FAQ
GoFISHn is a big site that offers a lot of functionality and features. We know there will lots of questions about how it all works. This is a starter FAQ that we'll add to over time.
What is GoFISHn?
We built GoFISHn to help anglers share experiences, information and know how. The idea is to make the fishing easier and more fun for both pro and amateur anglers. We like to says that GoFISHn is where anglers connect. Techies might say we've built a social media and marketing platform driven by user generated and licensed content. But that's just them. Just connect. And fish.
Who is behind GoFISHn?
The site is owned by Go Sportn Inc. which is a privately held company based in California. The president is Ned Desmond, an experienced Internet executive who has launched many online businesses and, lucky for him, Ned has lots of excellent help on the design, technology, and of course, fishing side of things. Much as he loves fishing, Ned's enthusiasm far outstrips his fishing skills.
Read more about Go Sportn on our About Us page.
What types of registration do you offer on GoFISHn?
We have two types: The Angler, which is for folks who love fishing but don't offer professional services. Angler accounts are free. The Pro, which is for those who offer services to others, such as guiding, outfitting, boat rentals etc. Pricing on pro accounts starts at $24.95/month and varies depending on the type of business.
Why does the price vary by business type?
We charge based on the general idea that certain businesses by design are bound to have more customers, more revenue, and ultimately more connections on GoFISHn. A guide can only handle as many trips and customers as there are days in the year, but a lodge can handle several times than, and a gear manufacturer even more. So we price accordingly.
What are the benefits of a Pro membership?
If you have a Pro account, you can rest assured that we're doing everything we can to help your business. Our aim is to make the Web work better for you as a place to find new customers and stay in touch with existing ones. Some of the features that deliver on that promise are available to the angler as well -- such as dead-easy, self-service updates and integration with Facebook and Twitter. But we saved some of the most powerful features for the Pro account:
Get found on GoFISHn three ways. Visitors to GoFISHn can find you in regular search results, on maps of the area you service, and on encyclopedia pages about your species, locations and techniques. Your profile, by the way, is completely public on GoFISHn and the Web. So you'll get found through Google, Yahoo and Bing as well.
Do better in Google. We do a lot to ensure that you also get found easily in Google by creating a lot of links between your profile, other profiles, and other sections of the site. All you have to do is create a profile and add updates; we do the rest.
Choose your own URL. Pros may select a custom url for their profile, which will help with Google as well as general name recognition.
Provide Service Details. Your profile has a tab called "services" where you can list all the details of interest to customers, from rates, to fishing locations, to descriptions of favorite trips. It's all in a tidy template. You can change the information on your own any time you like.
Get customer recommendations. Any member of GoFISHn can write a recommendation for you. But you are not at the mercy of the guy who was impossible to please; you can remove recommendations that don't seem fair to you.
Link to your existing site. You may not be happy with your existing site, but it probably brings you some business. So why not link to it from your profile in GoFISHn? When it comes to Google, inbound links help search ranking. (If you want to understand more about Google, check out these posts on our blog.)
Show your GoFISHn updates on your existing site. We want you to get the most out of the updates you create on GoFISHn, which is why we help you push them out through Facebook, Twitter and a universal system called RSS. In addition, pros get a Widget, which is a little piece of code that you or your webmaster can drop into your existing site. It will add your updates on GoFISHn to your site.
Follow your metrics. Ever wonder how many visitors come to your site? And where they come from? We give you close to real-time answers right in your profile.
File updates from your phone (coming soon). Use your phone to file fishing reports by text message or email. We'll automatically update your profile. That way you can put your feet up after a long day on the water and leave the computer alone.
What email address should I use for my account login?
If you are a Pro, use the email address that you check regularly for customer inquiries. The email address you use for your login is the address we will also use to send you customer inquiries. Both GoFISHn members and non-members are free to send email to a Pro.
If you are an Angler, use the email address that's good for mail from fellow members. We'll use that address when another member wants to contact you. Only GoFISHn members will be permitted to contact you.
Do you reveal my email address on the site?
No, we do not show your address on the site regardless of your account type. When someone clicks the "contact" button your profile they get a form in which they type their message and return email address. We handle the rest.
What sort of a password should I set up?
