Hello All, I apologize if anyone has received this e-mail more than once. It is with a bit of regret that I have to announce a change to the Quranic Arabic Corpus message board (http://corpus.quran.com/messageboard.jsp). The message board will be disabled for adding NEW messages for the next several days, but viewing existing OLD message will still work during this time.
Today we had an anonymous user post a spam message to the board, which included a link to a website with potentially unsuitable and harmful material. This message was detected and instantly removed in under a few minutes. However, this situation is a bit sad because many young users regularly visit this website to learn Arabic grammar and find out more about the Quran. As I am sure you are all aware, spam is a common feature of the internet. Before today, the message board had always been easily accessible, and it was possible to post messages containing unrestrictied content without any form of registration or log-in. Over the last few weeks, the website and message board have been growing more and more popular, and the project is now well on its way to having several thousand users per day, each making use of the grammatical information online. To ensure accuracy, Arabic language and Quranic experts have been reviewing the annotation, and discussing through the message board what the most accurate approach would be to grammatical analysis for various Arabic words in the Quran. It was only a matter of time before this message board attracted spammers in one form or another. It is with a bit of regret that going forward, a one-time registration process will be required for all users before posting new messages. This is a slight inconvenience, as you may need to log-in (via an e-mail address and password) before posting new messages. Although once logged in, hopefully the website should remember you and keep you logged in for the remainder of that day. Note that will be no need to register, or log-in if only you want to view the messaboard, you will only need to go through this process if you want to post new messages. For now, a short term solution has been put in place where by it is no longer possible to post new messages to the message board, but you can still view existing previous messages. Over the next few days, a new version of the website will be uploaded that will include a registration and log-in process if you want to post messages online. This is a slight inconvenience, but this extra step is required to make the website more secure, and is standard practice for online message boards on the internet. I will be sure to keep all corpus annotators informed as soon as the message board reopens. It would be helpful not to e-mail me directly with any grammar corrections to words during this time. If possible, please hold on to your suggestions, and keep them in mind until the message board reopens, when you can post them again. Today, things were getting quite interesting on the message board, with some relevant discussion related to indeclinable words in Arabic, and to the nature of diptotes and triptotes: http://corpus.quran.com/wordmorphology.jsp?location=(9:114:4) I do hope that we can continue these very enthusiastic grammatical discussions quite soon. I am looking forward to seeing the message board reopening again in the next few days. If you have any more questions, please don't hesitate to contact me. I would be more than happy to provide any further information. Kind Regards, -- Kais Dukes Language Research Group School of Computing University of Leeds http://corpus.quran.com - The Quranic Arabic Corpus [email protected] - Computational Quranic Arabic discussion list
