TSF Upgrades and Threads of the Week - January 7th 2024
A look at the upgrades we put in place over the Christmas and New Year Period as well as some threads that have caught our eye.
Firstly, I hope you all had a great Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!
In this newsletter:
Website Upgrades
Interesting Threads This Week
Website Upgrades
Over the Christmas period, we undertook a series of upgrades on the website. We've completed our move away from WordPress for all of our articles, these now reside fully within the same software that powers our Forum. Doing this means that the whole website is integrated and that you will get information on the latest articles directly in the forum from now on. It also means that articles will come up in search, so if you want to know about a topic in-depth, you can search the forum, and the relevant article will appear. You can view our articles by clicking on this link.
We’ve also introduced Reviews to the website. These will be expanded with time, and they will work threefold:
We’ll add the product to the database with some manufacturer information and a studio shot of the product.
We’ll add an Editor’s Review - this will be our review of the product if one of the team has bought and is using the product.
User Reviews - if you’ve bought the product, then this will be where you can review the product and give your opinions on it.
Each product will have a little “Buy” button next to it, so if you like what you’ve read, you can then use those buttons to go and buy the product. These links are affiliate links with various affiliate partners such as eBay and Amazon and tackle shops like Prime Angling. We may receive a small commission if you click on the buy link and buy the product (or any product on those websites). It doesn’t affect your price, but it means we make a tiny amount of money that helps fund the website. We think this is a better way of generating income for the site than plastering adverts all over the site. You can view our reviews here.
Which leads me to advertising. You will notice that there is no advertising on the website at the moment. Before, we had some limited advertising for non-members, we will likely add some back in for non-members at some point in the future. Our hope is that, provided the links in the reviews are used, we can keep the website as advert-free as possible. That’s not to say there won’t ever be adverts, but there are certainly no plans to add them in the short term, and if (a big IF) we ever did, then it would be nowhere near the levels of some other websites out there. You can read more about how the website is funded here.
Interesting Threads
In each TSF Newsletter, I will start highlighting some interesting threads. These are posts that have been posted by our members.
This week, I’ve picked a thread in the England Catch Reports Forum by Just One Last Cast and his Annual Report 2023 Thread. This is a really interesting thread which chronicles his catches over the year. Well worth a visit.
Also, another thread of interest is a fantastic report by CKB entitled The Lost Colony this looks back at his adventures Red Drum Fishing, a great write-up with plenty of pics on an adventure of a lifetime.
If you have a thread of the week you’d like to bring to my attention, please send me a PM on the forum with a link to the thread.
And that’s all for this week’s edition of the TSF Newsletter. I hope you have a great week!
Tight Lines
Mike Thrussell Jnr