Well, if my experience is common, they probably have lost a lot of traffic. I used to go there every single day. Now, I go there a couple of times a week. I guess if I just started hanging out in their budget forum it might be okay but it just seems like a lot of folks on CPF have a lot more money than I do. Go to their Marketplace and see how many modders are selling $250 flashlights; some cheaper and many a whole lot more and they instantly sell out. It is incredible to me that somebody can list a $900 Spy over there and it sells in minutes.
AWWW DAMN I just missed out on buying a $470+ shipping AAA torch...........................
It was listed at 12:18pm (my time), sold by 12.19pm.... Need to count that in seconds, considering that it takes a whole minute to load/read/decide/load page/reply/post.
Was a really good looking AAA torch though..... Id Love to have one....
Could also get 2x TK35 and 2x TK41 shipped to my door.... with another hundred left over for a V10R Ti ;)
thank you so much for mentioning that!! I never knew there was such thing, I just installed it right now. no more annoying adds for me. Also if you disable third party cookies no websites will be able to track you! I never have any adware now where I used to have a ton before I disabled third party cookies
Traffic there may be down, but when you are on the site there is typically about 300-600 people currently online there.
So traffic at CPF is still higher than BLF by what, about a factor of 20? As I write this there are 612 folks viewing at CPF and19 here at BLF. Personally, I like it here a lot better, but then I like cheap lights!
True but since BLF has only been around for a little over a year--BLF is doing pretty darn good IMO. Give BLF time and there will be more traffic and people here at any given time compared to the other place.
I bet people are afraid to sign up over there because they are afraid of how they will be treated. People sign up here quicker because of the awesome information, great atmosphere and all the nice members (there are a handful of buttheads here too--we know and you know who you are ) and how people are treated here.
I think people don't like to log in over at CPF because of the huge scary red message they get until they have 3 authorized posts (only in subforums that count).
It's sort of interesting that BLF deals with a retail market that most people do not even know exists: cheap, bright Chinese flashlights.
A rather specialized marketplace, but pretty fascinating. I had never met anyone who had a collection of Chinese-built flashlights until I visited this place.
Just wanted to chime in with an observation here. I've followed CPF's traffic levels for many years now, and I've seen a real change in the numbers of 'active members' the site has since they came back online after the server crash. It's been over a month since things restarted there and they are getting about 7150 active members per month. While this is down a bit from what it had been historically (more like 9000), it doesn't tell the real story.
Don't know about this site, but I manually approve all registrations to FNF, so I see every spam registration. We're seeing about 5 spammers a day try to register to the site. FF.com, on the other hand, has had over 500 spam registrations over the same period (about 40 a day.) Because of CPF's long history and size, my best guess is that they get at least that many per day. Because of the way they handle spam accounts, these 'members' probably show in their 'active' list...meaning that 7150 figure is probably inflated by 1500 or more.
Now I admit I'm not privy to how the forum software at CPF calculates 'active members', so this is mostly conjecture on my part, but it would be consistent with what you guys are seeing as far as posting activity goes. Looks to me like they really took a hit over the down time and lost posts (and the growth of BLF, as well!)
All I do know for a fact is that we are now at a point with the flashlight enthusiast community where if the ownership of CPF closed things down, the hobby would still have several sites to carry on the fight. And that makes me a very, very happy boy .