Well, you all know I can’t resist an opportunity to graph stuff… so I did.
From the beginning of each site until today, the average rate of posts per day, sampled at 10,000-post intervals.
The left-most few years are weird due to CPF posts being out of order until ~2003-02 or so. Not sure what happened, but it makes the graph look strange at first. It also seems something must have happened around 2010-10 to 2011-03, like maybe CPF was down for a while? I haven’t looked for any details there.
Wow, this thread is turning into something really fascinating.
Judging from the graphs just posted by TK, CPF seems to be on it’s long tail part of popularity and slowly fading. Most places once established would level out or if they have good leadership grow slowly.
Like most here, I lurked in both places. BLF just feels more welcoming, no matter how often people ask similar questions, someone steps up to help clarify or even educate.
However, there’s information at CPF that is really valuable, for example their little corner about battery related incidents, might not be representative of the actual risk, but it’s good to be reminded of what we are carrying around.
My 2 cents. Just by reading threads in both forums, it seems like if you post a question here at BLF, there is a good 75-80% chance someone will help you out. Over at CPF it seems around 25% or so. I have no charts to prove this though. BLF for help and friendliness and both forums for reading and absorbing good info.
This topic came up because the site was down. The site was down for some pretty major server maintenance or upgrades. If I understand correctly, the maintenance was necessary because the site had been responding very slowly for a while. That might be why CPF’s graph was so much lower than usual over the past year, but I don’t really know.
This is just my opinion but I think they were losing their following and they knew it. That site has been slow and had lots of down time for many years. Lots of post with useful info has been lost over there because of server crashes. I think someone finally decided they had to do something before their site became just a hole in the wall. “We are Losing active members, it must be the slow server.”
When you look at the advances in this flashlight hobby, all the advances I know about came from members working together right here on BLF.
You gotta love the “There are no stupid questions” thread here on BLF. Seems to me what this forum is all about. The There Are No Stupid Questions Thread
@toykeeper Thank you for taking the time to round up all that data.
I think another factor to keep in mind when viewing those numbers, is the affect Facebook groups and Instagram have had on all forums worldwide.
I know of at least one knife forum that’s closed it’s doors and they made it clear their membership had fallen dramatically due to IG.
If forumites leave one forum due to not liking there is more chance they will join a Facebook group(s) and/or IG rather than try another forum.
About 2-3 yrs ago I saw a post on The Lounge of a well known CPF forum—it was about a boy with terminal cancer—His family had a photographer take pictures of him—I thought Wow I’ll donate some lights for a raffle of some kind—I contacted person in charge of that sub forum—he in tern inquired about this idea—the answer was NO NO NO—we don’t accept that kind of thing here— I just donated on my own —another member’s family donated time— Sent him toys
I always remember that —We don’t accept that here Phrase
I still go to CPF. There is a good amount of info to be found there.
I really miss CPFM. I was a member there also. I bought and sold many lights just to try them out.
When they started charging it cut into my light fund. Life also cut into my light fund.
I watched selfbuilt reviews like a series , couldn’t wait for his next video.
There are some good people there for sure.
Bigger shed, bigger tools.
There is far more information and builds regarding HID and short arc lights or other “extreme” LED builds over there.
Maybe because on average the people there have a larger budget for these types of projects.
I learnt far more from that forum than BLF when I getting into thrower flashlights.
People like Ra and PolarLi as well as many others are some amazing people.
Im feeling a bit nostalgic tonight… so please dont mind my rambling.
@moderator007
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if at least 250 BLF members had appeared in this forum after being banned from CPF. It happens all the time. Many of those refugees have become great contributors to this forum, with gracious personalities that we have all grown to love and respect. As we say, being banned from CPF is a distinguished badge of honor.
@ToyKeeper
Thanks for the interesting read. I dated a Clinical Psychologist for a number of years, who had more than a few things to mention about online forums. My take: Flashlight affectionados seem to define a certain type of person (me included) who finds a connection with illumination devices at the strands of our DNA. Perhaps it is a hardwired trait that is brought to the surface, as we find unlimited fascination with lighting devices. It must certainly be a part of our inherent survival strategy handed down through the eons. Most of us have a fastidious nature and many are absolute perfectionists. Then there are the large number of chronic nail biters that chew their claws right down to the bloody stumps and go OCD off the deep end, while beating a dead horse to death in ascertaining and discussing trivial minutia. Keep in mind that the professional consensus is that it takes roughly double the lumens for the human eyes to perceive a 20-30% increase in brightness. After reading hundreds of flashlight reviews, the OCD types becomes obvious and immediately identifiable. This is also often true for the low income and/or younger crowds who fester over low cost items, self justification and gratification over the spending of their hard earned pennies. There is nothing at all wrong with that… its just a phase of life for many, and some never outgrow it. lol. As we move up the ladder into more cost prohibitive hobbies (for some) this phenomena dissolves to a higher degree, the crowds are often far more mature and there is a cohesiveness in sharing information. Patriarchal senior members are usually an incredible wealth of guidance, with knowledge brought to bare through the successful professional experience in serving several decades in the field; and there is often no room for false conjecture. Age and maturity certainly come to play.
