CPF Sold - Under New Management

This forum is well moderated, it must take a lot of work.

I am really glad I found BLF

it is a safe space for me

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.

Just got an email selling memberships.

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.

How does one sell a membership?

Well, perhaps I give you my account name and password for fee, and that’s it!

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?

Just got another spam from CPF, wanting me to pay a subscription… ah yeah, ok, sure

This

I get it now, a premium membership

Okay, Supporting Membership looks like a premium subscription.

That makes more sense (though I won't be paying for it.)

EDIT:

Bort beat me to the punch.

now, that makes sense. I always wondered.

Vote Bort for sneaky evil genius :partying_face:

What do you get, a free CPF sticker with the premium membership?

From the mailer...

"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.

in the past, I would pay $5 for a 30 day membership,
which was the minimum required for me to be able to post a For Sale ad.

It will now cost me $14.99 a year… if I want to sell a light on CPF

I have not received the email offering me a discount…

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.