Thanks to those who are correct that I no longer have anything to do with advertising decisions or technology responsibility. I am however, a member just like you and have certainly passed along to IB, your concerns and suggestions to remedy them sooner than later. But, while i think the general membership has been very pleased with what we accomplished over the years, we had our rough spots in earlier years and did make a few mistakes. We tried hard not to repeat them and of course you all saw to that!

It is my hope that IB understands it might be best to learn from the mistakes we made and that way they don't need to make them. But, sometimes companies just need to test themselves. The entire team of HOM and myself will continue to assist you where we can and at the end of the day, we all have the same goals in mind - FlyerTalk as a healthy and welcome place to learn everything we need to know about miles, point and travel in general.

And despite any appearance of black helicopters, there has never been an aggressive plan to use the Premium Services as anything more than a customer service. In fact, that idea was not even original to myself or InsideFlyer magazine, it was original to the members themselves who thought out loud on remedies for using FlyerTalk while at work when in earlier foopahs there was that stupid duck shooting ad with sound.

And that income stays here at InsideFlyer, to do what it did for funding the start of FlyerTalk, this time it is being spent to launch yet another helpful tool for frequent flyers. Look no farther than boardingarea.com for that when it launches in the next month.

So while i can excuse IB for making some of the very same mistakes we made many years ago, i like you, will hold them to a very fast learning curve.