Posts by Avery

I wouldn’t honestly worry too much these days - and for a very good reason. Before, many light fixtures were powered by bulbs which, dependent on the fixture and bulb type, had an average lifespan of a year or a couple of years before they went out (or got so dim you couldn’t really use them anymore). Nowadays, almost all light fixtures are powered by LEDs which have a very long lifespan (>10 years on average), and they won’t explode if you accidentally get a drop of water on them when doing water changes.

If you are buying used light fixtures, I’d try to avoid high-powered units since they must have fans or the lights get too hot and will burn out, and I would also avoid units with non-common light bulb types (which means replacement bulbs are pricey as they are uncommon at best).

I tend to give them a general cure-all like medicine, along with a treatment for Ich and any parasites. This is to avoid any issues once I add them, in case I didn't catch them having Ich or parasites, that would ruin all of the other species within the tank.

Hey cy.paul, I appreciate your worry regarding making sure members are always up to date on any news we have. I believe that the current setup (having the announcements at the top, in their own reply-only section) has the benefit to allow those who want to see and read it - to do so.

I’ve personally seen other communities force you to mark that you have read an announcement or toggle a checkmark to verify that. I don’t believe we need that here, since any announcement wouldn’t be mission-critical like it would be with a service platform, for example.

Likewise we are working on integrations with out social platform channels to make sure any announcements are automatically pushed to them, so that will help for those who follow us on social networks.

I can personally 100% can recommend Beamworks or Nicrew for cheap, quality LED lights that will be able to grow low-light plants with ease. Otherwise, I think even trying to get a modular LED light fixture might make sense overall (Aqueon has one where you can buy individual LED strips that can promote light, plants, corals, etc. over time) so you only end up buying what you need or in smaller purchase groups to get the best product overall.

I think that they stopped selling the fish due to them not being that cost-effective, getting a bunch of bad press when it comes to the conditions that they were kept in (many employees cared less, so they would be covered in ich, half dead, or even fully dead). I also think that this was a way for them to try to get into the world of Petco/Petsmart (as they already sell the equipment, food, etc. for a variety of animals including fish or turtles) since it seems like a very profitable business if you look at the balance sheets of those two major companies.

I've made a few different types, such as Brine Shrimp (since you can feed with high-quality algae), or even using fruit flies since you can make sure that they are full of protein and other things that are extremely beneficial to fish fry, or even to some fish as their natural diet. I think the biggest aspect is to make sure that they are worth raising in terms of batch size, and then trying to feed them correctly so that they are super nutritious compared to just crushing up food to make it smaller for fry to consume easier.

In order to make the fry or inverts eat it, I think it's really just around making sure that you place them in the tank next to them so they can see it (and during the day, when the tank has had lights on for awhile so they are fully awake).

How many tanks did it take before you noticed that your house was either getting overrun by different fish tanks, or that you had a good problem and needed to possibly downsize?

I personally have painted a few of those particleboard-based stands, and I would honestly highly recommend it for a few reasons;

1) You can ensure the stand doesn't have the cheap, thin, and sometimes not wholly covered paint on the stand

2) You can add multiple coats, or even add a primer/more durable layer of paint so that if it gets wet from water, it doesn't peel or soak in and instead would use evaporate off (if dry enough).

3) You can let the tank match either the trim (if not black), or even match other things in the same room (since for whatever reason, the colors many stands come in are either black, a hard-to-match brown, or now slate grey).

Microsoft has finally responded to our request for additional information and has approved our request to be unblocked. Please let us know if this occurs again by using the Contact Us form if you don't receive your activation email.

Looks like the sale has started today and is going on for a bit. Shocked that they are doing that far more frequently than in prior years.

We have received word back from Microsoft, that they have denied our initial request from our ISP. They have requested Microsoft provide reasons why, and to look into this further since we have not been used as sending spam (but someone that is our IP neighbor has been). They noted that the initial denial is not uncommon, and they will update us as they hear back on their follow-up request.

Like always, we will be manually approving all Microsoft accounts created until this issue has been resolved.

We still have not heard back from Microsoft yet, but will keep you posted when we hear anything back!

They have submitted a request to Microsoft on our behalf (since we are not able to get through, each request we've sent resulted in them stating "No Action Taken") to get our emails unblocked. There wasn't any ETA from our ISP as to when we would hear an answer back, but I would expect to know something new within the next 72 hours.

If we have any other updates we will share them here. As noted we are manually approving all accounts in the meantime until this is fully resolved.

We have added in a new estimated date range, based on the prior years. We will update as we get more information that can confirm a date soon!

We are still working with them to resolve this issue. Right now we have confirmed that only North American based Microsoft email addresses are being blocked by them (others such as live.co.uk or others are not being blocked and are being received and accepted by Microsoft).

If we have any other updates we will share them here. As noted we are manually approving all accounts in the meantime until this is fully resolved.

Good luck to everyone who enters, I'd love to see some super unique amphibian setups done with this to whoever the winner is!

I would say it depends on if you have a hood, open top, or have an actual wooden top that hides your lighting equipment.

If you don’t mind the look of more lights, I would go with multiple lighting fixtures to make sure you cover all of the spectrums for enough time (you can even have lights on various schedules so it's not super bright when they first turn on, and not jet black when they all turn off). Otherwise, you can get one lighting fixture but make sure it covers corals primarily if you have any, since lighting for the fish is a secondary aspect (only benefits the owner, outside of letting the fish have a day/night cycle).

100% - although we are still working on other content, I can go through what we have again first in order to add such documentation (more than likely in a Wikipedia reference style where we will indent with numbers, that will correlate to references at the bottom of each page/article).

This will take some time since I need to dig up the studies/reference we used prior, but I'll keep you posted once we have everything marked up that we currently have now. Additionally, we'll be adding photos to those articles and pages as well in order to decrease the blocks of text, and add insights that many would find helpful in being able to compare/contrast.

I think they are generically helpful, but do not share a species matrix as sub-species can be wildly different than a general species level (ex; there is some community-level aggression of African cichlids and then super aggressive African cichlids).

I can create a general one is you think that would be helpful?

I’ve seen that a few times, normally the snail will give up on the hermit crab shell or the hermit crab will change shells if it gets annoyed enough (make sure to have similar shells in the tank near it). Normally you don’t have to pull the snail off unless it's completely blocking the hermit crab from moving/entering/exiting it's own shell.