Question for the SWE Community

[cchobot]

We've added the capability for a new feature on the SWE Forums and we want to get everybody's opinion before we take it live.

Take a look at the following: hogy

Now the interesting thing is that if you hover over that link you will see a picture of a hogy w/ a brief description and a link to more info on that product.

This technology can be used a lot of ways since we only need to set it up once and then anytime anybody posts hogy it will create this sort of "glossary" link.

We think it might be useful for newbies who visit the boards to be able to hover over some words that they don't know and get a good explanation complete w/ picture.

Do we hope this may help us sell more? Yes... But then again we realize we won't be around very long if we do things that our customers don't like.

You can see we don't want to step on anyone's toes here.

So we want a little feedback on this feature.

What do you all think? Could it be helpful to have these type of glossary-like links? Complete w/ pictures? What words would be useful to link to and provide more info on?

I can't stress enough that SWE wants to please this community and we take your opinions very seriously.

Thanks in advance for your feedback,

Chris

[ChiefLinesider]

as long as when you set up the glossary links......

You make it so whenever you put your mouse over Chieflinesider a picture of Einstein comes up.

Other than that small obstacle I think its a great addition.

[RockHopper]

From a newbie's POV, it's an excellent idea. I'm in the magazine business and we try and do the same thing whenever possible. They're like entry points into an article, and they're not only useful, but very effective at keeping the reader's attention. Similar to how we read captions and tip boxes before actually diving into an article.

One suggestion would be to give the same treatment to techniques and tips. For example, you guys had two excellent articles on the homepage for awhile (one on fishing the whitewater), and as you add instructional material like this over the years, you can have jumps to these resources as well. Another example: when someone refers to "jigging" in a post, or even in your product descriptions, you can have it open up a window that explains jigging (I'm still unsure, myself). Make sense?

Keep up the great work...you're spot on with your approach, it's all about building the community (neighborhood) and anything you can do to make the experience good for the new guys makes them more likely to become permanent residents...of the site and the shop. But, then again, I think you guys already know this...

[Kevin J]

I like it cchobot. Maybe set up a polling thread to get a vote.

[Frightnight]

It would be a great asset for a fishing moran like me. I had actually asked the question months ago, about having a page to identify lures that everyone was referring to. I would accuse you of getting the idea from me, but we all know how no ones listens to me, so I guess you did come up with it on your own. LOL OK, that's all. I am trying to keep my mouth shut as much as possible on this forum for now on. Love your plan though.

[cchobot]

Great suggestions,

Kevin J : See the poll added to this thread

Frightnight: I want to give you a lot of credit. You say the things we know a lot of other newcomers to the sport are thinking but are too frightened (pun totally intended) to post.

We try to do our best to think of what everyone would like to see but when someone actually speaks up and tells us we really want to pay attention.

Take for instance our fishing report, we know everyone wants this to be updated daily and we are trying to think of ways to accomplish this without having the quality suffer. One idea we've kicked around is having more contributors. What are your ideas on improving the quality and regularity of the report?

There's lots of questions we have for all of you. We'll try to take them one at a time and implement each improvement well.

Thanks for all the response.

PS. Chieflinesider ... I can totally make your Einsteen request a reality... And this goes for anyone that would like to have their handle link to a "biography"-type popup... Just PM me the details

[cchobot]

RockHoppers suggestion about the articles has given me some work to do tonight...

We'll be setting up the words "whitewater" and "needlefish" to link to these articles in the near future.

Thanks VERY MUCH for that suggestion.

[ChiefLinesider]

Originally Posted by cchobot

Great suggestions,

Kevin J : See the poll added to this thread

Frightnight: I want to give you a lot of credit. You say the things we know a lot of other newcomers to the sport are thinking but are too frightened (pun totally intended) to post.

We try to do our best to think of what everyone would like to see but when someone actually speaks up and tells us we really want to pay attention.

Take for instance our fishing report, we know everyone wants this to be updated daily and we are trying to think of ways to accomplish this without having the quality suffer. One idea we've kicked around is having more contributors. What are your ideas on improving the quality and regularity of the report?

There's lots of questions we have for all of you. We'll try to take them one at a time and implement each improvement well.

Thanks for all the response.

PS. Chieflinesider ... I can totally make your Einsteen request a reality... And this goes for anyone that would like to have their handle link to a "biography"-type popup... Just PM me the details

I always look forward to reading the report. Would be glad to contribute any noteworthy catches if it meant more updating. It can be a useful motivational tool. I went as far as printing out the reports that were made this year. Being out there nearly every night, it was interesting to compare my success in my Fishing Log, To the success that was had at SWE.

There is a thin line though, between a report & a boring tally for the night.

[RockHopper]

Hmmm...this ChiefLinesider got me thinking...not sure of the technology involved here, but what if there were visual map graphic of the R.I./Mass. area, for example, the Cape on down to Block, including Narr. Bay, and it allowed the user to check off general areas on the map that were productive, and maybe unproductive (kind of like a poll). The result would show where there's better activity without revealing specific spots, and would generally show the movement of fish. This way, if someone doesn't want to write out a report, they have this option instead...

Anyway, maybe it's a silly idea to mull over the winter.

[Frightnight]

I love the Einstein thing for Cheifsideliner, very funny. I think we all understand that it is close to impossible to update the fishing report daily, but 2 or 3 weeks or more between reports is a long time in the fishing world. To be honest, I don't even check it anymore beacause it never seems to be updated. As far as people posting their catches, maybe you can make a topic on you forum for just that thing only. Like your "Ask a Question" area. Make a " Recent catches" area, that can not be changed like a thread, but is just for that purpose only. People can attach pics of their caych, and maybe a quick report of area caught, on what, bait, type of lure, and when the say what lure it is, it could have the highlighted thing you are doing that shows that lure if possible? Then you have everyone in your forum sort of doing a type of recent and updated report for you, along with pics to make it interesting! Just a suggestion from a dumb rookie. Maybe you can revise it to fit?