-
Hey Aaron, thanks for introducing yourself. You’ve been around since the beginning, but “welcome” to the new site.
One of the things I’ve always wanted is a community people could come to and use, and ask questions and contribute and grow.
The early vBulletin boards of the Internet had the potential for this. I was part of a really good one in the early 2000s that was moderated, organized and had good resources. I never forgot that and have been chasing something like that for inshore fishing since 2014.
It’s been tough. The Facebook group LAFB Inshore was good at first, but FB really just uses groups as another source for user generated content to put in News Feed and serve ads on. Otherwise, the organization and search function of Groups sucks. It’s just so obvious that FB doesn’t care. lol
That and everyone realized the low barrier to creating a group and now the user base is splintered.
I tried a public-facing forum back in 2014 to 2017 called Louisiana Fishing Reports (LAFR), and it did well enough, but got axed for LAFB Inshore. Now I’m taking lessons learned from both experiences and applying them here.
It kinda sucks that it has to be in the form of a paid membership, but that’s where we are. You get what you pay for. A free BuddyPress forum is gonna be wonky, full of Google AdSense, etc. and something “sleeker” like Facebook Groups comes with a whole other litany of hot garbage. lol
I like this site as it is, it works great on a browser like Brave (or even Chrome) but the new app being developed is gonna kick ass.
The main ingredient is gonna be you guys. It’s gonna be you guys showing up, making posts, saying hi, helping eachother out, etc.
So I appreciate you making an intro post and hope you post a report in the future.
Thanks, Aaron!
