I realized this became a long rant so skip to the last sentences if you just want to help me with the actual question.
I have been out of the flashight loop for a while, but I still take a peek here and there to see what’s new. I have been a member of CPF since around the first Luxeon LEDs came out(2005) and LED lights really caugth my interest(although I have always had a soft spot for flashights even before LEDs). When I first stumbled across CPF I couldn’t believe my eyes, a forum dedicated for flashlights. A place with people with the same weird fascination I had with flashlights. And CPF was a really friendly and helpful place back then.
But then over the years I started to notice rifts. The tacticool side(Surefire, HDS and other very expensive American brand fans) vs the more casual light buyers. The tacticool crowd always sneered at other brands saying they wouldn’t “trust their lives” on them, which I always thought was a rather silly thing to say since the vast majority would never have to bet their lives on their flashlight. Even those who do really rely on their lights should bring two because a Surefire etc is not more fool proof than any other high quality NON American brand(seems like the issue was with the nationality a lot of the time). Sure, they might have knurling that could saw through another light but whats the point when their switches had a higher failure rate(there were some polls) than “crap Chinese” brands like Fenix, Jetbeam etc. My point is that Surefire makes great lights, but they are not head above the rest as an illumination tool like the Surefire fans claim. In fact, you pay a lot more money for less output and features because of successful advertising and the fact American built will be more expensive even though it’s not necessarily superior. I think the problem was that Surefire had always been on the bleeding edge but now many Chinese upstarts were making high quality light with much higher output for less price. Smaller companies who were much more flexible and innovative than Surefire.
And lets face it, at the end of the day, we are talking about flashlights. We need them to light things up. They are for the majority, just tools. You could probably sell “tactical” shoelaces you can “trust with your life” for hundreds of dollars to the right myopic brainwashed crowd.
Most soldiers, cops etc I have come across, the real thing, they don’t care half as much. They use what they got. Make do.
But what I also started to notice was that the site admins took a side. Surefire(through Paul Kim) had always been a darling of CPF (along with HDS, Ark and some custom builders). But now they were in the same position as Maglite(always scorned by CPF), a big dinosaur with outdated tech and people started to talk about other cheaper lights being better. But it got really bad for the tacticool crowd when sites like dealextreme and kaidomain made super cheap and bright lights available for the public(although these light varied more in quality than the bigger brands). It was like CPFs who spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on a light got offended that you could get more output for a fraction of the price. Lets be honest here, even though there are tons of things that makes a great light, the thing that drew us into this hobby in the first place was to get as much light as possible from a small package.
Anyway, it was around this time I started to get fed up with the atmoshpere over at CPF. One day, I made the mistake to check out CPF Underground, and all the bitterness, condescending remarks, vitriol and general unpleasantness the people behind the site were posting, put me off. I mean we are talking about flashlights here, how can these people become so hateful and snobbish about that?
That combined with the mods starting to get trigger happy and banning people like Mevs(I think that was his name, the guy behind light-reviews.com) made me stop using CPF altogether. Even though I never got banned or even had the slightest problem with a mod, I stopped using CPF.
But that brings me to BLF. Around the time, there were a couple other flashlight forums. But they weren’t really an alternative to CPF. They mostly consisted of people who left or got banned and talked about how bad CPF was(which I’m aware of, I’m doing myself now), but not much flashlight content. But this doesn’t seem to be the case with BLF. I found my way here through google this time. I was just interested in buying one of these new 4AA pocket thrower class lights and most of my searches brought me to BLF (and Sunwayman D40A isn’t really a budget light). Besides Selfbuilt, the best reviews and info was found on this site(like dissections of EA41 and D40A). All in all I like BLF a lot more. The atmosphere seems to be how it used to be on CPF (when everyone were happy amateurs). The site is so much quicker. The layout brighter.
So after a really long rant, my question is how the traffic compares between CPF and BLF. Is CPF still significantly larger and more active, or is BLF catching up now?
It is a great place to learn, and have a laugh!