ya I would say anything that can be deemed "sticky" would improve the site. By this I means, reports, tackle reviews, galleries etc.
Content and stickiness are the keys to any website and of course the bottom line is more traffic and more members on the website. These are a few ideas I have implemented on another forum I run and they have worked great!
One thing I would mention is you should make the regular content site and forums flow smoothly. When on the content pages, you should be able to access the forum within one click. Many users will find the content pages via a search engine and of course you want to drive traffic to the forums for more membership. Don't make the user work to hard to find their goal, the less the clicks the better.
I've mentioned before that I run another forum on another topic(
http://www.pearl-guide.com/) as you can see the general topic pages are just as assessable as the forum pages, this greatly increases forum usage. We are extremely successful.
The idea is to keep it easy to find the general pages and the forum pages, we don't want to make the user work.
In the end, the more forum members the better for the site, so why not have a link on every page of the site. The idea is to drive traffic to the forum at every possible chance, the more traffic - the better right? By making it a smooth transition from main site to forum, you increase the amount of visitors.
You could also introduce advertising to the site. I'm sure most of us would be OK with that if it meant more advertising dollars for a bigger and better community. For my pearl community, I only advertise for non-members, regular member's never see the advertising, another bonus for signing up. I have no problems and it provides a good revenue source for us to attract new members. The more members the more the posts and the more posts the more traffic, we all win.
Another great forum would be buy and sell, as the other website is primarily Vancouver. Also a regular location report would keep "lurker" members coming back regularly and not once in a blue moon. This could tie into member galleries, maybe members could post pics with their fishing reports? That could be huge, as island outfitters has a report, but with pictures I'm sure a lot of us would check it more regularly.
We've all noticed how island outfitters report is repeated on different websites. By adding a unique element(report pictures) it gives users a reason to visit a certain website for their information.
We all love to brag about fish we catch, give us a good venue and we'll create a lot of content and pages for you. This will increase your page count and help you a lot in the search engines.
I have lot of methods that will work, been there done that. Pm Me~!
