Chesscafe.com

What happened at Chesscafe? The site all but disappeared for five months with promises of a relaunch. The target for the relaunch was moved back several times, as recorded on the English Chess Forum in a thread titled Chesscafe.com.

The regular early February updates have been replaced by a message 'Look for a new column when we relaunch in May' [...] It seems the 'relaunch' date has been put back to June now. [...] Now it's July. [...] They don't specify a year.

I understood that the 'relaunch' would somehow involve a redesign, but when the site again started updating its columns earlier this month, the look hadn't changed. In any case, a redesign might require taking the site down for a few hours -- worst case a day or two -- but never for a few months. One sure way to kill a web site is by neglecting to update it.

As I wrote in The Best of ChessCafe and Chess History Cat Fight, the site has never been one of my favorites, but I would still be sorry to see it disappear completely.