Wow. They were so liberal, they appealed to a huge audience. The more seriousness, morality, or (dare I say) sanctity you require from your members, the smaller your forum is going to be.
CAF was at the absolute bottom of the list.
I will point out one thing: apparently running a forum is difficult to make profitable. By the time you have enough traffic to be a decently busy forum, you almost need a dedicated server WHICH IS EXPENSIVE. I can relate to this. CathInfo has decent traffic, but not huge. And note I don't make much ad revenue with its current level of traffic. NEVERTHELESS, it has huge database, bandwidth, and server requirements. I tried to switch to more than your average $10 or $20/month "shared" hosting -- I went with $90/month -- and even that was having issues as bots or other traffic surged and triggered the site getting disabled by the webhost. Note that the $90/month hosting expense would already put CathInfo "in the red".
I quickly realized I had to put CathInfo on my own in-house server -- but do you know how expensive and how big a deal that is? How many guys have "Linux admin", "maintaining a Linux webserver" including all security practices and aspects, in their list of skills?
To hire a guy to do this would be prohibitively expensive for a site that makes less than $100/month.
There are other issues that I won't go into here -- but long story short, there aren't many guys other than me who COULD host a CathInfo. That's why I'm not too worried about competition.
P.S. Note I said "a CathInfo", not some small club of 10-12 friends on a private message board. That's easy. Getting a public forum with hundreds of members -- that's another story.
P.P.S. I also moved CathInfo.com in-house so there would be one less point of failure -- I control the means of production as it were. Basically you'd have to hire an expensive lawyer and *sue me* to force me to do anything (e.g., censorship). There is no middleman over me to complain to, except for maybe the electric company. The electric company isn't going to drop someone for being controversial. It's outside their scope. They provide only the rawest of materials. Web hosting companies are a whole different animal! That's why I don't use one.