:eek:

Featured Tank of the Month will be a new feature as early as June. A selection committee has been put together. More information will be released in due time.

Thanks for all the interest. I think this will be an interesting addition to the board.

Well this is great!!! Except one thing. We will have to come up with another name for this featured event. Last night after a couple of beers, my cleaner shrimp told me the word "tank" is politicaly incorrect. The correct term is "reduced artifically recreated living quarters." So I guess we will have to call it the RARLQOTM.

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:onfire:

Say that aloud a few times. What a fun word.

Just incase any of you didn't see the new sticky posted by Titus, the new Feature Tank of The Month is now a go :cool:


This is a copy of what was posted in the sticky in the reef forum:

Hello,

At last, we are going to get the ball rolling on our Featured Tank Of The Month (FTOTM). First, thank you to all who has input their ideas into the project and second, we welcome Bev, Christy, Rich, and Danny to join the FTOTM Committee.

We are now accepting nominations and we are looking for the following:
- tank must be at least six months old with some matured corals (except FOWLR)
- tanks can be softie, lps, sps or a mix of any of these, as well as FOWLR and frag tanks
- tanks can be any size

Every two months we will select from among the pool of nominees. Then we will decide on the theme and select a winner to be featured for that month.

Submissions should be made via e-mail to ftotm@canreef.com with the following:
-two or three photos of your own tank or of someone's tank you admire
-tank owner's name and size of tank

Titus

:mrgreen:

Good job so far guys. Coming along great. I wanted to also offer my thanks to all those that responded in the thread and esp. those that offered help and web space and the such.

We have a few submissions already :biggrin: Keep them coming. Shine up your tanks and submit two or three pics to ftotm@canreef.com

If we find more than one tank we would like to feature, we will keep the others in line for upcoming FTOTM.

If you are submitting someone else's tank, please let us know how we can contact that person in the event their tank is chosen.

Aw... for a second there, I thought I was on the committee... hehehe :mrgreen:

Thats a great group of people selected for the committee, this FTOTM thing is going to be great :razz:

-Rich

looks good. one question though, are you allowing people to nominate there own tank?

Steve

yup, unless you voted no to this poll :razz: just kidding. Nominating your tank?

Of course Steve, just keep the submissions to one a month-no padding in this feature :razz: :mrgreen:

Ah sorry Brad you beat me to it!

Ok people you wanted it-you got it, now start submitting those tanks :biggrin:

I nominate StirCrazy !!!!! :mrgreen:

He already said he wasn't interested, didn't he?

i thought sps tanks were all disqualified :mrgreen:

Absolutely :biggrin: We are hoping anyone with a tank they'd like the board to see will send us a few pics for the selection process.

No I am not, I think the committee should pick tanks and then solicit the owners. to me if I ask for my tank to be done there would be no self satisfaction, but if people nominate me with out my knowledge then it would be gratifying.

Steve

With all due respect, how are we gonna know who's got a nice tank if the folks who own them don't bring these tanks to our attention by submitting pics of them? I don't have time to scour Edmonton for that tell tale glow in living room and basement windows looking for tanks :confused: Heck, I'd probably get arresting for doing that :razz:

And then, of course, there is the much, much larger question of bribing the selection committee to pick your tank once you've submitted pics :biggrin: Joking, of course :razz: No bribes will be taken unless they're cold, hard cash :lol: :razz: :mrgreen:

Why not start a thread and have everyone submit a picture of there tank?

Walter

That might work. Anyone interested in doing that is welcome to do so.

However, there may be folks who would prefer send their tank pics to the email address for privacy sake.

Hello,

One problem also with a thread of submissions is that there are no surprises.

Titus

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I agree, with Titus. We need the element of surprise.

A bit of both is being done for now, but all we have to go on is the old pic forum, which is being watched very closley! :biggrin:

can i please say something :neutral: ?

after some reading behind the scene i have notice a few things. may be i can share my opinion:

1. it is a fabulous idea to have a tank of the month. no doubt about it.

2. i am pretty certain that we, as all the board members, cannot agree on a single set of criteria to choose this "tank of the month".

3. as compare to rc or reefs.org, their tank of the month is featured in their online magazine. one of the reasons why they do this is because some people, like me, have no time to read all the information/thread/irrelevant discussions on the board.

4. for me, totm is a showcase of what people can do, it might not be what i wanted to do nor i have the resources to do it, but just so that i know that can be done. it does not need to have a specific criteria.

i think totm is particularly important for beginners because it gives them a vision as to what type of tanks that they like to pursue, its like a holy grail, or just something they might ultimately want to achieve. as i said before, it need not be set on one set of criteria, like RC's or reefs.org, but the chosen reefer need to disclose all of his/her tricks to readers. that is the most important thing. :)

we all have our differences, we should all focus on how to grow this hobby, on 3 fronts, 1. support local businesses and 2. generate more hobbist, and last, grow this board. we should build something out of this effort instead of "sharing what i think is good"

i am willing to help out for whatever to make this work.

please save all unconstrutive criticism to my pm otherwise let get this totm going! :smile:

Cheers

Eric

I think RC finds a lot of potential TOTM "marks" from the "Let's see your _____ tanks!" threads. I've noticed a lack of that on Canreef.. Nobody ever asks to see T5 tanks? Nobody's interested in MH-only tanks? Your LPS biotopes? Let's see what you did with your 55s?
Might be a good way to encourage photo submissions - I can't be bothered to go through the process of uploading pics into a member gallery when I have no stellar shots to show, but if somebody wants a quick look at, say, a DIY surge, I'm much more inclined to throw a quick and dirty link to a decent shot of what I did for educational purposes.
Obviously a "crap" photo (and there are many of those) doesn't make anybody's jaw drop, but it gives you a good feel for the tank and what a polished series of photos after a good cleaning (of the glass, if nothing else) will be like.