Make it easy to remember but hard to guess, and eight characters long. We recommend that you use a combination of letters and numbers.
What type of profile should I choose?
If you offer professional services to fellow anglers, you are a Pro. If not, you are an Angler. If you would like to know more about the benefits of being a pro, read the Pro and Angler Accounts section of the FAQ.
What type of business am I?
We hope your business easily fits into one of the categories you see in the drop-down menu. If not, drop us a line at registration@gofishn.com and we'll help out. You can make a selection now and change it later if you wish.
Can I change my business type later?
Yes, though it may change your monthly subscription fee.
How do I choose a custom url?
You can only do this once, so choose carefully. Consider using a string of key words that capture your business name, where you fish, and what you fish for. For example: [gofishn.com/Hairball-Charters-Striped-Bass-Cape-Cod. Think haiku. Keep it under 30 characters, separate each word with a hyphen, all letters lower case, and no apostrophes.
Can I change my custom url later?
Not unless you create an entirely new account. Changing your custom url after you launch your profile is not a good idea for a variety of reasons, including Google performance. Contact us at registration@gofishn.com if you have questions. What business address should I use?
Please provide your official business address. If some some reason you do not wish to make this address public on your profile, check the appropriate box at the bottom of the page.
What image file types do you support?
Jpeg, PNG and Gif formats. Jpeg is best.
What's the right file size?
File size refers to the amount of data that's in the image, e.g. kilobytes or megabytes. The more data, the richer and more beautiful the image. But more data also means it loads more slowly in the browser. We recommend that you trim the file size as much as possible consistent with the image looking good on your profile. Maximum recommended file size: Website image (pros only) 300k and profile image 50k.
How do I choose images for my profile?
For the Angler: Upload a picture if you'd like to see your smiling face on your profile. if you upload nothing, you'll see a little two-tone image of our GoFishn angler.
For the Pro. When you set up you account we require you to select two images -- one of yourself (profile image) and one general image for the profile (website image). A third, optional image is your logo. Until you upload those first two, we'll keep your profile out of public view.
Profile image: Choose a flattering headshot that will fill the big frame on the right side of your profile. After you upload the image, you'll see a small cropping tool that will help you adjust the size. (aspect ratio: 1:1, 216x216 pixels)
Website image: Choose an image from our library (it's free) or use one of your own. Use the cropping tool to adjust the size. Hint: choose an image that has a panoramic look to it. (aspect ratio: 1:2.7, 660x245 pixels)
Logo: If you have a logo, upload and crop it. (aspect ratio: 1:1, 110x110 pixels)
I'm a pro, and I'd like to find more images to choose from for my Website image. What can you recommend?
You have a lot of options online. There are sites that sell photos that range in price from a few dollars to thousands of dollars. You can sign up on those sites and shop for yourself. Here are a few of the best known:
IStockfoto
Shutterstock
Getty Images
Jupiter Images
Punchstock
There are also many photographers whose work you can buy directly. Here are some whose work we know and like; they also license some images to our archive.
Cathy and Barry Beck
Ethan Gordon
Brian O'Keefe
Tim Romano
You may also want to ask a Photoshop designer to create a composite image to help showcase your business. A good example is Eric Stapelfeld's profile on GoFISHN. Some photographers also do this work.
How do I cancel my account?
To cancel your account, please send a request to registration@Gofishn.com and include your name as well as the email address that you use to log in.
Can I downgrade a pro account to an angler account?
Yes, please contact us at registration@gofishn.com if you'd like to downgrade your account from pro to angler. You will no longer be listed as pro on the site but we can preserve the content you've created as a pro account holder.
Can I upgrade from an angler account to a pro account?
Yes, we're happy to help members upgrade their accounts. Contact us at registration@Gofishn.com or go to your "edit profile" section, click on "account set-up" and change your profile type from angler to pro. You will be asked to add additional information and provide a credit card information.
What are "Services" on GoFISHn?
The Service area is a tab on all Pro accounts where the Pro can spell out service details, such as rates, seasons, transportation and so on. Some of this information is required at the time of registration -- general introduction, tagline, fishing area, business name, species, technique and location. We encourage pros to fill out the other sections of services as well.
What's up with Facebook, Twitter and RSS?
