Hands-Free Bulletin Boards Now Up and Running
It is my pleasure to make you aware of a new spinoff website from Texas Fly Caster. Late last week we were finally able to get the powerful, albeit complex YaBB bulletin board www.texasflyreports.com off the ground, if only a few feet off the ground and running.
Texasflyreports.com is a direct take from the legendary Texas website www.texasflyreport.com, which pulled up internet stakes about three years ago, and closed their doors after an illustrious and successful trail blazing life in the digital realm. Many lamented the loss of that site openly, and the quick and merciless death that was visited upon their treasured threads.
The refreshing thing about this new child, Texas Fly Reports, is that I am a doting grandparent, and confident of the parent’s hands the site is in. It’s hands-free for me, and the only influences I should have are in general direction, and specific appearance, advertising and technical functionality of the site. That last part of my job description is potentially the heaviest lifting of all. I am completely confident you will enjoy the superior functionality of YaBB Bulletin Board software that makes Texas Fly Reports work, but the software is complex and not as nearly as easy to deal with as a non-programmer, non-coder would want. That single fact lead from an April 1 roll out to a July 1 roll out.
The casual boards you find here at “DISCUSSION BOARDS” will continue to exist and I still invite you to use them as they will be much more tailored to the information in this site than the new Texas Fly Reports site. Texas Fly Reports is for Texas, and will have more of a statewide appeal.
Readers of Texas Fly Caster have a unique opportunity to influence the statewide Texas Fly Reports. Let me know what a good bulletin board should and should not include, and grandpa and the parents will take that as high level advice about raising this digital kid.
If you do visit Texas Fly Reports now, you won’t find much. Right now, it’s still in the infancy stage with no clear “look,” and we don’t even know what color its eyes will be yet. Rest assured, the look will be changing rapidly, and constantly for the next few weeks.
The things that I hope make the new Texas Fly Reports different are, a) ease of use, b) zero tolerance for cyber-bullies, racism, antagonism, heck all bad -isms!, c) a high tolerance for beginners, d) strong interest in bringing youth into the sport, and finally, e) extreme focus in converting lurkers into posters by all practical means. Solving the internet’s “Lurker Problem” will arguably be the most difficult task, but we will not resort to cheap, or unseemly tactics like those found on other sites (inflating reader counts OR allowing hateful discussions to progress).
Advertising on Texas Fly Reports is accepted and welcome there as well as here. Rates can be locked in at pretty low annual rates as we get the Texas Fly Reports site off the ground.
Category: Culture on the Skids, Fishing Reports, Industry, Life Observed, TECHNICAL
Please feel free to let us know what categories should be on the new site. It’s as much yours as ours – a new child of the digital universe.