So, I just frittered away a good few minutes reading through this one... it's good for a bit of a laugh and a cry. (A manly cry, though. Not one of those sissy ones.)
My opinionated capsule summary:
- ExtremeBeam buys banner ad on CPF
- banner ad (and website) is full of extremely bogus claims
- when you look closer at the lights, they're probably just XXXfires, but 10X more expensive because they're being marketed as "TACTICAL" and "B*D*SS". (Okay, I made the last one up.) "They protect the Pope." (I didn't make that up, though you'd think I did.)
- cpf member comes in and calls b*llsh*t on them
- company representative comes back and makes more ludicrous claims but doesn't answer the original questions
- cpf members ask nicely for company to send samples for testing
- company goes very silent
Bwahahaha!
Because it was too much fun, the cpf people locked the thread down.
Great thread and thank you to RedForest for running point on it. That went a lot further than I would have thought would be allowed, but once the real dirt started coming out so did the lock. That is CPF in nutshell right there, except it's missing the Surefire fanatics. :)
+1 I followed the whole thing from the start, CPF at it's best, and at it's worst all in one thread. Kudos to RedForest for keeping it calm and on point or it never would have lasted as long as it did.
As I said in the PM to you earlier it's just a shame that people started pushing accusations perhaps a little too far. If we'd stuck to the basics I think they would have allowed it to stay open for quite a while longer, I don't think Greta or the mods really wanted to touch it as it was already indirectly questioning their credibility. Also, I do not think they are as biased or unethical as most on here suggest, they do favour more expensive brands and come down often what I would also consider too hard, but I don't think they are really bad or unethical people.
In the end the questions didn't get answered and the thread comes up second in the google search results for 'extremebeam'. There's lots of good info in it for those willing to read it, and in the end the cause was sort of martyred by Greta closing it down. Also, it had coming up to 3000 views, so I guessed a few from BLF and many others were paying attention too, I think it'll catch a wide enough audience to make some difference.
I'm not suggesting by the way that the closure is a better result than a continuation. And I would invite extremebeam to reply to any of the key questions in this thread or by another avenue on CPFmarketplace for example. They are always free to clear their name, but I really do not think they are able to.
Maybe it wasn't the best circumstances to end the thread with, but ones that I'm on the whole reasonably happy with.
With regards to classing Sunwayman, Jetbeam etc the same as Ultrafire and Akoray etc, if it was a post by me that you're referring to I was only trying to suggest that the manufacturer themselves didn't seem to grasp the differences between the companies that they could with some degree of plausibility claim to have copied them, and the ones that were well out of their league and made them look stupid if they were claiming they copied some of their designs too.