We know that many of our customers would like to distribute their fishing updates as widely as possible, and not all their customers are necessarily members of GoFISHn. So we decided early on to integrate with Facebook and Twitter. If you log into your Twitter and/or Facebook account from the page we provide (coming soon) your updates on GoFISHn will magically appear in your Facebook and Twitter feeds. To read more about these services, please look at our blog posts on Facebook and Twitter
We also automatically create an RSS feed of your profile, which means that anyone can follow your headlines on MyYahoo, Google Reader or any other RSS reader. Read about RSS on Wikipeda.
How do recommendations work on gofishn.com?
GoFISHn encourages members to write reviews of Pros. Only members of GoFishn may write recommendations. New recommendations are published immediately on GoFISHn, but the professional who is the subject of the recommendation may remove the recommendation at his or her discretion.
If professionals can delete recommendations they don't like, how can I tell the best from the rest?
if you see solid recommendations on a professional's profile, that's a good starting point. You can also click on the name of the person who wrote the recommendation to see if they are a serious member of GoFISHn who posts often and has written other recommendations. You can also search all of GoFISHn (from the search bar on the top right of each page) to find any mentions -- positive or negative -- about this professional in updates. The pro can remove recommendations but cannot alter updates on other members' profiles.
What are updates?
They are ways to update your friends and customers about what you're doing. They come in several favors. There is the quick update, the report, the photo gallery, the video, the personal best and the map. Use whatever type suits you. All the folks who "favorite" your profile will see a summary of your updates on their own profile home page. It works much like Facebook.
How often can I produce updates?
Knock yourself out. The more you write, the more your customers will see of you and the better you will ultimately do with search engines.
What is a "report?"
It's short hand for "fishing report." This is our all-purpose update. You can write a little or a lot, and add pictures and a map, too.
What is a "quick update"?
This is a text-only update that you can fire off to give quick results of a trip, ping friends about getting a trip together, or, if you are a pro, get the word out to customers that you have a trip opening or the fish are biting.
Why is there a map attached to every type of update?
Sometimes, a map does a good job of conveying certain types of information. You might want to show the camp sites on a trip, trail heads to reach favorite waters, a boat location in the harbor, meeting points -- or show where you caught the big one -- though that's usually a secret, we know. Use maps however you like.
How does GoFISHn handle videos?
We don't host videos on GoFISHn, but we can playback videos hosted at other video sites, such as YouTube and others. We recommend YouTube because it's the only site that provides a thumbnail of the video that we can include with your feed. If you don't already have an account at YouTube.com, please create one. You can upload your video there, save it, and then cut and paste the "embed" code into the appropriate area on the Create a video update page on GoFISHn.
What are "favorites" and "favoriting"?
When you see a member whose feed you'd like to follow, or when you see an update you'd like to save -- that's when "favoriting" and "favorites" come into play. Click on the little "+ thumbs up" and you'll see a little window that asks whether:a) you'd like to save that item under your "favorites" tab, which is where you can file away items you want to save or,b) you'd like to see all the updates from the person who created that item, which means the updates will flow onto your main profile page.
If you want to undo a "favorited" member's feed or update, just click on the "- thumbs up" sign again.
Why do profiles have those member profile images in the right column?
When you "favorite" a member profile, we add your image to that box.
And what is that other tab in the same area marked "items"?
Those are the most frequently favorited updates on that member's profiles. It's a way to see the most popular updates in someone's profile.
How does search work on GoFISHn?
We use a search technology called Sphinx, which allows us to deliver what techies call "faceted search results." When you search, you can use the drop down to select what area of the site you'd like to search, e.g. Updates, Answers, All, etc. Then once you have results, you can sort those results based on how the pages are "tagged" (see next section of this FAQ). If you search for "Cape Cod" for example, you get a mixture of results, and on the left there are a number of "facets" you can select to narrow your search, e.g. "striped bass" or "trolling." We also show how many items there are associated with each facet in parens, e.g. (2), next to the facet. If material is not tagged, it still shows up in search but it's a bit harder to find.
How does search results work on a map? (coming soon)
GoFISHn allows you to search for most of our content types, including professional profiles, by map. We created this feature in order to make it easier to associate geography with information. If you're thinking about going fishing on Lake Toho in Florida, it's useful to see the guides in that area by seeing their location on a map of the Lake Toho area. You can also see updates, encyclopedia pages and so on. The best place to start if you want to try this feature is from our Directory.
