Nigeria’s biggest online forum, Nairaland is back up after a three-day blackout.
Announcing the initial shutdown on X days ago, Nairaland founder, Seun Osewa informed the Nairaland community that the site was shutdown because he “overlooked an abuse report that was originally sent on December 14th.”
“After the takedown, I removed the offensive content,” Osewa admitted.
“The UI for bringing back the server didn’t work so it took hours to get support on how to get that done. Minutes after the forum was brought back, they took the server down again with no warning. I’m guessing that the content I removed was still cached on Cloudflare servers, so they could still see it. I have cleared the caches now, but they are not communicating.”
Today, Osewa announced that the site has been partially restored but was using a temporary host until all is resolved.
In his words, it is “A VERY time-consuming process. We are not fully back, even though most features of the site are working. We still have a long way to go. Additional downtime is likely; don’t let it alarm you.”
Avid users of the platform have recommended that Osewa revisit the UI and content moderation issues facing Nairaland as that may be the cause of the takedown.
They allege that Nairaland mods are tribalistic or partial to content supporting the ruling party and disgruntled users may report mod actions leading to former host, Cloudflare taking the site down.
For years, Osewa has been approached by teeming fans of Nairaland to tweak the forum and scale it to become like Reddit but he didn’t seem keen.
Perhaps this situation will change his mind.
