Fly makers - your input please

[Paddy80701]

Ron, I would favor the general category sceme with tags as suggested and then a complete alphabetical listing by name, every fly has a name and the tag list shold allow one to pick out the fly they were looking for or pick one. Just my $.02 worth. I would also try to enlist Steven McGarthwaite's assistance, his FOTW and other pdf files are great!

[Cold]

Dave, that entirely depends on the strength of its coding. I've seen software that, depending on the input, can give you returns with descending match percentage. In terms of flies by material, this would mean that flies you have everything for would be first, then flies that you'd need 1 more material to tie...then 2 more...and so on.

So this system will be able to decide between what you've listed ( ribbing wire ) and the gold tinsel or copper wire that may be listed in the materials list. It knows that you have silver 1/8" beads, while the pattern calls for another size and color bead. Wouldn't you have to list what color dubbing, hare's mask, pheasant tail feather and biots you have on hand? If so, the list of returns would get short fast, possibly turning up nothing.

No. The system still needs a good design. For tying purposes, you would have general categories. "Wire" would cover all metal wire ribbing. Thin, heavy, gold, copper, black, etc. Also, all the truly minor variations would get lumped into an "over-pattern". A pattern entry should be as generic as "Catskill Dry Fly", with variations for BWOs, sulphurs, cahills, etc. listed as variations of that fly. For that fly's materials, you'd have: dry fly dubbing, dry fly hackle, dry fly tailing.

Your dubbing for an Adams might be gray superfine, or it might be muskrat...either way, its dry fly dubbing and you're tying an adams, so the specifics dont matter in the slightest. For tailing, you might use spade hackle fibers, or microfibbets, or moose mane...doesnt matter as long as you've got a tail.

The key to a good pattern database is not getting bogged down in the minutiae. There's absolutely no sense at all in doubling your entire nymph collection to include beadheads as a seperate entry (or tripling it to add tungheads...or quadrupling it to add coneheads...you see how this can get out of hand). Likewise, you need to sit back an look objectively at your fly box and realize that switching estaz in for chenille gives you a variation, not a new pattern. When you start to do this, classification gets much easier.

The material-based search, though, would be an add-on later. With a tag-based system, it should be fairly easy to add material tags to the patterns, then simply work out the best interface for it. The primary objective is to get them classified by fly first.

I'm fairly opposed to a simple alphabetical sorting because lets face it...when you want a streamer to imitate a sculpin, you dont want to have to sort through hundreds of ridiculous (admit it, pattern names are ridiculous) and unrelated pattern names, hoping to find a few sculpins and missing a few in the process. Chances are, you'll never click on 'Sex Dungeon'.

[Dave E]

Hi Cold,

It still seems to me to be overly complicated for a patterns index. But it's not my sandbox or checkbook.

I'll reiterate, I don't envy the task. I'll add that I obviously don't have the first clue as to what it's going to take to perform this feat or the commitment it's going to take to maintain it, yet it sounds daunting. To those of you who undertake it, I wish you the best of luck. Truly.

Dave

[Normand]

Hey Norm,
I'd agree on the Crayfish thing, if I didn't live at the base of the Sierra range, where Crayfish and Trout are pretty common foes.
B.T.W. Will it be Crayfish, Crawfish, Crawdads or what's for Dinner Tonight? Which word will turn up in a search?

Thanks guys, Dave

maybe with the "tag" system it will get cross referenced.

mud bug works for me!

[rtidd]

ROFL.
The comment about opening a can of worms seems just right
AND a bit humorous.. getting flytossers involved in worms.. LOL

Great ideas - each and every one of em.

The tag idea is great. This bb uses em. For those of you that aren't aware of what this is .. Look at the Search menu option in the header. Click on it. Then click on Tag search. Type in panfish and you end up with all the panfish articles since Readers Voice was started.

These are powerful but can be abused. Tags if entered free hand by the evaluator can be mistyped so you end up with tags dry Dry DRy Drie etc..
And each tag is specific to it's subset.

However using tags or some other mechanism that are selected from a pre determined set via checkbox/radio button/ or pull down could work.

I like the material option too. None of the selection items need to be used remember, you get to choose which ones you want to restrict the 1000+ fly patterns.

It would be very cool to select Dry caddis or whatever makes sense..
and see a list of materials show up that COULD be used if you wanted..
then you select the materials you don't have and the patterns using it go away from the list..

LOTS of good ideas here. Each of them has different requirements. And the BB section reserved for the flies allows you to free form enter comments on whatever I am not thinking of.

Thanks for the inputs guys.. I'll let this run another week and then distill the information overload to a single button... RANDOM CHOICE... ya.. that'll work.

ROFL
Thanks for all the great ideas... don't stop yet!
--Ron--