[koldkut]

Never said "ALL" of them are scum. just most of them including the owners---

Including the owners - Yessir!

 

[koldkut]

I spent some time looking for this mystery website since coming back to the forum and wondering if that had anything to do with the decline here (thinking maybe people ventured elsewhere in my decade absence)

With that, I could only assume that the references were pertaining to FishExplorer.com

Kind of hard to determine from navigating the site what the big stink about it is? Seems like a decent place for info. Even saw Bernie on there, and made me think of my ice rod stashed someplace in the Upper Peninsula


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Bernie's in "the industry" and makes his living off talking about fishing and getting exposure, he should be everywhere.

In the early days of Fish'Sploiter, the owner came over here and was like "check out this site,this may be a cool place, what you think?"

And when I put my honest two cents out here, that I felt the site was only there to exploit users for info rather than being a valid exchange of data place, I got a nasty PM from the poster who then identified himself as the owner of fishexplorer and asked me to take my defamatory post down because it's hurting him.

Then there was the posts on his site where he laid it out, if you don't post, the site dies....

then if you criticize someone, you get banned or restricted. I even came up with the tagline "Fishexploiterer, we want your info, but we don't want you" because it was how they seriously operated that site, no debate, just fishing reports and lake status updates and helping others catch fish, outside of that, you aren't invited to share thoughts or nothing.

So it we dubbed it FishExploiter or 'Sploiter.....And that Dave guy Matt had running the place was a disease of the worst kind too. It only got worse from there, you had to pay for your own data when his site wasn't performing on the ad revenue......

The site has a history with many of us......So we recognize the inate traits of a 'Sploiter when they come into our home....

 

[koldkut]

Interesting info, thank you for sharing. I guess I like the concept of an easy place to find accessible info on lakes and reports, and it would save time filtering thousands of posts with uninformative information. This is especially true for me as I am always making out of state trips and it can be a real struggle to find the most basic of feedback. But I also agree that a site with that format takes some of the uniqueness away from a forum, if a forum is what their goal was.

Other than what you shared, I really know no other information about the other site. I started coming here after meeting Don B and never went anywhere else (even WSA when I moved from Denver to GJ...that used to be the real competition back in the good ole days)

Just a little unfortunate that the amount of valuable posts from our members here has declined significantly over my 9 years away. Especially since the amount of general online internet users has spiked during this time along with everyone's access via mobile devices (back then, Blackberry was the elite phone)...but I still very much enjoy seeing the quality of fish coming out of CO and the beautiful back drops in the pictures, which will keep me lurking.

There's only so much water, I've been dumb in my early days on here and had some small ponds whored out by folks who had never met me but saw my information about the ponds on here....I'm not the only one who has dealt with seeing a bunch of internet report chasers blowing spots up.