Is it true that Catholic Answers Forum is closing?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Rozellelily
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Mary, do you think that is since they changed the style of the forums? I vaguely remember that the forums used to look different, and when they changed it a lot of old members left as they did not like the new format.
 
73 per day really is not a lot of people at all. So if that is the real reason, then I can totally understand their reasoning.
 
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Rozellelily said:
Mary, do you think that is since they changed the style of the forums?
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No, it is not related to the vBulletin to Discourse switch. Some users were put off by the transition, but the decline has been ongoing well before that as others have indicated.
 
AlNg said:
There are 226194 users of CAF.
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There are a lot of abandoned and junk accounts though. Several of us dug around and found accounts from 2004! The active community is much much smaller. The Patron group is only 65 members!
 
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Rozellelily said:
However, the fact that there is an executive board, it would be good for transparencies sake to know how much they are being paid.
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Their board of directors does not receive payment.

Non profits in the US file tax forms that are publicly available on many charity review sites and if not the documents can be requested of the nonprofit by anyone.
Rozellelily said:
I understand it’s a non-profit, but sometimes non profits can pay board members huge salaries, which are corporate-model based and not in line with Catholic values.
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Most nonprofits in the US do not pay boards of directors, although they typically reimburse or pay for travel expenses for board meetings and such.
Rozellelily said:
I completely agree with you if operations costs are the real and only issue.
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It’s their apostolate. They can do whatever they want. If they feel this is an expense they don’t want to carry and a distraction from their main undertakings, that is their decision.

I don’t get this weird umbrage people are taking with the CAF decision. It’s their executive team and board’s decision.

Frankly I’m surprised it lasted this long. It was always a tool to drive people to their others offerings and website, not an end unto itself. It’s been fraught with trolls and hacks and data issues, it’s taken a lot of money and time to host. Time and resources they’ve decided can be put to bette use elsewhere.
 
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Where do I sign up?

Seriously why haven’t CAF looked into this before?
 
MarysLurker said:
So about 73 people per day.
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I forgot to mention that this is not 73 unique users per day. Since I based it off the monthly active users count divided by 30, users are being counted in the numerator each day they log into CAF in a month. So this number is probably very inflated.
 
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1ke said:
I don’t get this weird umbrage people are taking with the CAF decision. It’s their executive team and board’s decision.
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It is a grieving process. Same reason I’m still here on a dying forum trying to help people understand.

I suggest signing off a while and thinking of something else like your families. Especially if you are in the USA where it is Thanksgiving Day.
 
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When they close the forums, are they deleting them entirely, or are they just going to leave them around but no one is able to post anymore? There is some useful information on the forums I have found that it would be a shame to lose.
 
Deleting them entirely; no archives will be kept.

(Although of course with the Internet Way Back Machine snapshots of archives can be reviewed.)
 
MNathaniel said:
Deleting them entirely; no archives will be kept.

(Although of course with the Internet Way Back Machine snapshots of archives can be reviewed.)
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Well, I hope they reverse the stance on that. There is a lot of useful information on the forums that one can find, and I would hate for it all to go away.

I admit I know little of the costs of webhosting, but it would seem to me that if they simply archive the forums (just keeping them available but disallowing people to make accounts or post), wouldn’t that really cut down on the costs of maintaining it?
 
JSRG said:
There is some useful information on the forums I have found that it would be a shame to lose.
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There is indeed. The forum has been a great source of information, perspectives, advice, and recommendations.
 
Buks said:
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JSRG:
There is some useful information on the forums I have found that it would be a shame to lose.
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There is indeed. The forum has been a great source of information, perspectives, advice, and recommendations.
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Well, I at least sent them a message asking if they could at least keep an archive of the forums available somehow. Not sure if it’ll do any good, but I figure if enough people ask they might at least reconsider that part of it.

As for the earlier suggestion that the Wayback Machine allows viewing of the forums… not really so much. A few pages here and there are archived but that’s it, and even those that are archived don’t tend to really get archived past the first 20 posts or so due to the way the forum displays itself. If they don’t leave up an archive of some sort then almost everything is gone for good, which would be a major loss.
 
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Are you sure these are the real figures though?
When I look around at the threads, there seems to be a lot of lively current interaction from many users.
If it was only 73 (even if unique) users per day, one would expect the forums to be “dead”.
 
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