Ummah.com
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Ummah.com, formerly known as the Islamic Gateway, is a website best known for the Ummah Forum, a large English internet forum for Muslims. As of June 2013 the forum has over 70,000 members.
Ummah.com is based in the UK, as are the majority of its voluntary contributors and active forum users. The Ummah forum membership is mainly composed of Muslims of Pakistani and Indian origin residing in the United Kingdom.
Contents
History
Islamic Gateway
The Islamic Gateway was founded in 1996 by a high school student with a shared hosting account from the now-defunct UK-based web host Virtual-PC. By posting the FTP username and password for their hosting account on several Muslim mailing lists the Islamic Gateway encouraged users to put their own Islamic content online, effectively providing free web hosting without adverts.
Rebranding as Ummah.com
After obtaining the Ummah.com domain name in late 2001, Waha Media Limited, a not-for-profit company formed by the administrators of the Islamic Gateway, decided to rebrand the site as Ummah.com. A new homepage was designed from scratch, making use of a bespoke content management system programmed using PHP and mySQL.
Ummah Chat
Ummah.com has had a chat room for as long as its Internet forum. After the move to a dedicated server, the chat room ran on the Java application DigiChat. The chat room was closed in late 2005 due to a lack of server resources caused by the popularity of the Ummah Forum.
Use of FreeBSD
Although Ummah.com has been through several changes of webserver hardware, it has, due to the insistence of its system administrator, always used FreeBSD as its operating system. It did, however, operate a second webserver running Red Hat Linux, hosted by the European firm 1&1, for a brief period in 2002. The Ummah Forum was moved to the second webserver as Ummah.com's primary webserver at the time was unable to handle its large number of visitors. The second webserver was retired later in the year, when Ummah.com leased a more powerful dedicated server.
Ummah Forum
Soon after the launch of Islamic Gateway, the site's administrators opened a forum based on the then-popular Perl CGI script DCForum. DCForum was replaced with phpBB when the site moved to a dedicated server. As the forum grew, phpBB was replaced with vBulletin when the latter was requested by the forum's voluntary moderators for its ease-of-use and functionality.
Ummah Radio
Ummah Radio, an Internet radio station, was launched in early 2006 by Ummah.com. The majority of the station's presenters are supplied by Ummah.com. Listeners, who contribute via the Ummah Forum, have considerable say in the running of the station. The majority of airtime is taken by Nasheeds, Qur'an audio and talk shows.
Sun Article
In January 2009 the British tabloid The Sun published an article claiming Ummah.com contained a 'hit list' of British Jews. It later emerged that the journalist responsible for the article, Glen Jenvey, had fabricated the claim by posting the 'hit list' to Ummah.com himself. The issue was investigated by the Press Complaints Commission and The Sun newspaper was ordered to publish an apology.[1][2]
See also
References
- ↑ http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2650181/Ummahcom-story-January-7.html
- ↑ http://www.pcc.org.uk/news/?article=NTk0MQ==
