CPF Sold - Under New Management

Everything should be taken in moderation… including moderation. :slight_smile:

Also, thanks for running this forum SB. We appreciate all your work.

By the way, if you want to bug sb, ask him when BLF is getting Drupal 8.

Apparently upgrading to a new version is a real pain in the neck, and I think Drupal 8 isn't really ready for primetime anyway.

I’m a member at CPF, but never felt comfortable enough to post anything. I’ve learned a lot at CPF over the years, but haven’t been over there for quite awhile. I only have so many hours in a week for flashlights and I’ve chosen to spend my time here instead.

Because serious product reviews were a driving force to my CPF membership as a resource, once "Selfbuilt" moved on to other ventures, the standard for high quality, comprehensive reviews went with him. While there certainly is no shortage of review material available, in my opinion, none come close to that which Selfbuilt provided. So it was at that point that CPF became a less appealing resource to visit, and joining BLF made sense for my needs. Plus, SB provides a fantastic platform for the sharing of information especially everything modding related.

Good point.

If the same bunch of toss pot mods still run the place I have literally zero interest.

But better them staying over there than migrating here…

Drupal 8 was released on November 19th, 2015 :smiley:

For forum duty it’s absolutely not viable yet, unfortunately.

Selfbuilt was terrific. His reviews were so thorough and mostly objective. I learned a lot from him. Yeah, recent searches around didn’t turn up anything from him. You say he moved on to other ventures—do you know what they are?

I was very young when I first joined CPF and had great time reading selfbuilt reviews (the gold standard of flashlight reviews), following FIVEMEGA mods for surefire which were my grail lights for many years even though the only surefire I finally decided to get was a hellfire 50 cal HID weapon light, and I remember drooling all over the “post your pelican case setup” thread. There was someone who ran his zebralight in the lowest moon mode for more than a year, I remember following that very closely.

The amount of high end flashlight collectors in CPF was mind blowing, but maybe a bunch of entitled folks didn’t bring the best of harmony to the forum and people like myself didn’t felt at home. I still visit from time to time but the stuff there is just outdated or repeated BLF and reddit content.

Yeah, I understand. Drupal 8 is slow as snot vs 7. No idea how 9 is considering I haven’t worked with Drupal for at least 5 years.
I actually created an account to finally post here to make fun of D8. Maybe I will stop lurking now.

You're going to love it here, SemiNormal!

I'm not sure why, but people refer to me as "Abby Normal."

It seems to be fashionable to bash PHP just because its been so successful. The largest websites/apps in the world use PHP in some for or the other. Just look at Node JS and its pile of crap dependencies. You wake up in the middle of the night and something is broken. For the BLF use case, PHP is just perfect! The PHP speed problem was solved with PHP 7 and PHP 8. It just keeps getting faster. Multi-threading is just a buzz word.

You end up spending $$$ on some new library. Just maintaining it is hell. Successful apps are not those which are totally dependent on some library. That’s something a lazy/greedy developer would want. Build something with all those dependencies and the owner would need to throw it away after 2 years. This is typically how freelancers make money. BLF is smart to keep costs under control and stay profitable. You do that by keeping what works.

You can avoid dependency hell by writing your own libraries for most things.
But ask yourself the question- is it worth it?
The web is evolving very fast, and what you code today doesn’t have to work more than 2 years. Just like with modern cars. You buy one, keep it until warranty expires, then throw it away and get a new one :smiley:
It’s a waste of resources, but keeps the world turning faster and faster

It's been so long Xevious, but if I recall correctly, Selfbuilt left flashlight reviewing behind largely because the time and energy required to put together such comprehensive, high quality, technically demanding reviews, that were also understandable, was taking a toll on his health. To me, it was obvious that he was a perfectionist! So with demands for new product reviews piling up, especially from everyone wanting to see how much more Vinh could squeeze out of his Super Thrower and Lumen Monster mods, I suspect he realized he had other things he wanted to accomplish before it was too late. I do remember that one of those other things was sampling and possibly reviewing Scotch whiskeys. Cigars may have been another, though that's pure speculation. Personally, with all that he brought to the flashlight enthusiasts community, he certainly earned the opportunity to kick back while enjoying a smooth, aromatic, single malt, and perhaps a stogie. Wherever you are Selfbuilt, I do hope you're doing well and enjoying life! For those of you who don't know who Selfbuilt is, or what he brought to the flashlight enthusiast community, checkout his website for yourself by clicking on the following link, http://flashlightreviews.ca/

I wonder, and fear that others like HKJ are heading down the same path.

