TexasCHLforum.com

I've founded and operated many, many forums, going all the way back to the old Majordomo "listserv" email lists. To survive, a forum needs a certain "critical mass" of posting users, to give it enough momentum to keep going. What often happens, though, is that visitors don't see anything THEY are interested in, so they leave. So what happens is, everybody is "waiting for somebody else to post something," and "nobody posts, because nobody posts." When you go to a forum and the most recent post is a month ago, you just figure, "what's the point?" and click away.

So if you really care about a forum site surviving, you need to POST. If you don't see a topic you're interested in, POST a topic, don't sit there waiting for somebody ELSE to entertain you.

allisji wrote: ↑Thu Sep 09, 2021 8:28 am Looking at this morning's spammer, it looks like probably all of the new users who were added last year in August are probably spammers. I do really hope that Charles and the team can find a way that we are able to get new members in and keep that trash out.

We all know that this forum has come under many attacks for a long time by opponents of the second amendment who would want to destroy the forum to the point that it gets no traffic and/or officially goes offline.

I don't know exactly what we the members can do to help, but I am sure that if is a matter of needing volunteers or donations to fund a new hosting platform or anything like that that people would gladly contribute. I know that I would make a donation if there were a contribution function and it would help to improve the forum.

There's also a LOT of hostility towards the NRA and especially WLP, and that gets redirected towards the forum, since Charles is an NRA board member.

I would advise against changing platforms. A platform/software change, no matter how smooth, can kill a forum overnight. Seen it happen many times.

I think the general topic of the forum has been somewhat diluted by events of the past few years. At first, we couldn't carry concealed weapons at all, and there was the big push to create a "Concealed Handgun License" law, which Bush Jr. finally did. So a CHL was a big, novel, new deal, and it was a ripe situation for a Texas CHL forum. Later we got open carry passed, which was a big hullabaloo that amounted to nothing, and a CHL was then called an LTC.

We coasted along for awhile, and eventually just about everything that could be said about a CHL (LTC) had been said. Then we passed constitutional carry, after which we don't even NEED a license to carry. So the very basis for the existence of the forum has pretty much dissolved.

On some other sites, like Texas Gun Forum, our forum, and Charles in particular, is HEAVILY flamed as being too restrictive and censored. Of course, that's bull, Charles is a great guy and we all know it. One accusation is that if you say ANYTHING negative about the NRA on here, you'll be kicked off and banned. Check out these two discussions:

https://www.texasguntalk.com/threads/te ... com.77334/

https://www.texasguntalk.com/threads/ch ... st-1498470