BlueEye

Welcome aboard Steve - we are glad to have you!

Happy Birthday Dad May your day be filled with smoke and cake and other birthday surprises!

Happy new year and welcome aboard billfish! Make yourself at home. [ Post made via iPhone ]

Happy New Year everyone! I hope 2013 is a great, safe and productive year on the water. [ Post made via iPhone ]

No need to thank me Bob - we all owe you a big thank you for always helping to set these beneficial ebay auctions up and see them through. Hope you and the family have a great new years. Cheers, Chad

Merry Christmas everyone! Hope you all have a very Happy New Year as well

Steve, Iceman - thank you both! Hope you both have a great holiday and happy new year

Greg, Randy, Tom, Richard - thanks for kind words and feedback Panfisher, that's a great question and the reason I posted this idea for discussion before moving forward with it. You are correct in that a photogallery will cost more money for us in terms of space and the use of a CDN (Content Distribution Network) to ensure the images are served up FAST. IMHO I think the biggest risk here still comes back to that idea of SIMPLICITY. If we put out a gallery that is hard to use or confusing then we are just wasting everyone's time along with money and resources that could be better spent elsewhere. HCI and other usability factors are ultimately what makes or breaks "great new features" as I am sure everyone on this board has seen over the years. Keeping it simple is the hard part, change in itself is the risk. You can mitigate the risk of change by keeping it simple and intuitive to the end user. Money/Space - Yes (but of no worry to you), un-reversability - No, we can always switch the gallery feature off and use current way of simply posting to images forum. One of the nice things about the photogallery is that if you upload an image to it, then you can use that image any other time you want to post it in the forum easily and without having to re-upload the same image again. Another cool feature is the ability to add "notes" to posts to explain exactly what the photo is displaying - in other words you could draw a box around someone's face and label it with their name, or draw box around spoon and label the name of the spoon, or maybe point out certain parts of an engine, etc. It's easy to get caught up with all the "cool" features of new software, but my main focus still remains on keeping it simple Cheers Chad

Very sorry to hear of your loss Richard. Our thoughts and prayers are with you and your family.

Thanks again guys for kind words! I'd like to get your thoughts/opinions on a PHOTOGALLERY option we have with the new software. Is this something you think you would use? Is it a waste of space and we should just post pictures to forum? Just want to try and wrap my head around what you think about this. The idea would be to basically have two galleries (for simplicity) - A Fishing Gallery & A Hunting Gallery. Members could post pictures to these galleries with descriptions. Other members would be able to comment on pictures (similar to how forum would work). The main advantage of the gallery vs. forum is obviously the ability to see all the pictures at once. Let me know!! Thanks, Chad

Hi Troy - Just as an FYI, the new LOU website will allow for polls with MULTIPLE questions (basically a survey) that will be able to accommodate what you are looking to try and accomplish here. The current system only allows one poll question (without creating a bunch of different separate topics). I have made it a sticky topic as you requested until January. Cheers , Chad