The "This is True" and "Stella Awards" Forum is offline forever.

It was hacked twice: the first time, the Forum itself was defaced to stop you from being able to post your thoughts. That was a challenge I wouldn't back away from: I reinforced the security, recovered all the previous posts, and went on.

The second time, however, was much more serious: an exploit in one of the Forum's programming modules was used to exploit the server itself, and it was literally taken over by a spammer to send junk mail. Ironic, considering the same server hosts the Spam Primer, which warns about spammers' scams and helps you learn how to protect yourself from their schemes.

After that, I wasn't willing to reactivate the Forum until I could be assured that such a thing wouldn't happen again. I know there's never a 100% guarantee against hacking on any server, but I wanted to ensure that the Forum didn't make the server unreasonably vulnerable. My site security guy's response: no such assurance is possible; continuing to host the forum will make the server more vulnerable to hacker attack.

Sorry, but I actually lost money on the Forum (due to space, bandwidth, and admin costs) -- the ads included on the Forum never even came close to paying for it. So the decision was: something that cost me money and headache could take down my entire operation? Forget it. And that's before I paid an admin to build me a new server and move all my sites over, costing us a full day of lost time -- and revenue, and admin time.

There are criminals online, just like in the Real World. If you liked the Forum, if you used it, if you "needed" it, if you appreciated it, I say this: you were one of the victims of the crime that was committed here.

The next best thing to the forum is Randy's blog, which allows comments which are specific to the postings there.