New North East Sea Angling Website

Mike

Administrator
Staff member
You may or may not have read my introduction post a few days ago. But I have taken over as the owner of NESA from Elton. You can read my introduction post here.

I've completed the move to the new NESA server, and I have upgraded the forum software from the old vBulletin system to Xenforo. Xenforo is a far more efficient piece of software, it's more user-friendly as well and is just generally better, in every way! I hope you like the new look and the new forum software. If you experience any issues with it, please do post in this thread and I will do my best to answer any questions. Below are a few things to look out for and also explanations of some changes that have been made.

Mobile Friendly and PWA Mobile App
NESA now has a mobile App. If you go to the NESA website on your mobile phone browser, click on the Hamburger Menu (three horizontal lines) and scroll to the bottom of the menu. There you will see something called "Install Mobile App". Click on that and follow the instructions.

Image Uploads
You can upload large images from your mobile phone onto the site now. All the upload limits have been increased, and new image optimisation software has been installed which will compress those images down for quicker viewing. There are still a few posts/threads on the forum that detail that you need to use Photobucket or other image hosting services, I haven't got around to deleting these yet, but, please ignore them, they are now irrelevant. Images are now being served from Amazon S3, so they will download super quick, no matter where you are.

Enhanced Search
I've installed a new search engine into NESA. This one is more accurate and should, in most cases, allow you to find what you need to find quicker. The search engine will show similar threads at the bottom of each thread. It will also run a search when you start a new thread to see if the topic has already been discussed.

Facebook and Google Logins
For those of you who use single sign on methods with your Google or Facebook account, you can now log in to NESA using your Facebook or Google account details. Other SSO will be brought online soon, along with SSO with NESA sister sites Talk Sea Fishing and Tackle Guide.

Forum Consolidation
This is always the hard one with any forum. Below I'll explain what has been done and why:

Report Forums
These have been grouped together in a new Local Angling Reports section. This includes the Shore and Boat Catch Report forums, as well as the Club Results Forum. This gives you a simple go to area to read and post any catch reports.

Angling Forums
A new section that contains the forums where general North East fishing chat takes place. This section contains the Shore Fishing, Boat Fishing, Lure Fishing, Tournament Casting and For/Sale Wanted forums.

The Tournament Casting Forum includes the old Calendar and Comp Results sections. Although these haven't been maintained for a long time, they contain historical results that some of you may find interesting. I'm hoping once we get a bit more traction on here, Comp Results will start to be posted again, along with events in the Calendar section.

I've merged the old For Sale, Wanted and eBay forums into a new For Sale / Wanted Forum. You can distinguish whether a classified ad is a "For Sale" or a "Wanted" because this forum now has Prefixes which show before the title of the thread. When you post a new classified ad, you will need to designate whether it is a For Sale or Wanted item using those Prefixes. All forums have a filter option, which allows you to only show results by the Prefix. So if you only want to see For Sale ads, you can filter out all the Wanted ads.

The Other Fishing section contains the Freshwater Fishing forum and the Video Forum has been modified to be a YouTube Fishing Videos forum where you can post relevant angling YouTube video links. The new forum will embed the YouTube video directly into the post, so you don't need to go to YouTube to watch those videos, you can watch them right here on NESA.

Non-Fishing Chat contains the Chat Forum, The Barmaids Bosom, Cooking Your Catch forums. Also included is a Forum Question and Suggestions Forum where you can ask any questions about how the forum works, any problems you're having with the forum software and also post up suggestions that you think would benefit the forum too.

Several forums have been moved to an Archive section. These are forums that haven't had any traffic for years and forums where the information is out of date. For example, the webcams' forum, none of the links worked in there any more. Realistically, topics such as Sea State and Webcams are better as sticky threads in the Shore Forum where more people will see them. So we can add those in at a later date if you all feel they need to be put in.

You can still visit the forums that have been archived, they can be found by clicking here.

Clubs, Charter Boats and Tackle Shop Listings
These pages were old, some of the information was over 20 years old. Quite a lot of the contact details were out of date. I've removed those pages to an archive, and I've created a new Directory Listing. This will contain information on Local Clubs, Charter Boats and Tackle Shops. These pages are empty currently, but, with your help, I'd like to get these pages populated again asap.

Articles
Lastly, the articles that were on the NESA site before. This is a difficult one, again, much of the information is out of date now, especially some of the mark articles that were on the site before. When I took a look through them, some of them were over 25 years old. My next job is to go through all of these and see which ones will be added to the new articles' system. I'm aware there are a few threads in the archive section that should be articles as well. If you know of any articles that you feel must haves from the old site, please let me know in the comments below, and I can look to bring them back in.

There are many articles/marks that need updating as well. So that is something else that I may need some help with going forward :)

Advertising
At some point, there will be some low-level advertising added just to help pay for the server bills and the software that runs the site. These adverts won't be to the level that was on here before, and there absolutely won't be any full-screen ads that were on the forum before. As with my other websites, you will have the option to turn these adverts off in your User Preferences Section. All you need to do is click on your Username, go to Preferences and Scroll to Advertisement Options and uncheck View Ads.

I think that is everything for the first update to NESA. I hope that you like the new forum software, although like most things, it will take time to get used to, it was the best decision for NESA to move to a more modern forum software. I wanted to get this done as a priority as traffic is low currently, and it would cause the least amount of disruption doing it at this time.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top