A description of AWC's problems are in the Owner's own words

• The owners plea for Lifetime members donations in June 2010 outlined the basics – not enough money coming in had forced them to lay off virtually all staff. The site's primary traffic was non-cash generating Lifetime Members.
• A year ago the Owners promised big and good things for the site, but no one, not even Ops, has seen evidence that anything is or has happened to improve or change the lot of AWC since that announcement in Sept 2010. Appropriately, the link on the announcement page is dead.
• Both documents are featured prominently on the Home page of the website
• We have a post on the message board by one of the Ops the ONLY time anyone engaged in operating the site has even seen Ownership was a brief visit during the year – in which they said nothing.

Alexa – the premier internet traffic authority – reveals that the website's daily traffic has been in free fall ever since:

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  Overall – daily traffic is 1/4^th what it when the request was made of members for donations.
  • In the most recent quarter, site traffic has been falling by over 25% each month!
  • And as each month passes, the revenue from pay as you go members (AWC's only source of income) also continues to decline. Simple math makes it clear the cash flow has to be almost gone at this pont.
  • There is no evidence Owners are or can subsidize the site or to what purpose that would be.
• AWC is totally dependent on the generosity of the volunteer Ops and Mods right now, but soon if trends go unabated even THAT will not be enough. .
• An unscientific survey of on line activity conducted over the last month suggests that n0n0cash generating Lifetime members STILL dominate what traffic is coming in.

The question is with traffic/active membership plummeting how much longer will it be until the few month-to-month subscribers will fail to pay the operating expenses of the site.

• As of Sept 2011 we are at roughly 25% of the traffic that forced the owners to lay off virtually everyone because there wasn't enough money coming in with about 4 times more revenue. .

These facts painful for me to report – I wish it weren't so. .

Those in AWC-The Sequel who have looked have reported that they have not found existing website alternatives that meet or exceed the mix of features the members of AWC have come to enjoy. Others are working on other alternatives that offer the potentil for a different feature set, time will tell how viable these may become.

Does anyone care to guess how much time left we have before AWC becomes 503 (Internet error code for File Server Not Found)?