What he does is clearly a labor of love, with no YouTube channel or Patreon for support, just a website with no advertising and a PayPal address barely mentioned in passing at the bottom of the page.

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Good you are here with us NeutralFan :sunglasses: , Maybe things will improve over there. I started on CPF for a short while until finding BLF.
It is a different world here, so staying here was easier. I still go to CPF occasionally for info only, no posting.
.

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Same experience too.
I asked questions only to be reprimanded for not researching or reading a sticky somewhere that I didn’t know existed.
The last question I asked was deleted, I felt unwelcome and unworthy.
Realized immediately this forum was NOT for newbies like me.
.
But I do wish them well and hope things improve. :beer:

Not just Bort then.
What i wonder is if they have some rationale for how they treat members/newbies, is there some sort of goal they have in mind or logic/ideology behind it?

As others mentioned, the moderators are the problem although that was caused by the forum owner as she chose who would be a moderator. From an interaction with her, she is emotion poor/anti social just like the moderators I interacted with before I told her Spring last year to remove my account and that I would boycott CPF forever. Such people think other such people are quite reasonable and making correct judgements when in fact they do nothing of the sort. This is not just what you see on forums, but in many other places, e.g. in businesses with boards and directors having a certain similar view and appointing similar people, and getting rid of those who don't fit in. The 2 moderators I dealt with are complete morons, and anti-social/emotion poor, which means in particular that they are unable to understand normal use of language. It was interesting/useful as a psychological analysis though, which I placed on my site :)

The only way this could be fixed is not just with the owner being gone, but by removing all the moderators and all power structures/rules, such as how and what to moderate, and start anew. Another possible problem: If the new owner is anything like 'Greta' then nothing will improve.

Why would I or anyone else waste time waiting for a positive change to happen there? Many of those who have been affected left CPF and this means the value of reading/posting there is lower than it was many years ago. Will these posters return? In any case, I won't.

For those who wonder want went on and possibly still goes on, here is my example: After a long time I returned briefly there last year, and I corrected a view about the important points in taillamps, and in another few postings in reply to someone looking for a lens designer I gave some information on the approval process for StVZO bike lamps. What happened:

  1. a moderator tries to correct me about taillamp (design) issues but succeeds only in showing he is autistic, doesn't actually know what impairs vision which he could have known by just doing a test at night and opening his f-ing eyes a few seconds, then made various other inane comments
  2. A 2nd one removed various posts about that approval process and comments about another manufacturer that another commenter wondered about, that were useful/interesting even for the thread starter, but the moderator there felt "It didn't add nearly as much as you thought it did to the thread.". I know exactly what I added, not just to the thread but to general information (threads are NOT just of use to the thread starters!) and just throwing that away as 'unimportant' is typical for these morons.

Just after situation 1 happened another poster sent me a PM about situation 2 in which a few of mine and his posting were removed. He didn't like what was going on but would not leave just yet. I made clear that I would not accept what was going on. Perhaps he is still there but I did read many others left CPF due to the inane moderators. The moderation issue was also what I asked the forum owner here about, right around registering, as I'm not interested in dealing with such nonsense ever again (further, I boycott any sites with too much and especially insane moderation).

And as to search results that the forum owner mentioned quite a while ago: for me the BLF results with duckduckgo are usually higher up than CPF... Someone I talked to a long time ago who also used this search engine that the search results are lacking, but it's good enough for me.