? ? This is incredible! It seems to have stopped - 1 month before the year
? is
? ? up! After this month, the site would be practically looking after
? itself.
? ? But may be nobody joined after the price was put up too high?
? ? I'd love to know, why nobody answers our emls.
? ? g l to yous all, siegrun
?
? Signs of this have been coming for a very long time. If you read the
? previous posts here (which won't take all that long since there are only a
? few hundred), the writing on the wall has been there since the beginning.
?
? There has really only been spotty engagement by Tony Kosten and Nathan
? Goldberg. Nobody else involved with the site has ever done anything other
? than post their content whenever the whim struck them.
?
? I had such high hopes for this site, which I have stated many times. I
? have tried, more times than I should have, to communicate to those running
? the show here that a successful web-based business still requires all the
? same customer service commitments that a regular retail business does.
?
? It seems pretty obvious the hope was to put up a site that has a lot of
? static content, not differentiate it from the dozens of other sites out
? there that do pretty much the same thing for free, and then somehow a
? large customer base would magically appear and start sending them lots of
? money.
?
? Well, to no great surprise, that isn't happening. As we near the end of
? the first year they are now approaching the biggest juncture in their
? business and probably don't even know it. All the most interested
? customers they have, the ones that expressed interest and signed up before
? the site even opened, are now going to have to decide (if the site even
? stays open) whether or not to renew their subscription.
?
? One of the most basic laws in business is that it is much easier to keep a
? customer than it is to replace one. As shocking as it is to watch, they
? are making the decision for all of us.

This is all very disheartening. I really enjoyed doing the exercises and, to be honest, my chess has improved through doing them faithfully since the site opened. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens.