Hi TTA,TwoTankAmin wrote:This site has many great features, but using them or not is left up to users. Many folks like to post about spawning a given fish in the breeder area here. I have spawned every single pleco I have kept. It makes me happy, I sell or trade the offspring and I may post in a forum thread now and then about a spawn. However, I do not participate in the breeder reporting area here. I do not even read other folks breeding reports. That is my choice, however.
I know that focusing on this one statement carries us a little off the topic of this thread, and I don't wish to shift the thread focus, but I read your post (quoted here) and I feel compelled to comment:
You are absolutely right when you point out that it is really the prerogative of every user here to take advantage of whichever site features they choose, and to remove themselves (not participate) from every feature they wish to stay out of, and I fully support this perspective. I would, however, like to pick on this one point of the breeder board, and perhaps encourage you to reexamine why you don't fill out your own blogs for the species you have spawned.
I've only been a member on PlanetCatfish for a few months, and I've come to find the blogs to be one of the most accessible and useful features of this site. By reading and comparing the blogs of different people for the same species, I feel like I develop a "bigger picture" understanding about what is and isn't important when it comes to getting a species to spawn - tank conditions that are unimportant to the fish will show high variability from keeper to keeper, whereas conditions that are critical to the fish won't (this brings up a whole other feature I'd like to consider in the future, but with all the 31 bugs/revisions, this is no time to mention it ). Anyway, my point is this: I appreciate your concern that the breeder board points system may make this feature seem like a competition or contest, and it's done on the honor system so keepers' claims aren't independently validated by the site. But for "noobs" like me is, most of the time when our fish spawn, it's because of nothing purposeful or active that we did ourselves; we may fill out a blog, and provide lots of detail, but we might not even recognize which of those details was really important to the fish and which details are extraneous. By contrast, a person like yourself with years of experience and many spawned spp. under your belt has learned various tricks of the trade, so that you can purposefully set up conditions that make spawning more likely. Consequently, if you did fill out blogs for all the spp. you've spawned, those would carry a lot of weight to people like myself because we can tell by your blog score that you are an experienced breeder.
When you post to a forum suggestions to others as to how to breed a particular fish, that's all well and good. But as you know, with all the other forum posts, a person really has to search through the forums to find these details once they get buried by newer posts. But the nice thing about blogs is that they stay right there - easy for the world to find and access - on the species description page. So I guess what I'm saying is this: If you can get past the social /trivial implications of blog points scores, I would encourage you to rethink your position on the blogs, and I would appreciate reading your blogs on fish that I'm also interested in spawning.
I have to admit that I am puzzled and frustrated when I look at a species page and the blog section indicates that nobody has spawned a particular species (i.e., no blog entries exist), and yet the photos for that same species show mating, eggs, parental care and juvenile development! To me, when I see a blog section with no entries, or very few entries, that communicates to me that either this species is extremely difficult to breed or that the species is so rare that nobody has had a chance. And that may discourage me from buying and trying to breed that species because I don't want to end up with a species that I can't spawn.
That's my happy thought for the day.
Cheers, Eric