CPF Sold - Under New Management

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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.
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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.

That was the biggest problem there. If you asked a question that was covered in another thread, they lined up to reprimand you. How dare you post without searching first?

In all fairness, this is not only a problem on CPF. I have been on dozens of forums and the all have the same characteristics (no so much on BLF.) The members that have been on the longest and have the most posts basically think they own the place. The owner puts up with their nonsense because they supposedly bring value. Meanwhile they are really destroying the forum one post at a time. Like I said, I don’t see this destructive pattern of behavior on BLF.

For this reason, forums seem to have a finite life. The talented old school folks move on to new hobbies and the forum is left with a bunch of newbies, or as BLF refers to them: muggles.

I want to leave my thoughts of CPF on a positive note.

That would be because of the fine gentlemen name SB…Selfbuilt who was the highlight of my experience there.

I always looked forward to his reviews.I bought a lot of V54 lights in the beginning of my hobby. In regards to V54 lights, I believe the first V54 light he reviewed was the TK61vn then the SC200Cvn.Both of which I had.

I was fortunate to communicate with him several times outside of CPF. He was a gentle,genuine,easy going guy who was well respected and Valuable to the community.He was the HKJ of Flashlight reviews.

I donated several times to his battery fund.It made me feel good to contribute to someone who was so valuable and selfless to the community .

Once he left for his Whiskey reviews CPF was never the same.

Wherever you are SB…I hope all us well up in Canada :+1:

Yep, and in my experience PHP performance issues went away somewhere during the PHP 5.x lifecycle when they added the native opcache module. It makes a massive difference for repetitive procedures that run on every page, almost like running compiled binaries.

As kat mentions, frameworks are the new hotness now. In fact Drupal 8 and 9 feel much more like frameworks than an extensible turnkey CMS, which is what Drupal 6 and 7 were. I’m sure the web development frameworks are great for developers, but I am most emphatically not a developer, and even if I were, it seems insane to create a bespoke forum engine for a flashlight website. And creating it isn’t even the worst part, it’s the maintenance and staying on top of security, which in and of itself could easily turn into a full-time job.

Regarding moderation style, the grievances that many have mentioned aren’t unique to CPF. I use Reddit when necessary but not by choice for some non-flashlight related topics. But I’ve had a terrible experience with posts being arbitrarily pulled and unreasonable egomaniac moderators. To say nothing of the up/down rating button on every post and comment that tends to favor snarky and “witty” comments over genuine and helpful users. Or, at risk of sounding like a schoolboy, they tend to be mean. That just irks me to no end, which is why the BLF Rules and my moderation style are intended as a sort of antithesis to that toxic environment. I recognize that I can’t successfully and fairly moderate all issues that come up here, and there are pros and cons with the BLF way of doing things, but those are my goals and motivations.

You do well keeping things civil around here and at times it is not easy. :+1:

I feel the same way…

Greta and Hogokansatsukan have been the most abusive, insulting and disrespectful controllers I have ever met online.

I find nbp and archimedes arbitrary and impossible to reason with, I hope they retire.

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I respect the moderation attitude on BLF, and am happy to be able to participate on this forum.

Thank you for making this a safe space.

I have been on forums where the mods jump right into the fray rather than tamp it down. Gun forums are generally like that. I have seen like buttons used to fuel arguments. Becomes a good old boys club with all the regulars piling on.

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I see you do a Fantastic job here sb56637 and we are Blessed to have you moderate so patiently. :smiley:
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You might want to consider asking for a refund from wherever it is you got your CS degree.

Uhhh, to be fair, I consider that to be the context it's used in, not a generalized statement.

This is another nasty a*s mean-spirited BS comment that’s starting to get on my nerves around here.
The rudeness is becoming way too commonplace. :disguised_face:

Heard someone describe this horrible trend perfectly the other day. They posited this started with John Stewart’s comedy, except he is funny and they are not.

My breaking point with CPF was when, for the second time in a few years, I gently reminded someone of the rules and asked them politely not to post remarks that were critical of other people’s religious beliefs. To my surprise, I was attacked by the administrator/owner for what she assumed were my religious beliefs. I could not believe it at first, and thought the first time that it must have just been the result of someone having a bad day - but when it happed again, and I also saw the strident and condescending political comments of some other moderators coming up time after time, I decided it wasn’t the community for me.

No matter if he’s right or wrong: Clearly yes. But he may have had a bad day thus far, so let’s just ignore it, not getting into or even igniting a flame war. That would be the best support for sb’s style of moderation.

Edit: The second-best support is Raccoons Milla pictures :heart_eyes:

Moderation is no easy task, even somewhere as simple as a facebook group or something. I put in several years of doing it and it takes some thought to do it well and fairly, and being able to have clear directions from the forum owners or whomever is supervising the gig. I love the approach here on BLF and it works - works very well. There are some things that I might choose to wipe or nudge a little but it's good when "free speech" is allowed, and people can be normal humans without requiring users to earn a degree in forum rules and idiosyncrasies.

To be fair...or maybe just gracious...I believe the goal at CPF was to try to limit chaff and repetition, keep things on topic and "useful" but they just kicked it up ten notches over time to the point where they were indeed pretty harsh and rigid, even being unkind and judgmental frequently. Sometimes the idea is to keep the forum useful as a repository of reference/encyclopedia for future users but that can easily come at the expense of squelching the life from a living, breathing gathering place. Sometimes limits on storage space or costs of that space and running the site (which are not insignificant) become top priority and then things clamp down if they don't find a $ solution.

Even a couple hundred active users is a handful to deal with at times but there (was) enough activity there that I'm sure with their hovering approach to moderating it became a bit overwhelming or too time consuming that they ended up getting intolerant. When that happens people get weary or edgy, don't want to do the job anymore or even drop off the mod list, or they need to get more and more moderators to handle the load - then they start forming mod schedules to cover time slots, which inevitably dig in to personal lives/time, and the cycle repeats as a quiet hurricane forms. This isn't a justification or approval because they could be real nitwits that seemed to be more concerned with winning their one-sided fights, but an understanding of maybe how it came to be. And I think they stopped caring about "growing" the forum and keeping it fresh with new users, too, which is fine but not the most social attitude for what is normally a social venue.

BLF is doing it right. Bumpers on the gutters to keep everyone headed down the lane usually without resorting to barbed wire and stun guns. I also appreciate how sb allows comments to stand or entire threads to remain even if they get locked and has a very light finger on the delete key. I think his spirit shows in the forum over time and how the membership & attitudes stay pretty great here.

It’s easy to overdo moderation, yes. I was a mod, too. And I wouldn’t do it again.

Bit of a distinction first.

A newb is someone interested in lights and wants to learn more.

The Muggle™ is your neighbor, your barber, your cashier, etc., who just wants A Light, and isn’t interested in cri, lumens, color temp, etc. Press button, light up, that’s all they want.