using Firefox. So I went to my wife's lab, where there are a lot of computers that have never been used to access the Kamusi Project, and therefore were "clean" in terms of cache memory. I was shocked to discover that I could not access the site at all!

As soon as we recognized the existence of the problem, we were able to analyze our log files, isolate the issue, and fix it. What is so frustrating, though, is that we were blacked out to tens of thousands of users for several weeks - and we had no idea.

I hope this sort of configuration problem never happens again, but if it does, we need you to let us know. Whenever you have problems accessing any part of the Kamusi Project site, please, please write to us and give us as much information as you can:

* the complete URL (web address) of the page with the problem
* the browser you are using (IE, Firefox, Safari, etc - with version number if possible)
* your operating system (XP, Vista, Linux, OS-X, etc)
* the page you were trying to link from
* where you are logging in from

Any information you can give will help us to fix the problem quickly. And if we don't have any information about a problem, it may continue forever. So please, be part of our Rapid Response Team and drop us a note at the first sign of trouble!