Members of the Hacker Vietnam Association (HVA) forum, Vietnam’s largest hacking community, are no longer allowed to share their thoughts or opinions on the platform even though they can still access the content posted there.

The HVA forum, acting as a playground for local hackers and Internet security lovers over the last 15 years, was officially switched to what an administrator said was a “read-only mode” on Friday, according to an announcement posted on the page the same day.

Forum members are not permitted to create new topics, or reply to any of the existing posts on the website now.

The forum administrators have also disabled the registration function, meaning HVA has “stopped receiving new members,” the announcement, posted by a forum administrator under the screen name of conmale, reads.

Conmale said the decision had been “carefully discussed among the forum administration board,” adding HVA has “fulfilled its duty as an online forum,” referring to the course of 15 years it has been along with local security and information technology enthusiasts.

The administrator thanked the forum members and contributors, and ended the announcement by saying HVA could “possibly switch to a new type of operations.”

But details for that plan would not be disclosed until “a suitable time.”

Founded in 1999, HVA currently has 160,856 members, who generated more than 241,169 posts, according to statistics available on the forum’s main page.

The forum are also frequented by unregistered users. In August 2007, there was a time when the forum received 273,199 unique active visitors.

HVA has not responded to a query by Vietnamese-language tech website ICTNews as to why it decided to ‘silence’ its members.

The newswire quoted an HVA representative as divulging that the forum administration board has “issues to solve,” and it is unclear whether the read-only mode would be turned off in the coming time.

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