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Quick Link: https://www.njwoodsandwater.com/showcases/hunter-showcase/ TLDR; Instead of posting individual topics in various forums or one "picture only" topic in a given forum, we can now post our hunting success pictures and stories in a dedicated page called the Hunter Showcase! The long story... Alright, so I've been debating how best to handle the collection and display of hunting success on the site. Goals: Allow members to share their hunting success, their story, and their pictures Allow other members to react, comment, etc to that hunter's success Have organization where we can see a collection of all the featured success pictures without all the noise of the comments or needing to scroll through pages of comments to find the hunting success pictures. Have the ability to drill down into a specific hunter's success post and have an isolated discussion specific to it. Have the ability to see what I'm specifically interested in seeing, whether it's by animal, by weapon, and/or by year. The traditional way has been to use forum topics, but there are a few major drawbacks that made me rethink this approach and choose to try something new. For example, what types of topics do we create for a season long sharing of deer that members killed with a compound? 2023 Deer Success Thread in the Deer Hunting forum? 2023 Bowhunting Success Thread in the Bowhunting forum? Where do we post? How do other members know? How do we reduce the noise in a topic and focus on just the animal pictures we are interested in? Do we try to moderate a topic and say "Only post animal pictures here, don't say anything about them"? That's not ideal for members or moderators! We WANT to congratulate someone! How do we have conversations about a single success story without walking over other conversations? Alright, so now enter a new creation, the Hunter Showcase! What exactly is it and why is it better than shooting the X ring at 100 yards with a 40lb recurve and a 650 grain arrow? Alright, I'll tell you! Hunter Showcase: Custom entry form that allows you to enter in multiple contexts from the hunt: A unique title for the Hunter Showcase entry, i.e. Massive NJ 10 Pointer Down! A Featured Image that will be the source of the main landing page and provide a paginated list of all member's success (without the noise of any comments on that page, just pictures and details of the kill) Year the animal was killed Date the animal was killed Species of the animal Weapon used A full Content section allowing you to enter additional pictures of the hunt along with a detailed story. This is just like filling in a New Topic! Main landing page A paginated list of all the Featured Images entered! This is the snapshot of all the animals entered without any comments, just pages of featured success pictures! No noise! Comprehensive filtering that will allow you to filter on ANY COMBINATION of Year, Species, and/or Weapon used! This is the main collective benefit of all this. There's no longer a need to fish through forums to find something, you can narrow right down on what you are interested in! Want to see all Deer killed in 2023? You got it! Want to see all Bears killed with a rifle in 2023? You got it! Want to see all Coyotes killed with a compound across all years? You got it! Drill down into a specific Hunter Showcase record! When you see a Hunter Showcase record you're interested in, CLICK IT! It'll take you into the detailed content including the story and additional pictures! Here you'll be able to have a comments section (these are just like replies in a topic), where members can discuss THIS specific hunt. No cross chatter or confusion or difficult to follow conversation, instead it's focused on that hunt! Alright, that's the kickoff! So go give it a try and shoot holes in the approach! I welcome the feedback and will enhance it as recommendations come in! Here is the link again, and you'll also see a main menu item for it and I'll be adding something to the Featured Menu as well soon! https://www.njwoodsandwater.com/showcases/hunter-showcase/