On the morning of January 5th, 5:46 am, we received the following message from our service provider:

It appears that your site wordproject.org is facing a large scale DDOS attack.  To prevent issues on other customer’s sites we were forced to block all incoming traffic to your website. Within 10 minutes of blocking traffic to your site, over 500,000 connection attempts were made.  We will continue to monitor the issue and remove the restriction when it is safe to do so.

After one hour we received another message:

We attempted to keep the site up as we blocked 8000 separate IP addresses, but as we blocked those, more began hitting the site.  The attack is too widely distributed to single out any one IP range or country. Unfortunately, when a DDoS attack like this happens the only solution is to block all traffic and wait it out. We’re continuing to monitor the situation and we will remove the block as soon as possible.

So, for the next 6 hours we were down and there was no access to the site.

Cloudflare services

Cloudflare stats

With had Philip’s help we decided to relocate all the files (all 80000 of them) and managed to implement a system that protects us from those kinds of attacks (Cloudflare). Thus, after that, and so far we have been up again and cruising with a system that is actually much faster and safer. Now, there were some side effects with some of the links that had to be redirected. All in all, it has been a month of struggle and recovering. The good news is that we learned a lot and are getting more prepared to prevent this kind of occurrences in the future.

We are blessed to review a great year in our ministry for the Lord. There has been many personal and collective accomplishment from our team. Several new recordings were made this past year. A lot of progress and upgrading was made to our online material which resulted in a lot more visitors and Bible downloads. Our site recorded more than 9 million users, who viewed more than 36 million of Bible pages. Over 200,000 text Bibles were downloaded and 61 million audio Bible chapters. 35,212 applications were downloaded and installed. Reactions have been overwhelming. Here are a few examples of enthusiastic reactions to the app: (many of these comments are translations of original languages)

Read full article HERE

App

Malayalam is a language spoken in India, predominantly in the state of Kerala. It is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India. Malayalam has official language status in the state of Kerala (South West of India). Read more about it here. Malayalam is spoken by about 35 million people. We are blessed to be able to offer this language on our site and also in the our App. This month we were contacted by a young man, Thompson, from Thrissur, in Kerana State, India, who offer to help us correct some errors he found with the our Malayalam interface. He did that and subsequently offered to help record the Verse section in his language. We are thrilled to announce the conclusion of that recording project done during this past month and now available for enjoying and spiritual feeding.
Malayalam verse selection – now with audio, here:
http://www.wordproject.org/bibles/verses/malayalam/index.htm
It is a blessing to have faithful people on the field who are eager to publish the Word of God in their own language.

Thompson, our Malayalam narrator

Here are some scenes of Christian work in India sent by one of our users:

From India

We have been some interesting discussions about the end-time this past month. There has been new speculations about the raise of the anti-Christ and the signs of the times. As you probably know today many talk about signs in the moon and the stars, Illuminati, New World Order, more than ever before. There are videos and articles about this all over the internet. The information is fascinating but there are conflicting and sometimes totally opposed interpretations of possible events. Whatever happens, and how it happens, our main concern right now is to bring the Gospel to every creature. This the commission received from the Lord in His Word – “And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come… (Matthew 24:14). The Word says that we should always be prepared, no matter what time – “Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh. Who then is a faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath made ruler over his household, to give them meat in due season? Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing.” (Matthew 24:44-46). So, the end-time is actually pegged to the job that we all have to do. If the Gospel is not preached to every creature, other signs are early or out of time.  This is the sign that is becoming unique to our time, that the Gospel of the Kingdom may be preached to all the world. Certainly, we can see that times are changing rapidly and ‘because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold’ (Matthew 24:12)

Signs of the times…

Our android app is doing well and blessing many around the world. We have now created Portuguese, Hindi, Swahili and Chinese versions to offer along with the international version.
The international version is being downloaded at the average of 90 per day, while the Portuguese one (Brazil) is being downloaded at the rate of 260 per day. These are of course humble beginnings but we are encouraged by the comments and the reaction how the Word of God is affecting the people who are using the app. For us that is the most important.
“Great App! This is the best Bible app I have ever used. I now have the Bible available offline in five languages. The only thing I can think of that could improve it would be if it would let you view multiple languages at once like the website.” (JO)
“Word Project Audio Bible This is an extremely helpful and useful application which well deserves the highest possible rating.” (L.N.)

November app stats

Things have been bubbling already with Christmas preparations… We  have agreed on a one person giving a present to the other, which in our near family of 12 makes sense to avoid over spending and waste. We held a raffle for the names and now it will be a surprise to know who got who to give a present to. We also agreed on a cap on the value of the presents.
From Portugal we received news from Emanuel and Mandy that they are enjoying their stay there and studies are going well although that keeps them rather busy. They also visited some of our relatives there, and enjoyed some of the best in Portuguese hospitality.

Emanuel and Mandy on the road…

Here in Kenya, we appreciated our wonderful thanksgiving dinner which we enjoyed with one of our friends, Julia.

Thanksgiving dinner with Julia

We are thankful for everything even for every trial like what happened to our vehicle, which in spite of being recently repaired let us down and stuck on our way to Kijabe Dentist appointment, because the brand new fan belt came out …. the car over-heated and was smoking all over from the boiling water coming out – the belt also drives the water pump, which stopped pumping, therefore the overheating… a real scene that was solved with some help from some locals who improvised the mechanic, and took a ‘piky-piky’ ride (motorcycle taxi) to near town to buy a new fan belt. We finally made it to the dentist appointment, one and half hours later.

Thankful hearts!!

With such a large website to manage there is always work to be done online: errors, missing links, broken links, typos, etc. Here are some examples of emails we received just this month as an example of the issues we are constantly facing:

‘Thanks for your word online, may the Lord continue to bless your ministry. I have been using your bible in Luganda (the language of Uganda) and  it’s good. However there are many mistakes I come across in the book of Genesis, such as abbanga instead of ebbanga, yakamaze instead of yakamala, Kitawee instead of Taata and many more.And I feel disturbed when I project such verses with mistakes for the church to see and read during our bible study! I wish you could find a way to rectify that. Otherwise this is a very good project. I would also love to give out   audio Luganda bibles to people who don’t know how to read. They can listen to the word, I wish I can find cheap Mp3 bible players…

Read more HERE

Rwanda – The cross – Received from one of our users.

Thank you for your prayers concerning the Ebola outbreak and your concern with us since we stay in Africa. For now at least, there have not been any cases here in this part of Africa and we are thankful for that.

We do  not want to stop everything and just halt all our lives. We should not get paralyzed. We should, though, be aware that one ounce of prevention is always better than one pound of cure and we should take some precautions, just in case.

Read full article HERE

Ebola – how infectious?

by Jorge

Freely ye have receive, freely give“; ” He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things”

This month has been particularly active with issues related to copyrights. In one instance, we found out that someone copied the Indonesian Bible from our website, with our format and logo, and made an application out of it. Since the Gospel is being preached we would otherwise not mind if it did not contain advertisement, which the developer included on the app. Ultimately our problem is that we might have to respond to some Bible Society when they find out that someone is making profit (from the ads) out of ‘their’ translation of the Bible. If so, they will eventually approach us because the developer, of all things, left our email address on the application!! Actually, someone already wrote to us this week and complained about the advertisement on that app and how unchristian that is, etc…

Continue to read this article HERE.

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