Ummah.com
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Islamic website Ummah.com, formerly the Islamic Gateway, is best known for the Ummah Forum, an Islamic discussion forum known for its diverse membership. Ummah.com is based in the UK, as are the majority of its voluntary contributors and active forum users. It is fully owned by Waha Media Limited, and is financed entirely through donations.
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[edit] History
[edit] Islamic Gateway
The Islamic Gateway, as Ummah.com was then called, 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. This proved extremely popular, and the Islamic Gateway soon became a focal point for Islamic content online.
Years passed without incident before, inevitably, Islamic Gateway's homepage was defaced. The website's administrators then purchased their own dedicated server, running FreeBSD Unix. This enabled them to provide separate user accounts for each website they hosted, and limited editing of the homepage to the site's webmaster.
[edit] Rebranding as Ummah.com
After obtaining the Ummah.com domain name in late 2001, the site was rebranded to Ummah.com. A new homepage was designed from scratch, making use of a bespoke content management system programmed using PHP and mySQL.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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.
The forum thus evolved from a small UK-centric bulletin board -- one of the first Islamic bulletin boards on the Internet -- into a popular forum for Muslims worldwide. Users of the forum tend to a typically orthodox Sunni understanding of Islam. Shia, Ahmadiyya, or Ismaili views are not widespread, but are tolerated by forum moderators if not discussed from a point of advocacy.
Among popular Muslim forums, Ummah.com is considered significant for its intolerance of non-Muslim participation. To the extent that they respect Muslim sensibilities and not engage in proselytization, members of other religions are allowed to explain their faith, or lack thereof, and offer opinions on current events, political issues, and Islamic teaching and practice.
[edit] Noor Radio
Noor Radio, an Internet radio station, was launched in early 2006 by Ummah.com and Noor Media, a record label which specialises in Nasheeds. Although operated by Noor Media, 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.
