Dear Cap'n Wacky readers,

Hello there. How have you been? How about that weather, am I right?

Anyway, some of you may have noticed a minor change around here: we've gotten rid of our message board. Due to the massive influx of letters asking why, we felt we'd better explain.

OK, honestly there have been no letters asking us why, but we don't have anything else this week so we felt we might as well explain.

Once, years ago, our message board was a fun-filled place where crazed Cap'n Wacky fan Jesse Ball would declare his love for the band Kiss, someone would pretend to be dead Hogan's Heroes star/sex addict Bob Crane, and people would write angry messages under the impression that our review of The Osbournes was sincere even though it was on a website called "capnwacky.com" that made no attempt to hide that it was a comedy site.

Yeah, and those were the GOOD times.

Then the Spam deluge began. Somehow, our forum became yet another receptacle for the massive amounts of internet junk mail. How? We don't know. Did our message board order something online from a site with a poor privacy policy? Was our message board posting messages on other message boards (perhaps message boards for and about message boards) and leaving it's e-mail address for all to see? We don't know, but it quickly got to the point where we couldn't distinguish the hate mail from the pyramid schemes.

And speaking of the pyramid schemes, it was really annoying to see people (programs, whatever) trying to use our website to swindle our readers out of their money. We have a hard enough time trying to swindle money out of our readers ourselves! Hello, people, Amazon tip bin! The Cap'n stores! Way to just take, take, take.

Anyway, after some half-hearted and futile attempts to clean up the message board things got even worse. The spammers or hackers or whoever finally rigged it so that when you tried to visit our forum, you also got a pop-up window.

Advertising porn.

With pictures.

And this wasn't just straightforward hello-how'd-you-like-some-of-this porn, it was a particularly unsettling subset of porn. Porn that even regular porn looks at and says "wow, that's some naughty porn there."

OK, now I've danced around it and you probably want to know what kind of porn it was, but I'm not sure I want to say. So please don't INSIST on asking what kind it was. Don't even INSIST, but change the word "insist" so that it's a very similar sounding word with a completely different meaning. Don't. Don't even have other members of your immediate family INSIST.

So that was that. The forum had been in pain and agony for a while now and we felt like it was really only the humane thing to do to Kevorkian it. Don't cry for the forum. The forum is at peace now. The forum is now in a better place with its loved ones and family members (but not in a dirty way).

And the good news is that without having to spend all that extra time clearing out the message board, we can get back to focusing on writing quality humor for you! And clearly that's working out really, really well.

But... could the forum return someday? It's possible. After all, the government has decided to crack down on Spam. If Spam becomes a problem of the past, perhaps the forum could get resurrected. After all, when the government decided to put an end to copyrighted song-swapping via the internet, they shut Napster down and no one has ever illegally shared copyrighted data on the internet ever again.

Cough.

Right. So in the meantime, you can still send us postcards.

Sincerely,
Brodie H. Brockie,
Co-Cap'n of the Cap'n