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Where did everybody go after CigarFamilyForum shuttered?

Col.Kurtz

Col.Kurtz

New Member
Joined
Nov 6, 2022
Messages
2
I have been looking to connect with folks from the old Cigar Family Lounge. Is there anybody here from the old site? Col.Kurtz
 
There's only a few privately owned cigar forums left, CP being the oldest and most trafficked of them all. I believe many CF members came here. We welcome them all. I've been offered to sell CP many times over the years, and currently have one company pressing me to sell right now. I have no intention of selling out. We welcome everyone who agrees to follow the few rules we have. :)
 
Rod said:
There's only a few privately owned cigar forums left, CP being the oldest and most trafficked of them all. I believe many CF members came here. We welcome them all. I've been offered to sell CP many times over the years, and currently have one company pressing me to sell right now. I have no intention of selling out. We welcome everyone who agrees to follow the few rules we have. :)
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And we all thank you for that!
 
Hi guys I’m from the cigar family website. I was Hemmingway. The extra M is for maduro :) I joined back in 1998 when I first got into smoking cigars and made many friends there whom I met in person.

CF was a fun and wild place back in the day. I met guys like Hollan, Wynn and the guys in Texas when I went there on a business trip or two. Paulie from San Diego. Randy and Mark Craney and all the guys in Indy when I went every year to the Formula 1 race as well as Jimmy from Knoxville Tennessee.

I remember my first trade there with Jimmy. Everybody said get your feet wet with a few five stick trades but I traded over $1000 worth of cigars for a bunch of Hemingway Maduros with Jimmy and he blew me up with a bunch of extras so I bombed his mailbox and that continued back-and-forth until he finally called me and said he didn’t have any more cigars to send me after we bombed each other with 2+ boxes worth of bonus sticks over weeks. I replied that I’ve been going out and buying really good sticks just to keep the bombs flying so we laughed and put a hold on our mailbox assaults becoming good friends.

The flame wars were hilarious too. People would get so serious it was truly funny. Mark Craney was,and I’m sure still is a cantankerous bastard. I love that guy. We were friends from the forum and hanging out in Indianapolis every year at Randy’s house during the Formula 1 race. He and I started a flame war with each other and everybody got up in arms taking his side or mine while we were on the phone with each other enjoying a cigar laughing about what we just posted. That place was a blast.

I’m still smoking cigars that were gifted to me by all those guys. I just sent Hollan a bunch of old crusty sticks that I know he likes and we talk here and there. I’ve reached out to some of the other guys to thank them for some of the great cigars they sent me like when Wynn gave me a prototype opus X maduro from around 2000. I still have that cigar and it’s due to be smoke soon.

I’m hoping to make some new friends here and get back in the loop so I can add some more smokes to my collection. I haven’t really bought any cigars since 2003 except for a recent purchase in London.

A big hello to any of you other CF transplants.

Cheers, Jim
 
cohibasurfer said:
Why did the CF site close down?
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short story...no internal support.
They tried a new mod but it all died out.

Most fogs, I'm aware of, are on a private FB group.

The band's back together.

....JimD from the Tobacco Shop in CT got me on board CF. He's retired and doing well. I think I was on there prior to CP...which Seadub hooked me into. :)
 
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G
grateful1 said:
short story...no internal support.
They tried a new mod but it all died out.

Most fogs, I'm aware of, are on a private FB group.

The band's back together.

....JimD from the Tobacco Shop in CT got me on board CF. He's retired and doing well. I think I was on there prior to CP...which Seadub hooked me into. :)
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Gary, is this gentleman who owned the shop we met at?
 
Sure, most of the old timers are on Facebook "CF Alumni" set up I believe by OpusXMarco, and there's also a CigarFamily slot too. Not as much fun as back in the day. Leafing through an old Cigar Aficionado mag about a year ago, I came upon an interview by the Newmans where Eric, who was the driving force behind the beloved CF said that he slashed it because he was "tired of breaking up fights between old men". I started in 2005 and really enjoyed meeting a few of the gang in my many travels before semi-retiring. Hope it picks up here at CP. I used to be "tradusir", my company name in Mexico before moving back to TX
 
SoTX-Leo said:
Sure, most of the old timers are on Facebook "CF Alumni" set up I believe by OpusXMarco, and there's also a CigarFamily slot too. Not as much fun as back in the day. Leafing through an old Cigar Aficionado mag about a year ago, I came upon an interview by the Newmans where Eric, who was the driving force behind the beloved CF said that he slashed it because he was "tired of breaking up fights between old men". I started in 2005 and really enjoyed meeting a few of the gang in my many travels before semi-retiring. Hope it picks up here at CP. I used to be "tradusir", my company name in Mexico before moving back to TX
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Yea.
Pretty much he couldn't find a mod.
Or let it grow on it's own. (understandable)

lol

...some are on OLH too.
 
CF was clique-y as all hell. Not very inviting to new smokers or people that weren't part of some cliquey group. God forbid a new smoker asked a basic cigar question, they were piled on more than helped. Kind of like CP was until the old guard left. The nasty flaming crap was horrible to deal with and drove more people away than attracted new members. Just because a handful of these a-holes were members in the site's infancy didn't make them the 'keepers of the castle' and being the judges of all things 'cigar'. Of course there were many very cool people there...and I met a bunch... but we mostly conversed in PM or email than in public.