What is "tagging" on GoFISHn?
When you create a profile or an update on GoFISHn we ask you to "tag" it with relevant information, such as location, species, gear maker, gear type, and technique. We use those tags to help us organize information across GoFISHn and make it easier to find.
For example, tags help make search better (see preceding wiki entry) and they attach profiles, updates, answers and gear reviews to appropriate Encyclopedia pages. To learn more about the GoFISHn Encyclopedia, go to the next section of this FAQ.
We have a dictionary of master tags and synonyms, which we're always working to update. For example, striped bass is our "master" for that fish species, and we know that if someone enters the tag "striper" they (usually) mean "striped bass" and we tag it accordingly. Some short names for fish, however, can refer to many species, so this can be a bit tricky at times. We appreciate your help in sorting this out.
When a member tags an update or a profile by placing a marker on a map, we capture the lat/lon and use that like a tag too.
What's the GoFISHn Encyclopedia?
GoFISHn will be especially useful to anglers if we can both provide reliable professionally created content and make it really easy to sort through the profiles and updates created by our members. The Encyclopedia is meant to help do both.
We licensed Ken Schultz's incomparable "Fishing Encyclopedia" to give us a baseline of information and topics. We turned each section and sub-section into its own page, with the help of software from Wikipedia called MediaWiki, and we linked them together with "related links." At the top of the page there are tabs -- Article is the Schultz information, Directory is a list of relevant pro profiles for that subject, Updates are member fishing reports etc. relevant to that topic, and so on.
In addition, we are building thousands of additional pages based on fishing locations around North America and merging geographic databases with detailed information from a variety of state agencies.
This is a huge undertaking, and we've barely scratched the surface. We are eager to have members' help.
What is the privacy policy at GoFISHn?
Please read our Privacy Policy.
What are the terms of service for GoFISHn members?
Please read our Terms of Service.
What is a widget?
A widget is a slice of GoFISHn that you can place on a website or a blog anywhere on the Web. When you create a profile on GoFISHn, you automatically get access to widgets for your feed and images. You can view them by a) logging in b) going to your main profile page c) clicking the yellow "edit profile" button on your profile d) then clicking the "widgets" link on the left. You'll see three types of widgets: one displays feeds from your profile, one displays pictures from your profile, and the third is a smaller "Follow Me On GoFISHn" logo that links back to your profile. The instructions on the page explain how to get the code for the widget and paste it into your site or blog.
There is an additional widget type called a "custom widget," which allows members to create a widget that contains all the member updates on any subject -- striped bass, Lake Tahoe, Flyfishing etc. To create a custom widget, a) log in to GoFISHn b) go to the search bar on the upper right of our page c) launch a search on your "custom" subject d) scroll to the bottom of the search results page, where you will see a link "create widget" e) click on that link and follow the instructions.
What is the paid widget affiliate program?
The paid affiliate program pays GoFISHn business/pro members for new accounts on GoFISHn created by visitors who originate from clicks on a GoFISHn pro/business member's widget or email invitation. In other words, if you have a GoFISHn widget on your site and someone clicks on the widget, lands at GOFISHn, and then creates an account, GoFISHn will pay you for that new account. And if you send email to friends from inside your GoFISHn account and they click on the link in that mail and create an account, we'll pay your for that member too.
How much does GoFISHn pay?
We pay $2 for an angler account and $25 for a new business/pro account, so long as the new account is created within 28 days of the initial click on the widget or the email invitation. GoFISHn pays when an account tallies up at least $40 worth credit. GoFISHn reserves the right to exclude any member who appears to be spamming the system with false memberships. Please read the terms and conditions.
Who can participate?
Any business member who uses the widgets or the email invitation system is automatically enrolled in the paid affiliate program. The program is not available to Angler members.
How can I track who has clicked on my widget or my email invitation and created an account?
This information is available to pro/business members in the stats section of their profile. Click on the "stats" link and scroll to the bottom of the page. Please note: This information on the stats page may not always be up-to-date or completely accurate. GoFISHn bases payments on our server records, not the data on the stats page.
