Coppercoins.com has now been online for 6 years and is flourishing far beyond my expectations. More support has been poured into this site than I had ever imagined. Some 100 collectors use this site on a regular basis, and nearly ten times that number use it more infrequently. To date we have had over 100,000 unique visits to the site. The book I wrote to companion the site, "Looking Through Lincoln Cents," is now in its second edition. Combined with the first edition, more than 2,500 copies have sold worldwide.

   The initial purpose of this website was to list all of the doubled dies and repunched mintmarks I had in my collection, then to keep track of and continue listing new purchases and coins for other collectors so ALL collectors would be able to use a photographic online reference to identify their own die varieties. One of the most important reasons why this site was initiated was to bring a new light to collecting die varieties in allowing collectors to identify their own coins rather than have to send everything in with a check for identification - that service has existed with other sources for years and is not fair to the collectors.

   Unfortunately opening an attribution service on coppercoins.com has led us into a serious problem - we have been sent more coins than we can deal with and still get the site finished to the point that it needs to be at to call it complete. Every time we find the time to work on something related to the site it ends up being attributions instead of listing the coins in the coppercoins master files so you, the collector, can identify your own coins. We are backed into a corner trying to dig ourselves out, and simply cannot do it with a backlog of photos and coins from other people. We need time to work on the coins we have here and finish the very long awaited new version of the web site. Only then will we be properly prepared to deal with new submissions. Once we get the site to where it needs to be, we will open the attribution services up to what we expect to be a far lighter crowd since most of the information submittors are looking for is sitting right here waiting to be done. We are involved in a catch 22 - we have the information you are looking for here already but cannot get it done because other work is inbound all the time.

   I have learned over the past few months to start reprioritizing my life and the things that need to be done to make this site and all its related entities a success. I have decided to stop taking new web development work because it is taking up too much time for what I can afford. I have also stopped teaching for the better part, because it too was detrimental to the completion of this work. My main focus at this point is working on the attribution guide (which is far behind) and working on taking care of the mess of coins I have here - because I have spent far too long accumulating and not collecting.

   Through this period of time Bob is going to assist me in cleaning up the backlog of coins, working on the new site features and programming, and working on his own business. In case you don't know, Bob has never been paid for any of his work here - he is a volunteer, and the money taken in for attributions is the only pay he has ever received for his work, and although it may seem like attribution is a simple task, it is indeed grueling work when our source material is disorganized and our communication lacks because of this.

   It shouldn't be surprising that attributing coins is not easy work, even if all the source material were organized. Often times, hours can be spent to identify one coin (for $2 - changed to $3 for the future). We do it for the love of the hobby, not for the money - obviously. I believe, however, that we are doing a disservice to ourselves, the collectors, and to the hobby by becoming more of an attribution warehouse than working on what we set out initially to complete - this site.

    With all this to wit, we are shutting down attribution services until at least May of 2006, and will not be accepting any attribution packages except in rare occasions when we ask for specific dies to fill the gaps we are working on. Once we complete all we have here, it will be very obvious why I decided to make this move. The site will be in its new version, new features will be enabled, and far more (and better) information will be at your fingertips - and those packages you were considering sending in might not be necessary at all because we may very well have answered your questions and provided the information you need with the work we will be doing.