Kali issue

Kali was having problems getting her tests passing & there was a very odd database related issue going on.

I'm sending in this pull request because these are changes that @kkiger had made that should be reviewed by her and the team to figure out if they should be merged in or not.

It's very likely that this pull request will fail on Travis and that it should not be accepted as is. It should instead be rejected & any changes that are important from this manually re-added as new work.