The excuse for shutting down the site is:
mcxNOW is shutting down for a period of time
Withdraw all your coins before December 20th
mcxNOW has seen unprecedented growth in recent months and especially in the last few weeks. mcxNOW is a custom coded exchange built 100% by one man in C++ . This means if anything has to be modified then only one person can do it.
Unfortunately the growth has been too fast to match with the support requirement as only one person can currently do all support. This is a burden of 200 to 400 emails a day among many requests on IRC and through chat. This makes development of mcxNOW nearly impossible without neglecting valid user requests through support.
I am happy that in over 7 months mcxNOW has not been hacked or lost any coins and that the exchange has scaled well from 100 users upto a peak of about 3500 users online at once, it shows the design here is pretty good. However I never anticipated some aspects of running an exchange that are quite important (ie. support) so I need to work on this before allowing the site to grow.
There is so much wrong with that it's not funny. Firstly all you have to do halt growth, is stop new account registrations, not stop providing a service altogether. Secondly you implement a support ticketing system that several people have access to, as most support queries will be the same basic stuff over and over that doesn't require RS to answer.
It takes like a few hours to install one of the numerous open source support ticketing systems and have it polling an email box, I have done it many times.
Lastly to suspend the trading of all coins without even a days warning is just wrong.
I posted earlier how it looked suspicious to me that the trading volumes were
sky high during the period he was raising funds, and after his fund raising was over the volumes plummeted to 3-4 BTC traded per day for most coins (i have noted the actual numbers in another thread).
I also wonder, if he was struggling with support and couldn't cope how is it ethical to sell a ton of shares to raise funds, knowing he is going to have to shut the site down? Would many people have bought those shares knowing he was going to have to shut it down? I very much doubt it.