Hello, is anybody home?

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Ditto to this.

Is this forum the continuation of Catholic Answers Forum under another name, or is it just intended to be an archive? And for what purpose?

And I think this is a fair question, given that Mr Atkinson posted his name here instead of a screen name, but is this the same Greg Atkinson as this man?


If so, don’t get me wrong, anything that can be done, to preserve the CAF archives and make them available to the general public, is much appreciated (at least by me, others might think otherwise, others might just want CAF to disappear forever). But having a Catholic forum moderated by someone who is not Catholic, well, some people would have “questions” of their own about that.

Please explain the purpose of this forum, and what your personal interest is in it.
 
Hello everyone. I am working on getting the Catholic Answers forum back up and running under the name “Catholic-Questions.org”. I didn’t submit the new URL to Google, so I was surprised when it started showing up in Google search results.

The catholic answers forum has been turned over to catholic-questions.org, with the exception of all email addresses, private messages and uploaded content.

Please note that emails sent from the software have not yet been turned on for non-administrators, so if you @ somebody, they might not get notified. Also, I’m working on some changes so that users can log in with their old email address (without getting into the technical details, even though the email addresses weren’t provided to me, if someone provides their email address, there is a way I can link up that email address to their old account.)

To answer one question, no, I’m not the Greg Atkinson in the link posted by @HomeschoolDad. This is my LinkedIn profile in case you’re curious:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-atkinson-020317/

I also have a Facebook profile, but I rarely log in. But if you’re looking for controversial posts, you’ll be disappointed because it’s mostly pictures from various weddings, graduations, birthdays, etc.
https://www.facebook.com/greg.atkinson.184

To answer another question, I am Catholic and I believe in and accept the teachings of the Catholic Church. My wife and I of 21 years have five beautiful children. I have personally benefitted from viewing the content on the CAF, though I’ve never actually posted myself. So my goal in reviving the forum was to ensure that this resource was available to everyone.

I have also asked one of the former CAF moderators to help moderate the forum.

I’m also working on a handful of other things, like updating the FAQ and similar documents.

My hope is to get everything running in September. But to be honest, I said that in June, July and August, so my track record isn’t great. But I am making progress…

Finally, for anyone who isn’t so happy about the forum being reactivated, I have been granting requests to people to remove their content as requested. This involves four pieces of information:
  1. Deleting their public profile.
  2. Deleting their posts.
  3. Deleting their quoted posts (i.e., if someone quoted one of their posts).
  4. Removing their name, e.g., if someone mentions them.
Feel free to ask me any questions - I pride myself on being open and honest.
 
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Thanks for touching base with us, Greg. It’d be an understatement to say we are curious and excited about a reunion with old friends with the resurrection of the old site.

I can’t think of any questions right now but I’m saying a prayer for your noble endeavour.
 
This is great, and was precisely the information I was looking for. I deeply appreciate your taking the time to address it.

I can’t guarantee how much I will participate in this forum, in that I have begun writing for CCS. At this time, I am busy with probating my father’s estate (he left this world on Thursday 22 July), providing my son with wholesome activities during a month’s break from homeschool before we begin the new school year (we run later than conventional day schools), maintaining two households, and providing spiritual and material support to my family. So my dance card is pretty full as it is.

I am happy to see CAF’s infrastructure and content preserved in some fashion, and I am very enthusiastic about seeing things get back up and running.

Thanks, HSD (www.homeschooldad.info)
 
Thanks, Greg, for confirming you are not the Protestant “Greg Atkinson”. I had hoped CA didn’t sell their Catholic content to a non-Catholic.

I can’t promise I’ll be posting on here much either. I now run another private Catholic forum which was primarily set up for CAFugees to stay in touch with each other after CAF shut down, and operating that forum takes up much of my time. But I’ll be keeping an eye out to see how this goes for you.

I do think there’s a place for another moderate Catholic forum open to the public, but it’s a monumental and costly job to run a good one, keep out bad faith posters, keep uncivil behavior to a minimum, and deal with the issues of people basically asking the same questions hundreds of times. That’s not something I could possibly deal with, as I have a day job unrelated to forums and it would likely call for additional paid staff as well.
Good luck with everything.
 
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Thank you, Greg.

