- Messages
- 5,391
- Classified ads
- 3
We've soft launched TactiQool.com as our merchandise store where you can buy our shirts when they become available. This is separate from our main site, which doesn't sell physical products. You might see the ad rotating in from time to time, so we wanted to let you know its us!
TactiQool.com will also:
The site is still being developed, but it's mostly working now. I'm currently cleaning up other parts of the site.
This was the original thread with the idea:
I didn't do a big launch since I don't have a lot of help building these things. Instead, I like to ask you guys what's wrong with it so I can fix it.
I can probably do better but you guys are good at finding issues. 
I'll annoy everyone with a big banner like we do updates, once it's ready.
This is for folks who don't want to sign up for a membership but still want to support the site, by taking pennies away from billionaires to support our 2A community. I've had to come up with other ways to monetize since traffic continues to outpace donations. If a portion of you guys do your shopping through us, it would go a long way in supporting our cause without directly supporting us.
Our growth
Here's CAguns.net one year chart. The big spike in April '24 was the great CGN migration. Then another spike in August after CGN deiced to go back to a dedicated server because it was too expensive to be in cloud. When CGN was running in the cloud, it wasn't looking too good for the site. We were down to 10-20 people online at any given time. Since then our growth is doing the hockey stick curve which is great, but ultimately why I'm having to do some of the things I'm doing now. Cloud infrastructure isn't the same as dedicated servers. We're charged based on scale and as usage goes up so does our cost vs the fixed cost of a dedicated server. We're adapting to this growth while trying to maintain a non-intrusive approach to funding, especially given our already strict community rules.
Over the year, we've managed to bring in nearly 1 million unique users and serve almost 200M requests without the service having any real change in performance.
CAguns.net migrated to Xenforo 2.3.6 on March 6th with very few problems thanks to the help of our volunteers doing some bug testing on our staging site.
After the upgrade, I made some optimizations to improve the performance score, this is something I do periodically after I make changes to the system. We've improved mobile performance by ~35% while serving double the traffic from November. Desktop performance was already good and managed ~10% improvement.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. I like to jot down notes, especially after big spikes in traffic or key milestones. I appreciate everyone who’s still along for the ride and the people who come and go, and that’s great too. I hope to be here whenever they have any 2A needs.
TactiQool.com will also:
- Host our class registration system
- Track your class information
- List our shirts for sale and order management
- Use your existing CAguns.net login (no need for a new account)
- A 24-hour cookie is set
- This extends to 90 days if you add items to your cart
- We receive a 3% commission on purchases (Amazon gets 97%)
The site is still being developed, but it's mostly working now. I'm currently cleaning up other parts of the site.
This was the original thread with the idea:
I didn't do a big launch since I don't have a lot of help building these things. Instead, I like to ask you guys what's wrong with it so I can fix it.
I can probably do better but you guys are good at finding issues. I'll annoy everyone with a big banner like we do updates, once it's ready.This is for folks who don't want to sign up for a membership but still want to support the site, by taking pennies away from billionaires to support our 2A community. I've had to come up with other ways to monetize since traffic continues to outpace donations. If a portion of you guys do your shopping through us, it would go a long way in supporting our cause without directly supporting us.
Our growth
Here's CAguns.net one year chart. The big spike in April '24 was the great CGN migration. Then another spike in August after CGN deiced to go back to a dedicated server because it was too expensive to be in cloud. When CGN was running in the cloud, it wasn't looking too good for the site. We were down to 10-20 people online at any given time. Since then our growth is doing the hockey stick curve which is great, but ultimately why I'm having to do some of the things I'm doing now. Cloud infrastructure isn't the same as dedicated servers. We're charged based on scale and as usage goes up so does our cost vs the fixed cost of a dedicated server. We're adapting to this growth while trying to maintain a non-intrusive approach to funding, especially given our already strict community rules.
Over the year, we've managed to bring in nearly 1 million unique users and serve almost 200M requests without the service having any real change in performance.
CAguns.net migrated to Xenforo 2.3.6 on March 6th with very few problems thanks to the help of our volunteers doing some bug testing on our staging site.
After the upgrade, I made some optimizations to improve the performance score, this is something I do periodically after I make changes to the system. We've improved mobile performance by ~35% while serving double the traffic from November. Desktop performance was already good and managed ~10% improvement.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. I like to jot down notes, especially after big spikes in traffic or key milestones. I appreciate everyone who’s still along for the ride and the people who come and go, and that’s great too. I hope to be here whenever they have any 2A needs.
Last edited:
