Swindon Music down... again!!

What is happening with the Swindon Music forum, first up it was hacked. Ok this in itself is a bit silly when you use IPB and you don't keep your security up to date, it happened to the Furnace forum and the WM learnt his lesson, got it updated and managed to keep everybodys account and posts. When this happened everybody abandoned a very good forum and had a mass exodus to Swindon Music, which to be fair was stable and running whilst Furnace forum was down and did look good (plus it was "impartial").

However SM itself gets hacked and although it was recovered quickly it soon went down again with the loss of all the posts. If this wasn't enough a bespoke system was rebuilt that just wasn't as good as the old IPB based forum, it was clunky, looked awful in FireFox and was simply not good enough. Still people used it but some key people got tired of the mess around and drifted away.

Up until recently I was a regular poster but I found it was starting to get a bit nastier, a bit cliquey, a bit well elitist. It started to turn in a schoolyard gang culture where the 'cool' kids stuck together and kissed each others arses to make themselves look good and ganged up on anybody that was not following the consensus or threatened to rock the boat.
It was at this point I decided to leave and delete my account, only I couldn't because the design of the forum didn't facilitate this(!?) so I just don't post or really look on there. Problem was people on there I knew personally were sounding like dicks, I really would cringe at some peoples posts and opinions which didn't tally up with their personalities when down the pub.

Anyway I got a message last night to check out SM which I did and guess what? Down again! But with a huge advert for the Swindon Shuffle, so much for impartiality.
Hopefully this time a wake-up call will be heeded by the powers that be at SM, already people are talking about totally abandoning it and going back to using the Furnace Forum which after all this time is still chugging on. I am using Furnace Forum if you want to chat with me there ;)

So I wonder whats going to happen next, will SM be fixed and everyone go back to the playground like nothing is wrong? If people go back will there be some users with backbone to speak out and really get things fixed? Or maybe people will go back to Furnace Forum and breath new life into the old place? Maybe we may see a new forum emerge from somewhere with new ideas and a fresh approach (if I only had the build something like this! LOL) ? We will see...