Hello,

Good comments. But one thing at a time. :mrgreen: Especially when we are all underfunded volunteers. There has been a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes. Lately with the FTOTM Committee, we have been discussing a lot. And I am still debugging from occasional flip flop coming up from time to time since the server migration. Some times we have to wonder if we come up with something, would it work. This is as in would the members on this board be willing to participate in it. For example, there has been a lot of activity with the FTOTM thread that Danny started with great support from the member base. But we are seeing the photos trickly in slowly. Maybe it is still early and people are cleaning up their tanks for the shots.

I'd also like to add to Aussiefishy's comments. We need to get the retailers to support us as well. So far Reef Crew is the only retailer generous enough to put up a banner ad.

Probably it is a Canadian thing. But when we moved onto a new server (in other words more costs), and e-mailed the various vendors who had in the past benefited from using this board's Vendor Announcement Forum or referrals to sponsor us, only 2 have replied saying they will look into it.

There has also been ... what maybe 2 startups e-mailed me saying they want to sponsor the board. One just told me that he is still working on his site. I don't know what happened to the other one. But every time when it comes down to actioning on sponsoring the board, it seems like most vendors bail out.

Now it is not like if there are no sponsors I am going to shut the board down or anything but sometimes it makes me wonder what is going on on this side of the border.

In the end, all in all, we are happy with the progress of this board. It has come a long way and has always given us a place to hang out.

Titus

Yes, J&L should sponsor here.

One of the goals of advertising though is to make the business more visible than the competition in order to generate more revenue. Banner ads are going to target online shoppers.

In this case, J&L is already known by everyone and has no serious online competition so they don't need the added visibility. Advertising on this board would probably not generate additional exposure nor revenues for them. To me, advertising here would be more beneficial to the smaller and unknown businesses.

How does this discussion have anything to do with nationality?

Hello,

Either way, big or small businesses whether they are known or not, are the same.

CptCleverer. The boards across the states have vendors actively pushing for ads, whether they are big or small, well known not or not. It is just like why we don't have major manufacturers over here.

This was brought up to somewhat explain why we haven't yet have some of the features like the US boards. I don't want to steer the thread into another direction or topic.

Titus

i dunno titus, aquarium pros has a buttload of sponsors, they each have their own forums on the board, banners and sponsor titles. most of them are regular posters that try and stay in touch with the community as they seem to have figured out that we are the source of their revenue. maybe you should look into how they have catered to the east coast retailers as i don't think it's a "canadian" thing.

I know on a couple other boards the TOTM is run by nomination but you are not allowed to nominate your own tank.

so lets say Brad has a nice tank (I couldn't tell yesterday as the lights were of when I looked :mrgreen: ) so I would submit a e-mail/msg to the TOTM committee stating that Brad has a exceptional tank that would be worthy of the TOTM and include a short description of the set up and maybe a pic of the tank.

so the committee reviews all the nominations they get in a specific period and they pick 3 (1st, 2nd, and 3rd.) they contact the first person and tell him he has been nominated for TOTM and ask if he is interested, if not they go to Number 2, and so on.. if he is then the 2nd they had is contacted for the next month and then they just pick a new 3rd from new submissions. this way they are always working 3 months in advance.

Steve

Steve,

We have a secret forum, bwahahahahaaaaa, where all kinds of FTOTM stuff is discussed. Some threads are four pages long, and one thread had to be split into two :eek: :razz: We got it covered, man :cool:

And we're not so elitist here that a person can't nominate their own tank, so shine up your tanks and send a few pics to ftotm@canreef.com

With all the input from, and work being done by, the Committee, Canreef's FTOTM is gonna be great :exclaim:

If it was was worth it financialy to advertise on canreef people would do it,but it's not .

Whoops, forgot to tighten up the post privileges. :redface: Thanks for catching that :wink: Should be fixed now. :mrgreen:

Well IYWMO I think some LFS's would probably pay to advertise here on Canreef except that some post can hurt these retailers just as much as help there business. I remember a thread not too long ago on here that totally hurt a LFS's reputation just because of one small problem between a staff and board member. Also maybe some LFS's in our community's don't realize how much reading or how many members actually surf Canreef, thus not knowing the potential of advertising here. I'm sure that Titus will eventually get more advertising and sponsor's here because LFS's will realize that more and more people not only post and read articles here, they in fact would also do there shopping here through sponors and advertising too :biggrin:

Well since im tottaly oblivious and never even saw this post. Or the new forum could someone summerize the main ideas on this post since i am way to lazy to read 8 pages.

nope... go read it. :razz: :mrgreen:

Hello,

Just nominate someone's tank to be featured in FTOTM.

Titus