A lot of the guys were at the Olympiad, and/or World Junior, when it is very difficult to find the time to do anything else (for serious coaches/competitors both events are quite exhausting), but I think they are all trying to catch up now.
If anyone has any good ideas on how to force them to produce their updates on time (without losing them!), we sure would be interested!

It would be much better to have the "October" update (regardless of the date of games included) arrive in October, IMO. I always assumed that was how it worked. 

Even accounting for a one-month lag in updates, right now August is the latest update we have from Chris Ward, John Fedorowicz, Gary Lane, Victor Mikhalevski, and John Emms--which is about half the site, and we're halfway through October.

I like the site, though. Hope it remains commercially viable.

Tony, my apologies for the misunderstanding. I (perhaps rather naively) simply assumed that the month titles meant that the updates would be released that month, regardless of when the games were played. That certainly placates some of my concerns, such as the fact that some September updates have not yet been released. However, the fact that Chris Ward's August update came out in the beginning of October is quite troubling. Surely it doesn't take 4 weeks to annotate 6 games!     ???

Once again, I want to make it clear that, unlike some other, more disgruntled members, I am not about to cancel my subscription and I have every intention of renewing when my subscription expires in December. However, I feel certain improvements could be made to the site in order to increase customer satisfaction.

Since I don't know how often (if at all) the webmaster or whomever is in charge of subscriptions checks this forum, it is probably best to send an e-mail to either support@chesspublishing.com or enquiries@chesspublishing.com

  Cannot wait for the latest updates....might die of old age

It's been a year since I posted my original concern about the timeliness of the updates. Let's see how we've done for the last year:

Dec 2003 Updates (5 groups): French, Dragons, Open Sicilians, King's Indian, Nimzo & Benoni
Jan 2004 Updates (6 groups): 1 e4 e5, Anti-sicilians, 1d4 d5, d-pawn specials, Daring Defences, Flank Openings
Feb 2004 Updates (1 group): 1 e4...

I'd say that Dec 2003 updates are 1 month behind schedule, January 2004 are on schedule, and February 2004 is ahead of schedule (since the month is not over yet).

So, in general, we can say that as a whole, there hasn't been much change from last year to this year.

Individually, this is how many updates each of the sites have done in the last year (12 updates should be normal):
1 e4 e5: 12 updates
French: 12 updates
Dragons: 12 updates
Open Sicilians: 12 updates
Anti-sicilians: 11 updates (though let's note that last year this group was ahead of schedule and now it's on schedule).
1 e4...: 12 updates (and continuously ahead of schedule!)
1 d4 d5: 12 updates
d-pawn specials: 13 updates (and on schedule)
King's Indian: 11 updates (and behind schedule) 
Nimzo and Benoni: 12 updates
Daring Defences: 11 updates (same note as anti-sicilians: was ahead of schedule and now on schedule).
Flank Openings: 12 updates

As I said, it's not as bad as I thought. However, once an author falls behind, it's hard to catch up. Somewhere along the line, some subscribers have lost 1 update if they let their subscription expire. 



Quote:

As far as I am concerned, one month is more than enough time to produce an update.

The most recent updates averaged (mean) of 8.42 games.  Whether or not you are busy with tournaments or anything else, I would believe that an update could easily be produced with 8 games.   

For example, let's say you use one night to scan over recent games in your openings area.  You then pick out 8 games that seemed interesting to you that you would like to bring into the update.

Then, you have to annotate your 8 selections.  From my own annotating of others' (not masters though) games, this can easily be done within 2 nights per game and be high quality.  (One night is usually even more than enough for a high quality annotation.)

This means that your workload is not exactly a giant amount for a month and will easily allow for whatever else is going on in your life.  (Not to mention that the masters are getting paid to do these updates!)

NeX iRae