CUEW Triad

Since CFFN began with a fully formed tradition, there was no addition of new material as the founder learned new things, something we saw in a lot of our early competition. There was the addition of clarification as we noticed our students, and the students of other people, making certain mistakes regularly. A CFFN student is pretty much never going to make the "Wiccan rede means harm none," mistake, for example.
Our limit in scope (part one) meant we were immune from becoming a big monster, trying to handle an online and offline school, videos, merchandise, and the rest-and that meant we could focus on the lessons, not on selling more stuff or adding more appeal. CFFN was never a marketing scheme, so we never had to add stuff to keep people. Indeed, our goal was to get (the students) them in, get them through and, ideally, get them to a position where we were not needed anymore. People brag about having been in some online covens for five or six years. While we have some CFFNers like that (and we love them) they know it's not ideal, the ideal thing is to do it in under 2 years, go into the 3rd circle if you desire and have a foundation in practice for the rest of their lives regardless.
In some ways, sticking to what we taught, not what was hip at the time was very limiting. There are some things I'd love to add to the lessons that just haven't had a proper place (bad craft names, using Blessed Be casually, spells versus magic(k), the cultural mileu Wicca started in, etc.) the problem, early on, was separating the stuff a good UEWiccan must know from the stuff a good UEWiccan could pick up from osmosis.
The problem of the knowledge gap-friends have heard that rant often-is very severe here, we could not, in the limited format of CFFN (see part one scope) give students all of the knowledge they need to be (what I have elsewhere termed) the intellectual HAVES. We had to do our best to give students the tools they needed to come to the "light side" of the knowledge gap while allowing them to pick knowledge up on their own.
Initially, this was accomplished by pushing more students to publically share with the group the sum total of their work, but we noticed a trend....some students were waiting to see what other people submitted before submitting their own work. It wasn't always cheating, sometimes it was fear that they'd done the assignment incorrectly, but it still was against the way it needed to be...so we changed it (with some improvements, at the loss of a few benefits.)
Another problem we had early on (especially before the passwords) was the idea that the hierarchy of UEW had top secret keys to the kingdom (or as I call them Kingdom Keys) and that we were going to reveal them once you reached the magic super level of whatever....
(Watch me be silly about Kingdom Keys: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfywqTc4RPw )
We actually had a small schism about this. There were scary people involved, and this would come as a result of the FIRST time I tried to "fair and equitably distribute power" (IE: Take the load off myself.) The second time I tried to fair and equitably distribute power resulted in a schism that resulted in an ethics question in the second circle about being seen as complicit in someone's wackjob UPG out of a fear of offending. No names are named for a reason.
It was obvious constancy was not enough, so we tried to become more transparent. You cannot even get to the CFFN how-to join page without reading a fairly extensive "what we are and what we offer" section.
That's not to say they don't kingdom keys on occassion, but the ones who do are much fewer and further between.
It was actually in this the most that we benefited from the "we will make you a witch" websites. They offered glamour, glitz, merit badges, long titles and "real magick©" and we would happily point those that wanted such nonsense in their direction. As other (some quite wacky) groups developed, CFFN, an old lady by internet standards (We're only months younger than witchvox, for example) was allowed to go about her business and do as she would.
Without the consistancy of the lessons (oatmeal like) and the transparancy of what were were teaching, we, too, would've ballooned up to an enormous size and ended up collapsing, as so many "rivals" have.

Our constantness did have some enormous benefits, however. When Triumph of the Moon came out and pretty much said THE EXACT THING we'd said all along in our lessons (ours was the result of knowing people who knew people who knew people, not doing historical research, but we KNEW our sources were good) we went from being the tiny minority of modernists to the majority. We didn't say I told you so though (well not that much!)

CFFN has been credited with some very good things: The affirmation of acknowledgement (ours) UPG (not ours, but we like it) the idea that all Wiccans are not Witches (again, not ours, but we like it) and broadening the idea of Wicca.
We've also been blamed for things we had nothing to do with (People like Silver Ravenwolf) and sometimes for stuff we just can't figure out (For example, we've been told that the visualization exercises are "too advanced magically" for beginners and that we turn out Wiccans who can't figure out the basics of magic, and we've been told that we're teaching people that Wicca is a narrow defintion that includes only us and teaching people Wicca is whatever you want it to be...)

All of this tells us one thing....you can't please all the people all the time, and if you try to, you're doing it wrong.

Stay tuned for Part three: It's hard to keep a virtual coven running when you can't afford an ISP, and drinking your own damn medicine (Kat goes back to college)