Catholic Answers Forums (CAF) Is Closing Permanently

I do remember you indeed!!!! So cool!!

Landon Caeli said:

I was TEPO. I was kind of young and inexperienced in the forum world at the time. But I remember you left a lasting impression on me because you were able to quote scripture so well. The other fellow did as well.

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You’re 43, right? I’m only 45, 2 years on you. We weren’t that young

Landon Caeli said:

I was TEPO. I was kind of young and inexperienced in the forum world at the time. But I remember you left a lasting impression on me because you were able to quote scripture so well. The other fellow did as well.

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On CAF, I got put on the penalty box for a month for quoting Trent. Their Ecumenism blinds them to Traditional Catholic Teachings

I used to go to a protestant site called Christianity.Com. There were a lot of vicious posters there too. They finally closed down. Don't miss it. I like this site much better by far.

Hey Landon,

No, actually I'm a sixth-grade teacher. I've been teaching 23 years now. My wife is an RN and just finished her Master's in Nurse Practitioner. She's studying for her state boards to become a Nurse Practitioner. She's the one who'll be, God-willing, prescribing medicine and really acting as a doctor without the surgery. She's the medical lady. I'm the educator dude.

Landon Caeli said:

Are you still a paramedic? I'm pretty sure you mentioned that, I thought that was pretty impressive as well.

...In any case, it's always a pleasure running into you.

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gurneyhalleck1 said:

I miss my old buddy GKC in CAF. He was an Anglican. Quite a character! There was another guy, Edwin, named Contarini....talk about an insufferable pain in the [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse]. That’s how that place was. I still crack up that I became Orthodox by going there. I met our current deacon at my parish who was leaving Catholicism for Orthodoxy at the time. Now he’s an ordained Deacon who will God-willing be our priest someday and I’m an ordained Reader. Irony...

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That was why they stealth banned Fr Ambrose. His historically backed and well reasoned responses were causing several members to enquire about Orthodoxy.

Michie said:

I never visited the board but found CA invaluable for learning about the faith.

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I visited only when a DuckDuckGo search lead me to a thread. Never was a member or a poster there.

From what I know of forums they do need moderation and a very steady handed moderation to boot. I'm thinking they didn't have good moderation.

And no, I am not volunteering to moderate. I did that on a different forum for a few years and I'm permanently burned out for doing it again. Thankless job.

Lady Bug said:

I'm glad they're closing. I sometimes felt it was no different than browsing Reddit. The people were not friendly there, and I thought they were too liberal. Good riddance. I'm a tad apprehensive that the members will start polluting this place though.

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You raise a good point that members will be migrating and some may end up here for good or not so good. And of course we change as we go too. How do we welcome the refugee and move in the right direction?

Two times I posted there and got replies that were not convenient for Catholicism, yet were historically accurate, with actual documents to support the positions. Then when I went back to re-read them, they were gone.

That place is straight up dishonest. Not very Christian.

Lost4words said:

Money, money, money!

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I think the expense of it is an excuse to justify getting rid of it. The alternative would be spending the same amount of money but having to invest a LOT more time and effort in moderating it back to being a good forum. If that would even be possible.

chevyontheriver said:

I think the expense of it is an excuse to justify getting rid of it. The alternative would be spending the same amount of money but having to invest a LOT more time and effort in moderating it back to being a good forum. If that would even be possible.

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Honestly message boards are dying, lack profit for the effort, and hard to handle liability wise at times.

I belong there under a different user name. I post there occasionally mostly lurk. I learned a lot there but I never liked the new forums. I'm glad we have these forums.
There are some posters that post there that I respect that I will miss.

I remember all those posters too and wish them well. I was on CAF for a number of years (Follow Christ). It was helpful and taught me doctrine I would not have necessarily learned in such depth just attending Mass at the local parish level. There were people who took their faith seriously and that inspired me to do the same, and for where that took me I am thankful. But there was a lot of disagreement, trolling and toxicity on CAF that just became worse and worse. CA had a hard time dealing with the controversies and conflicts as they came up in the Catholic Church too. To discuss or not to discuss. But I can't believe how everything is gone from the Internet. You can't even read old threads.

Claire34 said:

I remember all those posters too and wish them well. I was on CAF for a number of years (Follow Christ). It was helpful and taught me doctrine I would not have necessarily learned in such depth just attending Mass at the local parish level. There were people who took their faith seriously and that inspired me to do the same, and for where that took me I am thankful. But there was a lot of disagreement, trolling and toxicity on CAF that just became worse and worse. CA had a hard time dealing with the controversies and conflicts as they came up in the Catholic Church too. To discuss or not to discuss. But I can't believe how everything is gone from the Internet. You can't even read old threads.

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If you're lucky, a thread may have been archived on The Wayback Machine. I actually made sure to archive some of the ones I wanted to look back on.

Unfortunately, unless you specifically archived one, it's unlikely that it'll be saved. They underwent a big change in the way the forums operated (on a technological level) a few years back, which meant that the URLs for posts were all different (so if something got archived under the old URL, trying to go to The Wayback Machine for the new one wouldn't find it if it hadn't gotten re-archived in the meantime). Further, the new way the forum was set up seemed much more hostile to possible archiving than normal forums.

Maybe they'll put it back up in some kind of read-only (and preferably searchable) format, which would be useful because due to its longevity, I was often able to find information on something obscure just because someone had made a post on it a decade ago.

I liked CA Forums, but there seemed to be some super liberal Catholics there that would derail every single thread. I would read hundreds of posts with an argument between a conservative and a liberal, and the liberal Catholic would eventually say something like, "I would be fine with a transgender Pope."