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What has happened to Alpine Zone?

deadheadskier

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Sounds like somebody needs to lean harder on some other mountains! :wink:

You'd think any of the Peaks resorts would be willing to step of by now...
Lot of moving parts. The biggest thing is Sugarloaf doesn't require a room block. So, the deal gets offered to us with no guarantee on our end regarding attendance. Zero risk.

Other places that have been spoken with in the past include Killington, Sugarbush and Jay. All packages were more expensive and required room blocks.

Now that Peaks owns Hunter, maybe they are worth a look. I don't think many AZ members are going to have an interest in Mountain Snow or Attitash on weekends. Wildcat would be great, but no lodging options are tied to the ski area. You would need to stay at Attitash

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WJenness

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A site *like this*?

I'll let other with more direct knowledge comment. The key to maintaining profitability is probably the lack of reinvestment. If you believe this isn't a growth market, then financially your best decision is to keep it on life support and keep cashing the checks. As you mention, ad blockers have eliminated most of the up side. That's why most newspapers are paywalled when in the past they were freely available.

I can speak with some experience on the economics of well maintained, modern ski forum site. It loses money every month. I've been keeping an eye on the bottom line and believe the key to long-term sustainability will be to derive some alternative revenue stream besides the primary ad-supported content. I have to pay for a modern software platform, stable cloud-based hosting, mobile apps, promotions, and content development. If you don't have a passion for it, then it's not worth the effort. Which brings up back to a *site like this*.

I just whitelisted your site in my adblocker.

Hopefully it helps, even a little.

-w
 

Nick

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Hey guys, Summit IS happening, I have been talking with Sugarloaf. Expect an announcement by mid-october(ish). Yes I will be heading north from sunny Florida (haha, never thought I'd move here but here I be!) to ski with you guys.

I've been MIA obviously. We moved, my wife's business is all-consuming. I got laid off from my job in June and started a new one and it's been ridiculously busy. I've been traveling a ton for work which makes my schedule crazy.

When I started with AZ I had a job that required ..well.. minimal input. I also didn't have any kids. So I could spend the entire day just dicking around in the forums with everyone. Right now I'm just not at that phase, and I apologize for not communicating clearly what is going on.

I can promise to keep the servers running, the software updated (including the mobile apps) , and the summit going, so we all have a place to chat and go. AZ isn't changing, going away, or anything like that; it's just I won't be as active in sitting online arguing about whether or not to bring back GSS. :lol:

Anyways -hope you guys are doing awesome. If something on the site is borked shoot me an email and i'll check it out. nick@alpinezone.com.
 

Nick

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Not to mention the SkiMRV site has ben down for months. When are they going to fix that?

I just logged in there and it is resolving, what is happening on skimrv? I know we had an issue for a while with it being blacklisted because of some hack but that was fixed
 

Nick

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<------- Had to look that term up



Agreed. Just for proper functionality. I miss entering all the contests he used to run too (even though I only ever won 1 of them).

That's the part that's really tough for me right now. I apologize for that.

Running contest, the AZ Challenge, even getting the posts up in the news site. That took me hours every single day and was a manual process.
 

cdskier

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I just logged in there and it is resolving, what is happening on skimrv? I know we had an issue for a while with it being blacklisted because of some hack but that was fixed

Try clicking on a thread. You'll get a database error. This started a few months after it was fixed for that hack.


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teleo

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Oct 6, 2008
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Try clicking on a thread. You'll get a database error. This started a few months after it was fixed for that hack.


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Skimrv has been dead for months. Check the last post date there. Would be nice to see it back, but with such a long outage, not sure it can be revived.
 

Glenn

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Oct 1, 2008
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Good to see you back Nick! Sounds like a lot of activity. Hang in there.
 
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