CPF Sold - Under New Management

I did Reddit HiFi 20+ years ago and quickly left. Too progressive and a low signal to noise ratio. I doubt that the progressive commie types are into boutique lights, or even modding cheap shit, but that’s just a guess on my part?

Hobbies ebb and flow and the killer flashlights were a thing a decade ago, but for here, it’s’modding’ and that’s a small subset of the ‘flashlight whole.’

Chris

If DM51 is still a mod there, I sure won’t be going back. And indeed, I suppose I wouldn’t go anyway.

Isn’t this at least the second or third time? I remember being on CPF then years later it was totally changed and I had to re-register and it just wasn’t ass good as it was before (they even switched bb’s. Think it happened a third time. But the original CPF was great.

You’ve been here for one day and you’re wondering why CPF is in trouble?

Chris

I’m still there, after 15 years. I never had trouble but I can see how some might. It’s still a nostalgic trip for me as it’s where my hobby started. I did most of my reviews there too. But unfortunately it’s a bit of a shell now. Still nice to visit but not a place to hang out a lot.

CPF looks uglier than before, and still on downhill route.

One really positive thing i see is ability to upload pics, former pic posting policy was PIA.

oh come on, it’s much better now.
The old forum was very slow and 1990-looking, and lacking a lot of basic functionality from newer forums.

This forum is on the same path as well.
It still uses Drupal 7 which had end-of-life like 15 years ago, with some forum module that is likely not maintained anymore, that’s why an upgrade would require programming work.
And even the latest Drupal is on the path to its death, along with PHP hopefully. We have multicore processors for years. These outdated languages were made for single-cpu, single-thread era. There are modern languages that natively support multi-threading, and with a much better syntax as well.

For websites multithreading is not necessary. Makes more sense for backend services. But websites have a lot of parallel requests. Webservers usually work with a worker thread pool accepting the requests and delegating the script execution to another thread pool that runs the php processes and does all the work. So even with “outdated php” you have most of the benefits of parallel execution.

Websites are not just ‘websites’ anymore.
It’s true that you only need it for the back-end (doh), but what it is more efficient, to spawn a PHP process for each visitor from Apache, php-fpm or whatever, and run out of memory after 100 concurrent visits, or handle this efficiently in the language itself ?
And what if you need to do some image processing, its not uncommon for people to upload images. Wouldn’t it be better to be able to have full control over that in the most efficient way?

No idea what infrastructure sb is using but autoscaling is so easy today that running out of memory should only happen when you run out of money

This is blatant misinformation. Please stop with the uninformed speculation. The most recent release of Drupal 7.x was 10 days ago, and I patched BLF with the update on the same day that it came out. And before that the previous release of Drupal 7.x was on 2021-06-02, in fact that’s why BLF usually goes offline for a few minutes on Wednesdays while I apply updates on Drupal’s normal maintenance release cadence:
https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/releases/
The forum functionality used here is an official, core module in Drupal 7. And then I use another module to add additional functionality and theming called Advanced Forum, which is also supported by the official Drupal security team (confirm that by mousing over the shield icon on its project page).

kat’s comments on PHP are also either uninformed or disingenuous. SammysHP’s explanation is the correct one. BLF uses the industry standard software stack for higher performance websites, with Nginx and PHP-FPM (both having multiple worker processes), plus the core PHP opcache, Redis cache, and a static HTML cache for anonymous visitors. And be that what it may, kat’s suggestion that using a PHP-based forum software somehow puts BLF at a disadvantage is ludicrous, just look at this table of the most common forum software, both open source and proprietary, and notice what 80% of them use:

Well, my bad then… I haven’t worked with Drupal in 15 years, and I was just curious about it and saw their latest major version was 9, so I assumed they let go 7.
My opinion on it, and PHP software in general stands. It’s old, inefficient software based on outdated technology that continues to survive in the same form only because many websites are unable to switch to better options for one reason or another.

it’s easy because it’s a trade-off, just like with everything easy.
And you are not just trading $$. You also trade control and independence

I was somewhat active on there for several years and never had a negative experience. I know a lot of people had conflicts on there so hopefully this will be a new chapter.

I’ve just enjoyed BLF the past couple years much more and stopped visiting CPF.

I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but that shouldn’t be conflated with the potential future success or downfall of any forum. What makes or breaks a forum is 1) the userbase, and 2) the moderation and administration.

Going back to software specifically for internet forums, the only modern and viable alternative on that list not based on PHP is Discourse.

That’s not entirely true. Modern alternatives have a completely different concept, that’s why you don’t see them listed anywhere.
In the old days, someone had to build an entire app (like a forum) almost from scratch and had to write hundreds of thousands of lines of code, like the interaction with the database engine, the rendering on the user-end.
After all that work, it made sense to either sell the software or share it as open-source.

Today you build a similar app, with even more interactivity with just a few thousand lines.
You don’t need to do all that work anymore because of libraries and frameworks.
And it doesn’t make sense to sell it or share it because so little actual work is involved compared to old apps, that everyone prefers to build tailor-made apps, specific for the website on which they are intended to run

Although I prefer BLF over CPF and that’s why I am here, we mustn’t forget the significant contributions the CPF community has made to the flashlight hobby.

This is all about the flashlights, its not the Mets vs the Yankees.

Interesting! (Wont be going back though even if I’m not super active in here either)

I read sometimes here yes, but rarely post nowadays :slight_smile:

Oh, just noticed I missed my own 10year party :partying_face: