dcabarle
Administrator
A few items I'd like to offer from my perspective as this sites keeper. I started this website a while back because of my love of the sport. I wanted to share my experiences on the river with others as well as provide a form of media where others could do the same. I also wanted to use the site as a place where the inexperienced Fly Fisherman could ask questions and learn something new. This seams to be where the site excelled. Through many Emails, quite a few users said that they've learned so much from reading this site and its archives. It never occured to me that there are 4 years or so of great unexpired knowledge within the threads/posts on this site. Had I known the site actually served a purpose other than some people sitting back and hitting their refresh button, waiting to see what the next person posts, I would have just left it running without this interuption.
I don't want to give the impression that I'm looking to stroke my ego. It's not the case but I understand if some/all of you feel that way. My reasoning for turning the site off was because at any given time, I'd notice anywhere from 8-10 users viewing the site but at the same time, noticed hardly any interaction going on. Also, at least 70 registered visitors per day viewed the site and quite a few non-registered visitors as well, but still... no interaction. I couldn't figure out what everyone was doing if they weren't posting.
A few things that drove me to my decision to turn the forum off... I pay roughly 200.00 - 300.00 /year to maintain this site and that doesn't include the countless hours that I spent maintaining it. If that bothered me, I wouldn't have the site in the first place. What does bother me is when people ask for a specific new feature to be added and I go out and spend the money and time to set the new feature up and nobody takes advantage of it. That kinda made me feel as if people requested the features because they enjoy watching money fly out of my pockets. I understand that all of you have lives and can't participate every single day, but if some of the people who thought this was a great idea simply posted 1 fly per week, we'de have a pretty good fly tying database by now. Instead, only a small portion of people used the fly tying database. About a month ago, I turned if off just to see if anyone would notice and nobody sent an email to let me know that they couldn't post to it.
This site has an elaborate database of photographs. I definetely don't mind if you host the photo's here and every so often present them on another site. Hey, this is the internet and I kind of expect that. In fact, I purposely enabled the feature just so people could do just that. What I don't care for is posting the photo's here just to host them here so you can talk about them elsewhere. That's what photobucket.com is for. The reason I set up the photography database is so you can post your photo's here and talk about them here. Again, I don't mind if you post photo's here and display them on other sites, but let's start the conversation off over here and give it some time to pick up.
To keep the site interesting, I've asked for people to contribute by writing articles (which I'll gladly pay for if it's well written and excedes only a few paragraphs), but not many responded. The ones who did respond have their articles in the main menu. I've tried just about everything to get the user contribution level's up.
It's possible that some of you don't know about some of the features this site has. To name a few:
Chat - This is a realtime chat feature. I think the way to possibly make this a useful feature is to have a few Chat moderators. This means that at certain times on certain days, the moderator will be required to be in the chat room for at least 30 minutes. Why? Well, if people know that someone will be in the chat room, they might show up. This may take some time to catch on but if we set times and dates and have volunteer moderators, this would be great! If you're interested, please PM me with the times you're available and the topics you'de like to discus. I'll place this on the main page so everyone knows that on Wednesday nights at 9:00 we'll talk about the South Branch... You get the idea...
Arcade - The site has about 30 cheesy but fun games which we you can play.
Calendar - You can post important Fly Fishing event days which will display in the mini calendar. This means that your important days don't get lost within a thread. A pefect example would be something like a planned river cleanup or Jim Serio's, "Day on the Delaware"... I just feel it's a good place to keep important dates.
Anyhow, you get the picture. My main thing is that if I'm going to keep this site up, people are going to have to help me out by contributing to it. Not financially but by keeping it interesting, otherwise it's only an archive.
As far as site moderators, I'm presently doing this solo. I'd like to thank Andre for his volunteer efforts during the more outspoken times this site had.
If anyone has any suggestions that might benefit the users who visit this site, my ears are open and I'd love to learn some new ideas.
I'll go ahead and close this post/thread, but before I do, I'd like to thank the people who emailed me and informed me that they've learned something from this site. I think that's one of the main reasons I put the site up in the first place; a learning device. I didn't think anyone was actually looking in the archives. Thanks a bunch, I really do appreciate all of your feedback.
Thanks for listening to what I had say.
:thankyou:
I don't want to give the impression that I'm looking to stroke my ego. It's not the case but I understand if some/all of you feel that way. My reasoning for turning the site off was because at any given time, I'd notice anywhere from 8-10 users viewing the site but at the same time, noticed hardly any interaction going on. Also, at least 70 registered visitors per day viewed the site and quite a few non-registered visitors as well, but still... no interaction. I couldn't figure out what everyone was doing if they weren't posting.
A few things that drove me to my decision to turn the forum off... I pay roughly 200.00 - 300.00 /year to maintain this site and that doesn't include the countless hours that I spent maintaining it. If that bothered me, I wouldn't have the site in the first place. What does bother me is when people ask for a specific new feature to be added and I go out and spend the money and time to set the new feature up and nobody takes advantage of it. That kinda made me feel as if people requested the features because they enjoy watching money fly out of my pockets. I understand that all of you have lives and can't participate every single day, but if some of the people who thought this was a great idea simply posted 1 fly per week, we'de have a pretty good fly tying database by now. Instead, only a small portion of people used the fly tying database. About a month ago, I turned if off just to see if anyone would notice and nobody sent an email to let me know that they couldn't post to it.
This site has an elaborate database of photographs. I definetely don't mind if you host the photo's here and every so often present them on another site. Hey, this is the internet and I kind of expect that. In fact, I purposely enabled the feature just so people could do just that. What I don't care for is posting the photo's here just to host them here so you can talk about them elsewhere. That's what photobucket.com is for. The reason I set up the photography database is so you can post your photo's here and talk about them here. Again, I don't mind if you post photo's here and display them on other sites, but let's start the conversation off over here and give it some time to pick up.
To keep the site interesting, I've asked for people to contribute by writing articles (which I'll gladly pay for if it's well written and excedes only a few paragraphs), but not many responded. The ones who did respond have their articles in the main menu. I've tried just about everything to get the user contribution level's up.
It's possible that some of you don't know about some of the features this site has. To name a few:
Chat - This is a realtime chat feature. I think the way to possibly make this a useful feature is to have a few Chat moderators. This means that at certain times on certain days, the moderator will be required to be in the chat room for at least 30 minutes. Why? Well, if people know that someone will be in the chat room, they might show up. This may take some time to catch on but if we set times and dates and have volunteer moderators, this would be great! If you're interested, please PM me with the times you're available and the topics you'de like to discus. I'll place this on the main page so everyone knows that on Wednesday nights at 9:00 we'll talk about the South Branch... You get the idea...
Arcade - The site has about 30 cheesy but fun games which we you can play.
Calendar - You can post important Fly Fishing event days which will display in the mini calendar. This means that your important days don't get lost within a thread. A pefect example would be something like a planned river cleanup or Jim Serio's, "Day on the Delaware"... I just feel it's a good place to keep important dates.
Anyhow, you get the picture. My main thing is that if I'm going to keep this site up, people are going to have to help me out by contributing to it. Not financially but by keeping it interesting, otherwise it's only an archive.
As far as site moderators, I'm presently doing this solo. I'd like to thank Andre for his volunteer efforts during the more outspoken times this site had.
If anyone has any suggestions that might benefit the users who visit this site, my ears are open and I'd love to learn some new ideas.
I'll go ahead and close this post/thread, but before I do, I'd like to thank the people who emailed me and informed me that they've learned something from this site. I think that's one of the main reasons I put the site up in the first place; a learning device. I didn't think anyone was actually looking in the archives. Thanks a bunch, I really do appreciate all of your feedback.
Thanks for listening to what I had say.
:thankyou:
