"No Money" Is Not a Security Strategy

The other day I came across a forum exchange that nearly made me spray tea all over my keyboard.

> "Why on earth are you still on a version that has been end of life for years?"
> "Easy - money. Clients don't want to pay every year for a website they already paid for, as long as it still works."

I stared at the screen for a while. Then I checked my own wallet. Empty, too. Welcome to the club, my friend. The only difference is what we do with an empty wallet.

Money is not handed out equally. Time is. Rich or broke, every one of us receives the same 24 hours a day. I decided to pay with hours instead of yen. I read documentation at midnight. I broke my staging site a hundred times and fixed it a hundred times - plus once more, just to be sure. The total cost was roughly my sleep.

Joomla 3 reached end of life in August 2023. That is not "slightly past the best-before date". That is milk you would only open in a hazmat suit. And asking the developers to keep patching version 3 because you are broke is like phoning the dairy, carton in hand, to ask if they could kindly un-expire your milk. They cannot. Nobody can. That is what "end" means.

And here is what truly puzzles me: who is your website actually for? If it exists purely for your own satisfaction - a diary, a sandbox, a hobby shelf - fine. Run it at home, on your own machine, and nobody gets hurt. But most people who publish on the web do it because they want visitors. One more visitor, and one more after that. And if you invite guests, you do not serve them tea in a house with a rotting floor.

Every abandoned Joomla 3 site is an all-you-can-eat buffet with a neon sign that reads "Spammers welcome. Kitchen unattended." And then we all wonder why Joomla has a reputation problem.

Almost three years have passed since that EOL date. Two of them would have been more than enough to migrate to Joomla 6. The real question is not "where do I find the money". It is "what have you been doing all this time".

As for me? If the day ever comes when I truly cannot keep up - no money, no time, no strength left - I will not ask anyone to stop the calendar. I will close the site. Quietly, with a bow. Because that, too, is a way of showing respect to the people who came to visit.