A lot of my friends will know that I’ve been on CIX for yonks. I actually joined in April 1990, to get a screen driver for Borland’s Quattro. In those days there were a lot of official support conferences – WordPerfect and Netware were my income streams at the time, and there was huge amounts of help available.
Gradually I got sucked into the social side of it, bought Ameol from Steve Palmer, became an Ameol moderator (none of this will mean anything to most people), left Ameol moderating, went back to it. In all, I did support for them for about six years, I think.
But it ain’t, by a long chalk, what it was, and this morning I suddenly decided “enough, already”, and mailed them to cancel my account. They have mailed back and asked why, and this is what I told them:
“Anyhoo, if CIX wants to keep its customers – and let us not forget that’s what we are, especially to TPTB – they need to give us a decent pricing model, and manage the system properly.
“CIX needs new blood, and it won’t get it. Nobody now would want a text-based system, no matter how much we all love it. Nobody – NOBODY – is going to pay £7.50 or whatever per month for an online service, when Gmail/MSN/Yahoo/Flickr/LJ/”Facebook/infinite numbers of fora can be accessed for free. And anyone who did might take a look at CIX and be completely intimidated by its cliquiness.
“I have been on CIX since April 1990, and I have loved it – it’s been a huge part of my life, and has brought me a lot of work over the years. But it’s not any more, and I’m just tired of reading roman and strum and all the other entrenched arguments; everyone pretty much knows everyone else’s point of view, and I find myself marking more and more as Ignored.
“And at that point, it’s time to go. I’ll miss it, I expect, but my CIX time is over. I shall go Into the West 🙂
“You have a dying system there, and I don’t believe there is anything TPTB can do to save it – it’s a dinosaur in today’s online world, sadly. And, to be frank, I don’t believe that the owners care one jot about it, and haven’t done for many years. All very sad.
And so – that’s it. I do feel quite sad, though.
I also left today – I found your post when looking for the email address to resign with! I loved it in the early days but gradually found I was using it less and less. What kept me in till now was the free fax and voicemail services, but they did not justify the cost and the aggravation of finding it hard to get to a reasoned discussion without idiocy predominating.