Site was down today

[IMA SOL MAN]

I've only used one forum in my life prior to CPF, and it was automotive. Forums aren't a big thing for me.

I'm only aware of 2 other flashlight forums. I've checked them both over time, and would label one as 'juvenile', and the other as 'adolescent'. I posted a couple of times on the latter, and was attacked each time by adolescent idiots.

Besides: BLF=CLF (practically exclusively). They should just change the name and be done with it. I checked recently and that is still absolutely true. There are practically zero flashlights discussed there that I have any interest in. Even if it was 'civilized', I'd have no interest.

Most importantly, CPF includes discussion of ALL types of flashlights, and is (relatively) civilized (well, most users anyway). That differentiates it completely.

If / when CPF shuts down, I'll happily go back to being a closet flashaholic.

It's dark in the closet... *evil smile* ...you can play with your flashlights all you want, and no one will complain because you are alllll alone...or...are you?? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGHHHH!

 

[SYZYGY]

I can't help.

i am pretty sure you mean you won't help explain, even by pm if necessary
no worries if it's a secret or inside joke or something, lol

 

[Mister Ed]

I sure am glad it was a simple fix. Put up a few redundancies to get notified a bit faster.

Sorry, some of you had to use another site!

 

[bykfixer]

Just glad it got fixed before the voices talked me into trying out the CPF facebook page. Ugh!

 

[idleprocess]

i think the family friendly thing here is unnecessary and not necessarily to my taste (e.g. the word censorship/replacement), but that's a minor gripe. i have not run into (or afoul of) the administration of either site, so i have no real comment on that.

BLF is a little snappier, but there's still some word replacement style moderation going on there. Neither CPF nor BLF is a particularly good venue for political rants.

i feel that i've seen more interesting, technical discussion on BLF

Same. The experimentation seems to have migrated to BLF.

i will say that discourse is superior to xenforo

I prefer Discourse as well, but Xenforo is a solid step up over its predacessor.

i think we're extremely fortunate in this hobby to have two independent, (mostly) thriving discussion communities. many online special interest groups have one, and most have zero. if trash like facebook, reddit, IG, et al. were the only places to talk about flashlights online, i wouldn't even bother.

Social media platforms are horrific for discussion.

conversations are ephemeral (necrobumps are uncommon), difficult to follow (not presented chronologically by default, most comments suppressed automatically by score), and more impersonal by nature of the platform. it is not a discussion platform. it is a content aggregator and click farm. the crap-tier discussion functionality only exists to increase engagement.

Funny how Reddit was basically slashdot all over again ... with a naked profit motive behind it.

 

[PhotonWrangler]

BLF is a little snappier, but there's still some word replacement style moderation going on there. Neither CPF nor BLF is a particularly good venue for political rants.


Same. The experimentation seems to have migrated to BLF.


I prefer Discourse as well, but Xenforo is a solid step up over its predacessor.


Social media platforms are horrific for discussion.


Funny how Reddit was basically slashdot all over again ... with a naked profit motive behind it.

There are a few useful areas of reddit. Some of the tech support discussions have been useful for me, as long as I can ignore the snarky stuff from the pre-teen crowd.

 

[idleprocess]

There are a few useful areas of reddit. Some of the tech support discussions have been useful for me, as long as I can ignore the snarky stuff from the pre-teen crowd.

I've also for sure found useful information a plenty on Reddit, but that ignores the awful s/n ratio since I'm using an external search engine to get there. I refuse to participate on Reddit due to the UI and dynamics.

 

[SYZYGY]

BLF is a little snappier, but there's still some word replacement style moderation going on there.

wasn't aware BLF had a word filter or whatever

and yeah, xenforo's not bad. it's probably the second best forum software.

not a big fan of php or rails, but i guess i'll take rails. it's not as lightweight, but developing for it is much more pleasurable imo, and the rails object model makes it trivial to do a lot of one-off administration tasks.

i think discourse is fairly elegant and extensible, and they add new features at a fast pace. for example, their clientside image upload resizer thing is dope. uses webassembly and rust. i have personally never seen a better implementation.

it also comes fairly production-ready out of the box (unlike xenforo). with xenforo, there's no officially sanctioned docker-compose (or similar) stack that you can deploy with everything you'd want in prod set up and tuned like redis for caching, nginx/traefik, etc.

the discourse dev community is also great and very active. they're very welcoming, seriously welcome and consider PRs, listen to feedback, and implement community ideas. pretty darn good support for $0.

and discourse is free. xenforo isn't, and they also try to nickel and dime you. you pay for the base license, and then they want you to pay for the privilege of having full freedom over theming it – you can't remove "powered by xenforo" or whatever at the bottom of every page without paying $300. of course they have good support for subscription managements to charge your users money, but it just feels like a pyramid scheme to help you pay for their license. ok, getting a little too hyperbolic and cynical on that last point lol

ok, there's my forum software rant. i have worked on xenforo sites, but i don't use it for my own communities. i'm pretty much a discourse fanboy now.