I havent looked into it, but I wonder if google analytics could shed some light on connecting successful search hits and respondents by domain. Over the past several years, most of my successful searches regarding the latest information in flashlights, emitter performance, drivers and supplies… takes me to BLF. But of course, that is of no surprise!
As an aside, Ive heard it mentioned more than once that a senior jet captain flying for one of the majors, has amassed roughly the same amount of knowledge and continued education as a neurologist. While I certainly am not near that level of pilot, many of my mentors and friends are. When I have questions that personal research does not provide, I know several people who can help with great accuracy and certainty.
@sb56637
Hey ol friend! Is that really a surprise? Thank you for your kind gentle demeanor towards others, and suffering through untold frustration in keeping BLF up and running. Just check out the blue line in TK’s graph. BLF continues to peak in recent history. That large spike near the end was probably attributable to the advent of the GT, however your forum will continue to gain dominance for its kind friendly people and wealth of relevant information that people are interested in sharing. Also, thanks for NOT permanently excommunicating me and several others when we have disagreements!!! :+1: 
@Enderman
Thank you for your thoughts. As I mentioned, the dark side of CPF wasn’t in its casual members, it was in its management predicated attacks against them. My “story” is similar to dozens of others. I was banned after sharing my experiences in converting expensive large 100 watt halogen off road lights to 100 watt remote ballasted HID’s. The simple transplant proved to be an amazing success far beyond expectations, and I wanted to log the modification so others could discover and follow. In doing so, I arose the attention of a mod who touted himself as a self proclaimed expert on the subject. He attacked me without provocation, and I proved him incorrect in all of his obnoxiously communicated assumptions. Of course, the proof was undeniable in my results, and not in his mechanical theories; that were irrelevant… espescailly given the type of conversion. This ultimately lead to him jamming his thumb up his anus, locking the thread and editing nearly all of my posts to suit his own purposes. This came as no surprise… the mods did that to many many members. We have seen it happen time and time again.
Also check my sig. I sold two AN/VSS-3A xenon arc searchlights to CPF members and successfully provided support in powering, switching and wiring them for operation WITHOUT the remote controllers that were meant to operate those lights.
Also keep in mind that an extremely dedicated crack team of BLF members created the worlds farthest throwing commercially available LED thrower… not CPF. And what a robust high performance budget beauty she is! Its just another of a huge line of successful BLF derived flashlights that sold well and are still available. Not so much from the other camp. Uber priced tiny production for a select few was usually their forte.
CPF had its time in history and was once the only place to share our hobby in a way that reached the masses. Their management repeatedly blew it hard and deserve to burn in the ashes they created. We will welcome any remaining members as they become banned from the dictatorial Nazi site! 
say what you will about cpf but if your wish were to come true the loss of all that data would hurt the flashaholic community everywhere.
including here.
careful what you wish for!
i am sure i am not the only one who looks to that old data occasionally.
Thanks to ToyKeeper for the data:
PWM list causes inanity:
“Why is this list allowed to remain on CPF? It may be negatively impacting flashlight sales”
Speaking of measurements, it seems that Godwin’s Number is currently 81. 
Nice graphs and the tail there is likely why they figured it was about time they moved to the new service. The site had been barely functioning before the switch and only mildly functioning for the last 2 years so I suspect those post counts have been heavily influenced by the poor service of the site. Many people just give up on getting on CPF or had to greatly restrict their activity so that has to affect post count.
Also it would be good to find a baseline for the graphs, because the specialized Flashlight industry and then LED transition has had some remarkable swings over the last couple of decades, not to mention Lithium battery technology. No doubt there was lots of activity related to the general activity in the marketplace. Without the control it’s a bit hard to get an accurate picture. The market as also developed differently in different geographical regions which most likely also introduces a bias into the results.
moderation issues (oh my god someone will buy that guidesman on ebay instead of a $urefire!)
and most of the time my attention span was exceeded by page load times.
i even thought of setting up a bot to slowly archive the whole site like waybackmachine.
just incase the spiderweb draped 486 in the garage finally croaked and the backup if any failed.
i doubt cpf was running on anything that decrepit but death of a site is often 1 or 2 badly timed failures away.
Dunno if this counts as a baseline, but… here’s something. It peaks every December. There was also a big bump in 2015 which appears to be caused by a song called “Flashlight” in a popular movie released that year.
I wonder if if Miley Cirus caused the sales of wrecking balls to spike a few years back
I’ve seen that occur to others and it made me leave CPF. I still go there if someone posts an interesting link, but otherwise avoid that kind of crap and stay off their forum. Folks are more welcoming here in my view, some great technical info as well, and I also appreciate the freedom to speak my mind.
This is interesting. I’m sure the CPF moderators don’t appreciate the information as much as we do. The moderator perma-ban and deleted some of extremely useful information. I remember when I needed to find good information which I knew it was there (posted in a long detailed post by former CPF member “Ra”). The information I searched was gone, together with the poster - permanently banned from CPF for posting forbidden link I guess (don’t remember correctly what was the reason).
- Clemence