Yesterday the online banding site 4BarsRest ran a news article concerning down time for the Australian band forum, spitvalve.com.au.

It was discovered that the database that runs the forum had been hacked into and over a small period of time all user names and posts had been deleted.
I'm disgusted. Why are people so cruel? 

This is  a 'hobbyist' chat forum that provides a lot of pleasure for some people and I fail to understand what possible advantage a hacker would gain from creating this kind of mess and spoiling harmless (most of the time! ) fun, apart from the widely used excuse that they were simply demonstrating some system vulnerabilities in order to bring them to attention.

We are obviously not talking intelligent hacking here.
This is not a banking site or a holder of delicate personal information. To hack into something of that magnitude , albeit  the criminal charges and a stint at her majesties pleasure would actually require a considerable amount of thought and effort at some point.

Hacking of the nature experienced by spitvalve.com.au  , I believe,  should be deemed 'cyber-graffiti'.

A quick surf of wikipedia tells me that the original meaning of 'hack',  "was an elaborate and flamboyant student prank".
I like this meaning in reference to the 'spitty' problem as it does not herald it as a clever thing but merely an undergraduate waste of time giving pleasure to a few and misery to many.

Now watch my database be 'broken into' after my deluge of insults to the 'hacking community'!

I do realize that not all hacking is bad, and is often used to improve and add features to software and systems, but for every good side there is also an evil one!.

Unfortunately, this has now left the webmasters of spitvalve with a bitter taste in their mouth (Im not one of them by the way) and pondering weather it is indeed worth progressing to re-establish the once flourishing forum or to call it quits. Send me your thoughts.