Yesterday evening I received an email from the web hosting. The websites at koohii.com caused a spike in CPU usage. This is against the TOS, and hence they disabled the site temporarily.

This is partly my mistake. Some time ago I increased the "posts per page" on the forum in order to help users save their favorite threads (exporting to eg. PDF). The pages loaded a little slower, but it didn't seem to be an issue. I suspect this change caused a spike in CPU usage when the forum was hit by many search crawlers, and/or, very likely... someone running a misbehaving scraping/archiving tool on the forum.

In short, as it was planned by the end of May, the forum is now permanently closed. This ensures it won't have ripple effects on Kanji Koohii anymore.

Update: I've now set up a redirection page. Please note I am not affiliated or responsible in any way for the Unseen Japan Forum. This forum is maintained by gaiaslastlaugh.

Update 2: it has come to my attention that some people are misrepresenting the facts over at Unseen Japan Forum. In regard to the closure of Koohii Forum, I gave three months notice. It just happened that there was this issue with the server, so I closed the forum a few days earlier before « the end of May ».

The confusion arises because just a couple days prior, I posted on the forum that I considered leaving it read only for a while more and then from that point I would give a month’ts notice when I meant to close it definitely.

Now that didn’t happen, because a few days after I posted that the whole koohii.com server was taken down due to a spike of CPU usage which is against the webhosting TOS. So at that point, I said, screw it, we have pretty much reached the 3 months notice I gave earlier, so I’ll just go ahead and close the forum in order to make sure Kanji Koohii is back up asap and the CPU spike doesn’t happen again.

TLDR the forum was closed pretty much by « the end of May » exactly as it was announced 3 months prior.