CPF had a rule against discussing moderation issues on the main site, but there was a separate site (CPF Underground) where it was ok to discuss such issues. CPFU was not accessible to the public (i.e. you had to enroll an account and log in to read it at all), but it was reasonably well publicized to CPF members.
Luckily a lot of the positive atmosphere is because the community tends to self moderate. I don’t mean by shouting down dissenting voices but rather that most of the posters tend to stay on their best behavior because they want it to stay a positive community.
SB did a fantastic job bringing that attitude with him when he formed the board in the beginning and it’s made things easier for everyone.
Someone is trying to sell their CPF membership? Or do you mean the new admin is trying to get people to join, or to join some free membership tier. I haven’t looked there much in the past 5 years or so, except right after the sale was announced I logged in to wish Greta good luck. But I have a quite old account there with a lot of posts.
I've heard of people selling online memberships to places that are tough to get in to, but anyone can create an account at CPF for free, so why pay for a free membership?
"it provides some great account perks to you like the ability to post in the marketplace, turn off ads, unlimited attachments, Supporter badge, larger avatar, and more."
Oh CPF has had those before but never really given a spammy pitch for them. There were also a few donation thingies that I donated to. It was always a low pressure thing though, so those of us contributed were happy to do so. Some of you might remember the “Sasha’s Shoes” avatar. I had that but lost it somehow, which wasn’t supposed to happen, oh well.
I don’t remember ever having to pay to post a for sale ad on CPF as a non-dealer. Dealers had to pay and sometimes the site got after dealers for pretending to be non-dealers. I sold a fair amount on CPF and on CPF Marketplace without ever paying. But, it’s been a while since I was there.
I wonder if CPF will shrink even more now. I don’t have a sense of how it is doing now compared to back in the day, but I do see that some old interesting lights have continued to hold their value, which is nice from a certain perspective.