Today I have decommissioned three of my web portals. The common factor? All three sites were forums using phpbb's PHP based free forum software. Why?

Because I got tired and pissed off having to constantly update the software due to security holes. Every couple of weeks I saw a red warning message in the version area of the software - informing me of YASH (Yet Another Software Hole).

Some people might believe that is a Good Thing - software automatically informing you about new updates. In general that is nice, however in this case I would have felt much better if there had been no holes - or at least more realistically a hole a year. Take OpenBSD - their clame to fame is

"Only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 8 years!"

That is the way software should be written.

So I decided to stop using the software - and since it is not trivial to write such software in a short time span, I decided to stop providing the forums at all. Sorry if this is an inconvenience to anyone, but SH.