The Old Lessons are gone and so is my 10 year Diamond membership

I joined this site 10 years ago because of the Chess Mentor Lessons.  I chose diamond for unlimited access to them and faithfully renewed my membership each and every year because I continued to find them the most valuable resource here.  Not all of us are big fans of video instruction.  Some of the more difficult courses I've done dozens of times and was happily looking forward to doing again.  I'm sure that I wasn't the first premium member to let their membership lapse over this but I'm even more certain that I won't be the last... 

Lucky thing you weren't able to renew in January.

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/community/chess-com-giveth-and-chess-com-taketh-away

I agree,

With all the wonderful upgrades and improvements chess.com has implemented over the years, I was looking forward to more of the same in the future. Eliminating the old lessons has to be the most boneheaded and backward decision they've ever made. I'm sure a lot of premium members will either downgrade or cancel entirely due to this.

Some of those courses like the roots of positional understanding were challenging and super instructive.I miss them and find the new format to be very watered down.Also a lessons rating does not change if one correctly "solves"the new lessons.

Glad to hear others feel the same.  I actually thought about closing my account over this but I have a next generation 3x faster SquareOff coming this summer and so far Chess.com is the only site it works with.  I'll probably even have to pony up for a premium to get it to work right, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.  Thanks again for the support.

Have they actually removed the old lessons completely? When did this happen? I was looking at them just a couple of weeks ago

Loved the roots of positional understanding as well, Silmans strategy courses were great also. Its a shame if they truly are gone.

I  never took an "Old Lesson" as far as I recall.   But I've taken the New Lessons.  And they are fun and enjoyable.  

So I have no basis of comparing the two.  Just curious.  What makes the old lessons better than the new lessons? 

Agreed. Many people prefer text and move style lessons? Some were brilliant... the KID and Sicilian courses and Champion games. And what about classic mono analysis? Sweet and simple. As somebody who often consider going premium... the lion be not impressed. 

I'm afraid so.  Actually I can't check anymore, since I no longer have diamond...LOL.  But yes, the link was gone yesterday; I think it's been gone for a few days now.  And while diamond can access the new lessons, platinum and gold are out of luck since they are all tied to video presentations.  I'm not the only unhappy camper at the jamboree....

A little history might put this in perspective.  About a dozen years ago there was a stand alone digital product called Chess Mentor which purported to not only teach various chess subjects via text and diagrams, but would test you on them as well.  The cool thing is that the authors tried to anticipate wrong answers and had a ready response to most of them explaining where your thinking was flawed.  Some authors put a lot more work into it than others of course, so the results were mixed, but when it worked, it worked brilliantly.

Erik purchased the company and folded it into Chess.com.  The somewhat clunky interface was modernized and many new courses were introduced with very high standards for wrong answer explanations.  Because there were so many courses and no real organized way to approach them, A study plan was introduced that organized a subset of the courses into a manageable curriculum.

The new lessons are essentially a watered down version of the old Study Plan with video presentations.  Now don't get me wrong, I've done the new Lessons and they were well done and a lot of fun.  But there is simply no comparison to the Old Lessons as far as breadth and depth are concerned.  Do you have an idea now why we're so unhappy?

I have a better idea, yes.

Even if I didn't,  I don't understand why it would be a technological impossibility to restore the old lessons.  

But I'm not an engineer so I'll defer to those who know better than I.

Chess mentor was touted as the next best thing in those days with even Silman waxing lyrical.  It could have prevented the nCoV for all we know. 

http://www.chessmentor.com/

But that's OK.  We have flairs and badges now. 

Interesting thread.

We could award you a "bring them back" badge instead.  How does that sound? 

Perhaps a celebrity guru or hacker type... might have them on file and like, you know, upload them somewhere... or... stuff.

Sorry we've replaced our programmers with graphic designers to save on opex.  So what new flairs and badges and themes would you like? 

- chief dissolution architect