I have been addicted to the website scrabulous.com for the past 6 months. It's not a stretch to say I've played at least a game a day, sometimes as many as ten in a single sitting. Sure, the game is a rip-off from Hasbro's actual Scrabble game and the website owners were probably making tons of money off of somebody else's idea (let's just set aside the American ideal of intellectual property rights for the moment).

What made this website better than any "official" Scrabble website on the web? I suppose that's a bit complicated. What Scrabulous lacked in fancy graphics and cool flash videos it made up for in simple, easy-to-use interfaces. The website provided a medium for Scrabble enthusiasts all over the world to play with each other. Not only that - but it also catered to all level of Scrabble players, from newbies to fanatics. And it kept them coming back using a versatile scoring system which identified players by their level of skill at scoring points and winning games.

After reading all this this, you can imagine my dismay when I hit my quick link to Scrabulous.com this morning only to find the site had disappeared! Literally, the Scrabulous site was gone overnight, replaced by fancy graphics and a totally ludicrous explanation "this website is parked FREE courtesy of GoDaddy.com." I'm not sure what "parked FREE" means, but the bottom line is my favorite Scrabble site is apparently gone.

I hope that Hasbro will purchase the interface from the "Scrabulous" owners and restart this java-based program so us Scrabble-lovers everywhere can once again enjoy a morning game with our breakfast.