After five years of virtually uninterrupted service, Hypermart was bought out in August of 2003 by the Endurance International Group. Ramon Ray, of smallbiztechnology.com, subsequently termed this period "Hypermart's Dark Days." He wrote about his company's experience with the buyout and he also quotes us along with many others whose websites no longer worked. To keep the Prey community going, I moved the message board to my photography site (free of charge) until they could make arrangements to buy a permanent domain name and find another server. In 2004 the Prey community chipped in to buy three domain names http://PreyTheSeries.com, http://PreyTheSeries.net, and http://PreyTheSeries.org. To my surprise (I didn't handle the domain name acquisitions, nor do I handle any community funds, for that matter), the community decided to appropriate those domain names for ten years! So in February 2004 the community chose a new service provider and I set up the site and the Prey community moved into their new and "permanent" message board home at http://PreyTheSeries.com . Now their "web address" will never change, even if their service provider does, due to the vaguaries of the shared hosting industry.

I have supported and kept the Prey international community's technical infrastructure going steadily and reliably for ten years - and as they say, dot coms break all the boundaries. They go 24-7-365 the whole world over. I'm very proud to say that our Prey community has experienced minimal down time due to technical and other difficulties and that all our fans have grown in both their technical and leadership skills. We have been through four upgrades of WebBBS, a php script, several site providers, spammers, and a y2k patch. I collaborated with our service provider during a server upgrade (August 2004) which "broke" our WebBBS script to get it working again, and I found the community an alternate message board site in the interim. In the summer of 2007 xtreme-host.com went belly up with no warning. However a community member provided a blog site until I could get a board up and running - back at Hypermart at my husband's business site. Hypermart had added disk space and bandwidth and cut prices in the intervening years. We thought we'd try a php board to cut down on spammers, but we just didn't feel at home with it - so I installed Tetra's version of WebBBS with some protective measures against spammers. Anyway, this was the longest period our board was down - before then we hadn't been down more than a day or two. Not a bad track record for ten years!

The community's message board header changes frequently according to the community's interests and needs. I implemented FormMail and more recently EZ Form Mailer on our site so that we could easily do confidential surveys, vote, have auctions/raffles, and conduct censuses using an email response form. I also set up the message board header to assist with an on-going series of auctions/raffle throughout the summer of 2004. I provide graphic design for the monthly message board "donor of the month" banners. I try to base these on the preferences of the individual who donates, the television series, available resources, and an interest in learning graphic design. I also collaborated with other programmers and webmasters over distance to set up a Prey campaign site, which is currently designed and implemented by Sabine of Germany, and I registered our critical sites with the search engines.