This all sounds good and reassuring, and I might be persuaded to come back here, but it will depend on how the place is run.

I don’t know if it’s helpful to you or not, but there are a few things I wouldn’t like to see again and which would probably mean I would leave for good (weird, I thought I’d already done that once a bit before the Big Doomsday 😅):
  • endless dumpster fires triggered by words like “yoga”, “women’s trousers”, “Harry Potter”, “veiling at church”, “CITH or COTT?”.
  • “is this a sin” threads where people describe their, um, intimate struggles with a lot of graphic detail (I really don’t want to know about that, and there may be underage kids reading)
  • ad hominem attacks (I do enjoy a good debate, but, like most human beings, I don’t enjoy being insulted)
  • the war zone that was the World News category (muted it very quickly for my own peace of mind)
  • erratic and arbitrary moderation. The rules need to be fair and clearly stated.
I would like to see more charity, more thinking before posting, and more readiness to apologize in posters, myself included. A public forum like this one shows the whole internet what Catholics are like, and I wouldn’t be part of one such forum which would show Catholics as a prideful, insult-hurling, brandishing anathema on people who happen to disagree with them, kind of people (that was CAF in the last few months/weeks, when moderation had given up and the whole forum just soured and went bad).

Ahem. I hope I didn’t just heap unwelcome pressure on your shoulders. I wish you good luck with your endeavour and I’ll stay around for now.
 
WRT pajamas, I am assuming from your screen name, that you are a woman. In that case, if they’re bifurcated trousers, those are for men only. If it’s a nightgown down to your ankles, you should be fine.

WRT the saucepan, it would only be a sin (probably not mortal) if you attempted to assert the superiority of saucepans over Tupperware, or if you said that Tupperware should never have been invented. That would challenge Mr Tupper’s authority to replace saucepans with Tupperware, even if some people just prefer saucepans, and do not question the right of the majority of chefs to use Tupperware, if they prefer more modern types of kitchen cookware.

😜
 
All good points made by Oddbird. I would also add that the troll problem on CAF was seriously out of control. There was one troll who came back under different names probably somewhere between 75 to 100 times over the last three years. In some cases the people didn’t even make troll posts, they just created unwelcome profiles and went around “liking” various posts until they got banned. One was so dedicated that he made his final (?) post in the last 2 minutes of the forum before the plug was pulled.

There were other posters who might not have been trolls but definitely had some mental issues. One of them started at least a dozen different threads involving the topic of excrement before finally getting banned.

To have this stuff regularly popping up on a forum purporting to be the leading place for Catholics to ask questions was somewhere between ludicrous and embarrassing. I don’t even see such stuff on Reddit Catholicism, and we all know how crazy Reddit can be, but the moderators for r/ Catholicism seem to have developed good ways of screening the wack posts out.
 
Well, crazy. Just saying hi to the folks here. I don’t know how much I’ll be around, preferring other haunts these days, but we’ll see.
 
@Tis_Bearself, yes, I’ll have to figure out how to weed out the trolls. In the spirit of brainstorming, I’ve been toying with the idea of charging a nominal fee (say, a $10 one-time fee) to be able to create a post or reply to a post. I’d donate this money to a worthy cause, such as a great pro-life organization or Catholic Charities, for instance. That’s just an idea at this point - not a definite plan.
 
@OddBird - yes, you raise good points. I think a lot of what you bring up comes back to your point about having solid moderation and a vision of what kinds of content we want and what we don’t want. My ultimate goal is to provide a resource to help answer some of the thorny questions for Catholics. For instance, are Catholics morally obligated to get vaccinated? How can one respond lovingly to someone who wants to change their pronouns?

It’s hard to get an authoritative answer on some of these questions, and my goal is to help change that.
 
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By the way, would each of you mind telling me how you found this site? I hadn’t submitted the site to Google yet, so I was surprised to see all the activity. (To be clear, I’m super-happy that you’re all here!)
 
Catholic-Questions said:
My ultimate goal is to provide a resource to help answer some of the thorny questions for Catholics. For instance, are Catholics morally obligated to get vaccinated? How can one respond lovingly to someone who wants to change their pronouns?
Click to expand...
Will you be able to have representation from the Church on staff to speak for the official Church position?
 
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