Classical Theism

I'm pretty sure Brian, one of the other moderators here, owns classicaltheismforum.com. It's the domain name we used for the vBulletin forum. It might be worth asking him about it.

Hi everyone,

To boost the visibility of this forum I was thinking of registering a domain name so we lose the .createaforum part.
Unfortunately most of the obvious choices like classicaltheism.com, classicaltheismforum.com etc. are already in use.

Please vote in the poll above or add your suggestion in this thread!

JD3 has now been made a moderator, and MightyFool an administrator. The administrator who made the adjustment told me that he would be leaving it to you, MightyFool, to figure out how to make the forums viewable to people who haven't signed in. He apparently hasn't been able to on this platform yet.

Fixed this! I'm also going to look if this could be moved (without breaking anything) to a better domain (without .createaforum.com).

Same deal. When you get moderator status, you'll see a moderator forum. Post about opening up the forum and one of the administrators will help out, or at least give you a reason why they don't want to do it. (The initial justification, I take it, was that forcing people to log on helps us gauge the forum's actual activity level, whereas in the past everyone remained invisible unless posting. It also sometimes forces people on the fence to sign up.)

Also, a correction on a point of forum history: it was the forum's second incarnation at classicaltheismforum.com, which was doing well, which was hacked. It would have cost over $500 a year for hosting and security fees, so we dropped it. (Most of us were also burnt out. I think I had even went inactive by then.)

This is an important topic that I'd like to get some discussion on. As you may know, the previous versions of this forum were hacked and the membership never returned. The site https://classicaltheism.boardhost.com/ had over 700 members before it died, and this new forum only has like 50. There was also an issue about getting people to moderate the site and pay for hosting. So it is not a simple task to get a good forum going. But here's a few ideas I had:

- Make the threads visible without signing up, so when you are engaging with someone online, you can link them to a post that may answer there question (thus, they see the forum, and maybe signup later) Linking to the site on various subreddits (none of them are that popular really) or strange notions could be helpful.

- Mention it to friends who are interested in philosophy, or just people who might have questions about classical theism. Maybe there should be a separate page for people with casual questions, where more experienced folk can answer, sort of like an interactive FAQ with real people.

- Lastly, if the forum continues to stall, I wonder if we couldn't convince someone with a better domain name and more traffic to host the forum. For example: the site classicaltheism.com is one of the first things that show up when you search "classical theism" (not to mention "classical theism forum" and other similar keywords). It is a site with podcast interviews of various thinkers (Feser among them) and it doesn't seem to have a dedicated forum, so maybe that's a last-resort option.

Curious what others think about this.

-JD3