Quote:
Originally Posted by titus
As for write ups yes I'm looking into having a series of different types of write ups from a panel of SMEs in house on Canreef. So nominate some names of who you wish to see doing the writings, from hardware reviews, chemistry, breeding, blah.
Shall we subsidize a university biology or chemistry or fisheries dept so they can identify ways to better do things like controlling algae or whatever? I don't know but maybe Canreef donate a tank setup and let them do their research on it? How should we set it up? What experiments we should do? Any universities or official bodies will be interested?
And then there will be reference libraries of corals, fishes, algae with pictures and characteristics. Each time someone post an ad it'd contribute photos to build this library?
I don't know what we will end up doing, how exactly yet but I want to invest in Canreef this year with some projects. I need some help here with ideas, or maybe even someone to help with running or writing or contacting universities, labs, whatever.
The more crazy ideas we throw in here the better we can do. Don't let the confines of vBulletin 3 / 4 / 5 limit what we can do.
Canreef member QR codes on a Canreef app so you get discounts from participating sponsors? I don't know. Sponsors broadcasting coupons to first 5 responding members? Put your brain muscles to work. Ideas.
Titus
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I think having a university (or professional public aquarium) on board would be cool. Depending on what sort of time you could get from them, there are a few cool things you can do:
- Reef Mythbusters: there's a lot of BS hocus pocus in the hobby, as well as a lot of truly great stuff that gets passed off as anecdotal and snake oil. Universities are pretty bad for just passing off anything that comes from the hobby as a bunch of bologna (even though there is a lot more daily experience and creative power behind the collective hobby than there is in university settings), so having them prove/disprove some of the myths, methods, additives, etc would both help us as hobbyists and would also help the universities take us more seriously.
- Have the universities help us pioneer into better husbandry and help lower the bar on breeding programs. I think at least once a week I read or hear someone mention that for the hobby to be sustainable, and for us to start giving back to the oceans we love so much, that we need to up the game on breeding. For me, personally, I see my tank as a sort of Noah's Ark where I can show friends and family this amazing world that they never see and is quickly disappearing. Of all people in the world, we hobbyists should be the champions of preservation - not being accused of being parasites on the ecosystem (
cough*** Snorkel Bob *** cough). For many species there is little to no financial incentive for breeding efforts, so free enterprise isn't going to step in to fill that roll. But if universities could teach us hobbyists, who arguably may love the ocean world more than our own children, we would tackle breeding simply as a labour of love. If we can make breeding easier so that it could easily be incorporated into an existing reef tank some how (ie. make it sexier than smelly fish rooms) we could start to make leaps and bounds.
- Public Institutions and education: I think this is where we could pair up with places like the Vancouver Aquarium. I've volunteered with the Aquarium in the past but (because they don't take hobbyists seriously) they weren't overly keen when I kept telling them that I'd happily bring in my own demo tank, teach reef classes and even personally take care of the reef tanks (often their corals make me cringe... They make so many rookie mistakes!). There is a lot they can teach us, a lot we can teach and give them - and together there is a lot we could teach the wider public. If the Vancouver Aquarium let a group of us look after the reef tanks I'm pretty confident they'd have the most pimped-out, sexy, spectacular tanks of almost any aquarium - and they'd have the most enthusiastic (maybe overly-enthusiastic) bunch of volunteers that would probably walk around the complex dragging people to come see said sexy reefs.
Aside from the universities, there are a lot of smart people on this forum. I know a number of them have published works with Advanced Aquarist and the like. We should be encouraging them to broadcast and share that knowledge here rather than sending it off to some place where most of our members won't see it. We need to incentivize them to stay here and be our experts.
I could keep going but need to get back to work (maybe Canreef should have a built in timer so we can only procrastinate for so long each day
), but before I do I have two items I'd love to see change on the forum:
- Search function: it'd be smashing if the search function could take me to the exact text I am looking for rather than just show me the thread it's in and highlight it in red when I actually find it. I had to pour through a 24 page thread the other day to find one sentence I was looking for - should have been a 2 second search but instead was 15 minutes of frustration.
Advertising: I'm totally cool with ads here and I often click the ads to go see what sexy corals people have in stock right now (I honestly think this is the first time I've been aware of advertising actually having an effect of me). I like seeing the sponsors displayed - those guys make this site possible! But we really need something better than that ****ing sponsor thread summary monstrosity that plagues the front page - it really detracts from the site and I now often just use a bookmark that links me right into the forums (because I really just look at the buy/sell these days). The Monstrosity is particually a pain in the ass on a mobile device (where most of us spend our Internet lives these days). I've noticed that because I'm annoyed with the front page and just bypass it, I don't see what discussions are happening and don't participate anymore. I stumbled on this thread today accidentally by click the wrong forum link (like the Internet equivalent of taking the wrong turn at Albuquerque).
- Bring the library for the beginners out from being in the dark and buried annals to the front page and make it more than just stickied topics. People new to forums have no idea how to navigate these things and new reefers are so overwhelmed with jargon and just getting a grasp of what the heck is happening, they they never find or never think to look for the stickied articles. So we get the "how do I ...." posts and then someone makes some dick comment saying "Well, if you had ACTUALLY just used the search function..." (and we know how awesome that search function is
). Same as the idea above with having contributing writers to Canreef - let's make this site a repository for information. Let's find the best way to teach people interested in the hobby, people new to the hobby, people expanding their reefing skills and even helping experts who are pushing the boundaries of the hobby - buried forums and stickies are not the answer to that.
Thanks for the chance to bounce some ideas!