Kaskus has stumbled into a problem with its Domain Name Server (DNS) since May 26, 2012. This made the biggest online community forum in Indonesia cannot be accessed for more than several times, decreasing its traffic drastically to 70 percent.
Kaskus (kaskus.us), or short for kasak kusuk, is currently the largest online community forum in Indonesia. It was first launched in November 6th, 1999, by Andrew Darwis, Ronald Stephanus, dan Budi Dharmawan who were on their studies in Seattle, United States. It was first started as a small community where Indonesian students that were studying abroad can share their hobbies. Since then, Kaskus has grown into a community forum with more than 15 million page views each day and over a half a billion posts. The site is currently under the name of PT Darta Media Indonesia.
Kaskus CEO stated that Kaskus has a regular unique visitors of about 2.5 million each day. Because of the encountered problem, Kaskus dropped drastically and currently ranked 19 million globally from data collected from Alexa.
"At that time, we were not sure in what position Kaskus was in Indonesia. But according to Alexa, Kaskus was not the 50th most popular website anymore." said Andrew Darwis.
Before using .us, Kaskus used .com until May 23, 2006. The change was because the "Brontok virus" attack. Brontok, or W32/Brontok, or popular with the name Rontokbro, is a virus known for spreading in the year 2005.
After 6 years, Kaskus settled for .com again, and also .co.id. The site changed its top-level domain (TLD) because .us is reserved only for sites located in the United States, and also because the servers were managed by a third party. Kaskus is still working with Google for it to properly index all of its contents on the new domain.
This problem does not have a significant effect on advertisements where the site is getting most of its revenue. Advertisers have asked why their traffic dropped dramatically. Kaskus had made some revision regarding the length of time the ads are shown on the site.
For the first 3 weeks, many Kaskusers or juragan (Kaskus users) did not know that the site had changed its domain name. Kaskus kept updating their news regarding this problem on social media networks.
According to Alexa, Kaskus is currently back as the 7th largest site in Indonesia, and the 700th largest globally, crawling its way back to its 200th position. Kaskus is also planning to use .id as their TLD in the future.