CGHUB|PPP2

I've been an active CGHub user for quite few years now, since it was website full of stunning work created by professional artists. I treated my profile like a portfolio, with only best work getting uploaded. I also had quite a lot great artists followed and many great pieces fav'd. I found news of CGHub being shut quite sad.
It started by simply redirecting people to CGhugs (ad website), there was no notice or clear explanation, which is bad, especially since premium memberships were introduced only month ago. Team Shakuro posted a short entry on their FB profile.

We are getting tons of emails and from the comments to our recent post we think that we need to clarify some things and answer the most common questions.

1. Team Shakuro was NOT associated with Full Spectrum Digital, LLC - a company that ran CGHUB.com. We were actually only responsible for development and of course were not authorized to make decisions like shutting the project down. That also means that we were not making money from ads, pro accounts and so on.
However, since the real owners prefer to keep low profiles we are the only ones on the surface (to blame).
2. We were caught completely unprepared. It was as simple as: “Guys, it’s over”.
Why the shutdown was like this and without prior notification – we have no answer to this question and that’s also beyond our understanding.
3. Even though it wasn’t our decision to close the project, it was us who tried to reach the community with at least a bit of explanation of what was going on.
And we are really sorry to see comments like “I am going to stay away from anything Shakuro will produce in future”, “Unprofessional” and so on … and we hope that they are made out of misunderstanding of the situation.
4. We tried every single option to keep the community running including buying it out, selling to somebody else, even pausing … it didn’t work.
5. Again the reason is completely personal. The project had a very bright future, we were beating our traffic records on monthly basis, had a perfect team and tons of ideas and even a couple of satellite projects in mind.
Situation in Crimea, hackers, SSL bug, aliens have nothing to do with the project closure. The servers and were based in the US and were secure. Management team was in US as well. Absolutely nothing is going on in Crimea that would prevent us from doing our business. 

CGHub wasn't perfect, didn't had a nice forum community like conceptart.org, but had by far the best art library with a really good browsing system. Now, many artists have to move back to Deviantart or DrawCrowd (or just use Facebook, which I personally find a bit unprofessional). Luckily, Team Shakuro may be able to bring another art platform soon. After all, MangaBullet and Anipan haven't lasted ages either, but their creators are still working hard on other projects;).