Funny you should mention this. I just received an e-mail from Eli with the "friendly" suggestion that they would renew my subscription automatically. I had just renewed prior to their purchase of Foxtalk. I am tempted to forward a copy of this to the NJ Attorney General. (When I first googled Eli after starting to get all the renewal letters, I found reference to an action that the Florida Atty General is taking against them.)

I subscribe to Pinnacle's SQL newsletter, and it was gutted in the same way. Time has come to call Eli and talk to them about the 100% Satisfaction Guarantee they keep mentioning in their e-mails.

Glad to hear that CoDe is picking up some of the SQL newsletter writers -- there used to be good stuff there.

Steve

>FWIW...
>
>This looks like it happened to all of its pubs. The Access, SQL and Oracle ones all made the shift.
>
>Good news for CoDe is we picked up some of the key writers for the SQL Server newsletter.
>
>BTW... The stuff that ELI is doing is probably illegal with the auto renewal threats. If you didnt authorize the charge... charge them back. The credit card companies will stomp them.
>
>Rodman
>
>
>>I have been watching the threads regarding Eli Publishing, the new owner of the Journal foxTalk. I can only concur with others' reactions about Eli's marketing tactics as well as their destruction of what I had found to be useful VFP journal.
>>
>>I have corresponded in the past year with Rainer Becker, the former editor of FoxTalk, regarding the German FoxPro user group's framework, Visual Extend, and he has always been extremely helpful. I recently shared with Rainer my frustration about what happened to FoxTalk, he sent me back a long note, and he encouraged me to paraphrase his comments and share them with others in the VFP community. Here are Rainer's comments about what happened to FoxTalk -- I had surmised that Eli had trashed the magazine:
>>
>>
>>You guessed correctly.... The new owner promised that all editors
>>and authors would continue to be involved with FoxTalk, but the
>>very first day after Pinnacle sold the newsletter to Ely, they
>>cancelled each and every contract with 30 days notice This
>>included contracts with editors and authors as well as layout
>>people and such. There is absolutely nobody left from the
>>original team. The new editor, Jonathan Rabson, is not known
>>to the FoxPro community, but as they then cancelled his budget
>>for authors completely, he had to write everything himself.
>>Many of the former well-known authors have still not signed
>>the new author contracts -- and it is not very likely that
>>they ever will.
>>
>>The original agreement between Pinnacle and me was that after
>>a given period of time I will take over the magazine completly
>>and relaunch it with a new website adding access to our thousands
>>of pages of international/English content related to Visual
>>FoxPro. I already added the complete archive of FoxTalk to our
>>portal. But Ely ended this process. So there is nothing left
>>from the original plans I had announced at a Podcast with
>>Andrew McNeill last year.
>>
>>....There is no way any more to take over and make it a
>>successful FoxPro publication. Instead I plan to publish
>>a series of books with the former authors of FoxTalk.
>>
>>
>>I find it amazing that a publisher would gut a technical publication and imagine that readers could possibly want to continue subscribing. In the case of the VFP community we knew and respected the people who had written for FoxTalk over the years. By the way, the same thing has happended to Pinnacle's SQL Server newsletter.
>>
>>Steve