The Most Helpful Online Fishing Group Ever?

Joe and Luke, you’ve done a magnificent job! You asked for feedback, and here’s some:

1. IT and AI is important, and substantial growth of IT staff seems to indicate your priorities. The “Career Opportunities” announcement makes no mention of searching for fishing coaches. With two gone this year and no replacements, it doesn’t seem this is an area of focus.
2. At first of year, Joe did a podcast where he talked about having fishing coaches fish outside their customary areas. Great idea but not put into practice. Nearly every FL east coast fishing session is about the northern IRL or Mosquito Lagoon. It’s one reason the weekend game plans discuss the patterns and trends, and say to apply them across the entire FL east coast which spans roughly 450 miles. When a person was selected to fish with a coach, it was the same area that the coach fishes instead of going to a different area. Many of these fisheries are very different such as habitat, tidal flow, and different species having abundance (e.g., redfish north of Sebastian less so south of there). It’s like saying to apply the patterns and trends of the FL west coast or GA, SC, NC because they’re all the same. SS has moved past the notion that trends and patterns apply to all local fisheries as it sought growth outside inshore Florida waters to other states, newer focus on nearshore, and offering an array of different colored baits due to “local demand”. Hopefully, this idea gets put into practice.
3. You don’t need to rush out something new when it’s not ready for prime time. IT philosophy seems to promote getting product (apps, web re-design) out due to short shelf life and then further develop it and bug removal on the fly. Apple seems to be a company who leans heavily on beta testing and product feedback before formally launching their products, and their repeat customers reward them for taking a different tack.
4. Community page IT housekeeping should help to better organize content and remove marketing clutter. That’s a good move although now needing to go back and clean up stuff. More organization and better ways to archive content (especially “Fishing Tips”) based on user preference would also be a step in the right direction. Nearly impossible to find a particular article among more than 3,000 by searching through several hundred articles that come up on a search. It seems like an inordinate amount of resources goes into creating new content when nearly identical content has already been produced (i.e., repetition). With focus on growing membership to 200,000 by 2025, a lot of newcomers are beginning anglers so they appreciate basic “Fishing Tips” but that takes away from producing better content for Insiders whom are long term members. In other words, why reinvent the wheel when it already exists?