The site has now been up and running and viewable by the general public for two months and the traffic although small has been steadily increasing. I always knew that this project would be a slow burner, I mean a site that revolves around professional level IT in Cambodia is never going to be a high traffic affair. Even if every developer, hacker and system admin in the whole country logged in at the same time, we would probably still have less than 1% of the traffic a site like digg.com gets at 3am on Christmas Eve!

Despite the steady increases in traffic though, I had been quite disappointed with the lack of comments and user input, this site always started out with the ambition of being a user community where anybody who had something to say or offer could contribute in anyway they liked. As of yesterday it had been about one month since the last person joined despite picking up a handful of users early on. This had left me wondering what the problem might be, was the site too nerdy? Surely not, I know more than a few propeller heads in Cambodia. Was my writing crap? Possible! Were people simply not interested in OOP, databases, debuggers and other such thrilling subjects? Impossible!

Then yesterday I had a call from a friend who said they had tried to sign up for the site but never received the acceptance email. I hastily went to the site and tried setting up a new account and was greeted with the same issue. To compound the problem the issue also effected the 'Contact Us' page, which was not working also, it now appears that several people tried contacting us to say that they couldn't sign up. Obviously these mails never made it through either.

I knocked up a quick test script using PHP's mail() function, the script confirmed my suspicion that the mail() function was the root of the problem and after few quick alterations to the Sendmail configuration all was once again well in Khmer Click Land.

It turns out that the mail function hadn't been working since our managed server was upgraded in early May! After reviewing the site logs, it became clear over a dozen users had attempted to sign up in that period without success. I have now emailed all of these users and invited them back to the site, an invitation which I hope they will accept.

So my humblest apologies to any readers who tried to sign up and couldn't, I just hope you all come back, continue reading and hopefully share some contributions