Soon to be launched by parent company FishingForFlies.com, there will be a brand new angling website with a whole new approach. MagicFishing.com is bound to take the internet by storm.
For a start, and to stamp its uniqueness from the outset, there will be not one, not two, but three editors, Mick, Mike and Micky running the show. This will ensure that there can be no 50/50 split decisions over policy, so any action required can be taken immediately.
To guarantee at least one editor is always on hand to steady the ship, Mick will work Mondays and Tuesdays, Mike will cover Wednesdays and Thursdays and Micky will work Fridays and Saturdays. They will all take turns via a rota to cover Sundays, and for Bank holidays, Easter and Xmas breaks there will be a separate rota.
Another rota will be arranged for holiday cover, and other absence through sickness etc. will be covered by another rota. All of these rotas are colour-coded and have been put on a spreadsheet that members can view on site, to see just which editor should be in residence on any particular day
So, with editorial cover taken care of, thoughts turned to moderation on the site, and a pro-active approach was deemed the best way forward. Instead of just a small team of mods frantically scanning the site checking for transgressions, each member will have their very own randomly selected moderator
You send your proposed post to your personal mod, they check it out and if it meets all the relevant site criteria (honest, legal, decent, inoffensive, non-political, non-critical, etc. etc) it will be posted onto the Forum. To save confusion, there is only one category on the Forum, it is expected that the moderators will filter out 90% of what normally gets put up on most sites, and that will dramatically reduce the kind of problems that have occurred on other sites.
Member numbers are all important, so anyone signing up will be required to provide the details of at least 6 others before they are accepted (Not to be confused with pyramid selling, but if you offer them a bribe, then that’s up to you) Grannies (dead or alive), aunts, third cousins twice removed, vaguely remembered friends from school days, just about anyone will do. Sorry, no family pets.
Each new member will be expected to submit an article as part of their acceptance onto the site, and this way a vast reservoir of fresh work will be readily available for the editors to put up MagicFishing.com. With a target of 100,000 members and an average of one new article being put up on the site every day, it could be 275 years before your piece gets posted, but other sites put up articles that seem to be about that old, so apparently that’s not a problem.
The organisation of fish-Ins will be permitted, although the degree of fraternisation between members will be closely scrutinised by the on-duty editor via a bank of webcams situated around the venue. Any behaviour that may reflect badly on the good name of MagicFishing.com will be frowned upon. Punishments for infringements will range from a short, sin-bin like suspension right up to expulsion. The decision of the editors is final, no appeals and no correspondence will be entered into etc.
At last you say, a site like no other, prospective members should rush to pre-register at Magicfishing.com today..!! The faster you sign up, the quicker your article will appear…….
But Seriously……….
All of the above is obviously another of my poor attempts at tongue in cheek humour, and took me all of twenty minutes to write (as long as that, you say…!) The real point of the article is…….ARTICLES
I’m not about to kick over the embers of the ‘Old v New FM’ debate other than to say that the likes of Mark Wintle and myself contributed well over 400 articles between us to the ‘old site, an average of around one a week in our eight or so years of contributing. Unpaid and done just for the love of it, you understand.
Now, Mark has moved on to bigger things, and whilst I have received a number of kind comments about my ramblings and had plenty of encouragement to continue, my personal circumstances mean I can’t find enough ‘thinking’ time to dream up new articles, let alone find the time to write them. The reason I need thinking time for my articles is because 99% of what I write (wrote) is made up, believe it or not! My ramblings would never inform or enlighten the reader, nobody ever learned how to fish any better after reading anything I wrote, and the pieces were simply designed to (hopefully) entertain.
Now there is a vacuum caused by Mark and I not writing regularly (a much bigger vacuum in the case of Mark’s absence) the premise of give and take should come into play. You lot, the members, have figuratively taken from us writers for years, now it’s your turn to give something back. Regardless of what you may feel about the FM hierarchy, it matters not a jot about who is putting articles up on the site, as long as they have something from the members to put there in the first place.
Any one of you can write about a fishing experience you’ve had, good days or bad days, your first ever trip, your latest day out, whatever. It’s where you lot have the advantage over me because you don’t have to spend time thinking about what you have to write, you already have the experience to relate to.
You can colour the piece with (brief) descriptions of tackle and bait, you can add in the scenery, the weather, what you caught (or didn’t), who you went with, anything that happened (there are plenty of ‘colourful’ angling companions.) If you’ve got a few pictures, so much the better.
If it all went t*ts up, you could use the article as a discussion piece to get some advice on what to do right next time. There probably aren’t many venues, methods, baits etc. that the FM members don’t know about and will be keen to advise. If you had one of those really great days when it all went just right (never had one myself, but one day…) then why not let everyone know? It will act as encouragement to other members, particularly those just starting out and those not quite sure what to do.
If you think your spelling and grammar aren’t up to much, don’t worry, the editors will knock it into shape, and it doesn’t have to be War and Peace, 600 – 1200 words is fine (that’s less than 2 pages of A4 writing in Arial 10 point) And if you’re not quite sure if it’s OK and you’re really, really desperate you can send it over to me to read over if you like. I don’t claim any journalistic experience, but I will give you my opinion, for what it’s worth, and I promise I won’t plagiarise anything for a future article of my own, as if…….!
Short of writing the article for you, there’s not much else I can do, but if you lot don’t send things in, don’t be moaning about the quality and content of what is appearing on FM these days if you’re not prepared to do something about it. And certainly don’t leave it all up to the likes of Sean and a few gallant others to do all the work for you……
(As an example, the above is 1267 words.)