The only people that liked that atmosphere didn't have a mentoring bone in their body who lapped up the drama like 13yo girls in Middle School. ;)
 
SoTX-Leo said:
Sure, most of the old timers are on Facebook "CF Alumni" set up I believe by OpusXMarco, and there's also a CigarFamily slot too. Not as much fun as back in the day. Leafing through an old Cigar Aficionado mag about a year ago, I came upon an interview by the Newmans where Eric, who was the driving force behind the beloved CF said that he slashed it because he was of "tired of breaking up fights between old men". I started in 2005 and really enjoyed meeting a few of the gang in my many travels before semi-retiring. Hope it picks up here at CP. I used to be "tradusir", my company name in Mexico before moving back to TX
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Frankly, Eric gave you the answer that was for public consumption. Yes, he had to be tired of breaking up fights...to a humorous degree. Old farts fighting across their keyboards was the least of the Newman family concerns. The political fighting became unsparingly acrimonious. Many of the most vocal posters had views antithetical to those of the Newman family. As you may recall, there was substantial posting that bordered on racist, sexist, and with religious intolerance. The Newman brain trust did not want to turn people away from their products, even those to whom they were politically diametrically opposed. There was, of course, the option to just disband the room where politics were discussed, but it was clear that removing that room would basically de-facto derail the forum, or political posts would bleed into other rooms.
Eric saw that the U.S. political atmosphere was becoming increasingly contentious and felt that being a part of a fight would not serve the Newman family business.
There were also rumblings that the Fuente family and the Newman family had disparate political leanings and that their differences were being articulated by forum members. That didn't go over well, not at all.
And, of course, there was the continued discussion by members of Cuban cigars. As it became illegal again to import Habanos, the Newmans had to consider what was in the best interest of the forum they sponsored. Would the authorities hold them to account for giving license to illegally importing a banned foreign product?
The Newmans had a lot to consider, but clearly with Cigar Pass and others still alive and healthy, they were not removing the sole cigar forum.
 
Steve*R said:
Frankly, Eric gave you the answer that was for public consumption. Yes, he had to be tired of breaking up fights...to a humorous degree. Old farts fighting across their keyboards was the least of the Newman family concerns. The political fighting became unsparingly acrimonious. Many of the most vocal posters had views antithetical to those of the Newman family. As you may recall, there was substantial posting that bordered on racist, sexist, and with religious intolerance. The Newman brain trust did not want to turn people away from their products, even those to whom they were politically diametrically opposed. There was, of course, the option to just disband the room where politics were discussed, but it was clear that removing that room would basically de-facto derail the forum, or political posts would bleed into other rooms.
Eric saw that the U.S. political atmosphere was becoming increasingly contentious and felt that being a part of a fight would not serve the Newman family business.
There were also rumblings that the Fuente family and the Newman family had disparate political leanings and that their differences were being articulated by forum members. That didn't go over well, not at all.
And, of course, there was the continued discussion by members of Cuban cigars. As it became illegal again to import Habanos, the Newmans had to consider what was in the best interest of the forum they sponsored. Would the authorities hold them to account for giving license to illegally importing a banned foreign product?
The Newmans had a lot to consider, but clearly with Cigar Pass and others still alive and healthy, they were not removing the sole cigar forum.
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This right here is the answer. I think it would be really great if there was a more active CF expat presence migrated to CP, but given how idle the Facebook groups are generally I suspect most of the folks who aren't already here are on the truly private boards or have stepped away from cigar discussion. The increased prices of the hobby, aging out of many of the members, and falling off of the monster herf dynamic all come into play too (and that all hits CP just as hard).
 
Steve*R said:
There was, of course, the option to just disband the room where politics were discussed, but it was clear that removing that room would basically de-facto derail the forum, or political posts would bleed into other rooms.
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I used to run a football forum. It was small, only aimed at one team, but the guy who put the money down insisted on a politics forum. And it was, by far, the most active forum. Made no sense.

One year as an April fools joke, I made the politics forum unaccessible. People lost their minds. A handful were crying about having their rights violated. On a private football forum. Because they couldn't circle jerk themselves raw for one day.

It's funny to me how some people truly cannot function unless they're frothing at the mouth about their current political cause. Makes sense that a corporation wouldn't want to deal with the crap that comes along with that.
 
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tomthirtysix said:
I used to run a football forum. It was small, only aimed at one team, but the guy who put the money down insisted on a politics forum. And it was, by far, the most active forum. Made no sense.

One year as an April fools joke, I made the politics forum unaccessible. People lost their minds. A handful were crying about having their rights violated. On a private football forum. Because they couldn't circle jerk themselves raw for one day.

It's funny to me how some people truly cannot function unless they're frothing at the mouth about their current political cause. Makes sense that a corporation wouldn't want to deal with the crap that comes along with that.
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It’s a mental defect brought about by indoctrination since we are born. I would wax on that, and how obsessive partisanship and sports fandom have some funny parallels, but I’m actually pretty dumb and don’t like being embarrassed online when people explain to me how I’m wrong.
 
Beginning with the mid 1990s, there was a tremendous upsurge in cigar culture. The internet was alive and comprehensible to even those of us who were already in our 50s. By gosh, we could easily communicate, instantly, with fellow cigar smokers from everywhere and anywhere without feeling guilty about odor and expense. To us it was bouquet and great value. We had our choice of venues and many of us contributed to many. We had a few youngsters tag along with us, who now are in their 50s themselves. But the reality is that there are currently two distinct populations of cigar smokers; those of us who are many years retired and well past all the cigar marketing B.S. and a new generation of cigar smokers with considerable discretionary dollars, who may think a $10.00 cigar is average priced. They have their own well attended forums using various social media like Facebook, Instagram, reddit, snapchat, Discord, etc. I've taken a cursory glance at a few and it appears that most keep the discussions focused on cigars; what's new and where can they be purchased. And, of course, there are some reviews. I think the intent is to avoid what happened at Cigar Family.
 
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