To the left is a screenshot the home page - note the main navigation bar (the four buttons in the black header space) does not have a link back to this page – most sections have a link in the sub-navigation bar, but once you click on Forum, for example, you have to re-enter the homepage address into the browser to return.
At the end of the welcome message here, there is an update announcing the number of members of the website, as well as new moderators and a post count. The date of this update, however, is the same as the copyright at the bottom of the page: 2009 (Oddly, the forum is copyrighted through this year, but this side was neglected.). There are a couple of other signs of neglect, such as the success story page, where Micheloud encourages his followers to submit their stories - but only one other than his own is displayed. Either Micheloud is very picky, or they just aren’t contributing that much because there is very little user-generated content on this side. After seeing a thread on the forum side suggesting that even the forum users didn't know what happened to him, I did a Google search to find if he was simply too busy being successful elsewhere to keep up on his site. Other than discovering that he is in the Swiss banking business and has several other websites that don't seem to have been updated since 2009, there is no news of his doings. It was suggested that I find out whether he even owned HTLAL anymore - and he does not. Fabien Snauwaert, a Frenchman who owns a website about learning English and has published a book on that topic, seems to be the sole contact for HTLAL. He does not show up anywhere on the site, and if he is a contributor to the forums, he uses another name; this does not help my opinion of the safety of this website.
The Guide section has a lot of great, general information, again generated pretty much solely by Micheloud. He includes tips and tricks on the learning process, a list (in English) of the most important phrases to learn in another language, and a full e-book about Mezzofanti, a famous polyglot. The offerings are a bit esoteric, but nothing too out of the ordinary. It is clear when Micheloud uses phrases such as, "there's no rule written on a stone" that English isn't quite his first language, but he is clear enough to be well-understood.
Though Micheloud does not actually include much learning material on his site, he does include a profile for 21 language, ranking them by popularity, difficulty, transparency, GDP, income, number of speakers, and number of countries it is spoken in. They are ordered by popularity, which does not seem to directly correlate with any of the other statistics, but instead is based on his visitations to shops that sell foreign-language materials. This seems like a very loose guideline, and many people seem to have written in regarding their own opinions on where their language should be ranked, but the information is interesting, nonetheless.
The pictures on the far right side of the page are placed directly where and in the same format that one would expect advertisements to be. As such, I hardly paid any attention to them for several visits. When I looked closer, however, I found links to other sections on the web page. I still have not clicked on them, out of confusion and fear that they still may be spam, but they seem to be legitimate.
Compared to the forum side of the webpage, this website looks a bit trashy and very suspicious. If I hadn't discovered the robust nature of the forum side first, I probably would have left - too much of it looks like what I would consider spam.
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