I think unasked for advice badly offered is like door to door evangelism. It's a waste of time and breath if the people don't want to listen.
There is an old German saying, "A man convinced against his will remains unpersuaded still." It is a good piece of wisdom.
Answer the persons questions, try to offer some fishy wisdom. But I think we overstep our license when we insist on giving unwanted advice. Not that we need to lie about what we think.
In the Betta forum when a youth comes in with a VT and wants to breed him. It takes time and patience to lead the horse to water, let alone get him to drink. But the member that comes along side and answers the questions honestly and directly, will soon earn trust and may prevent a couple of dead fish for CFC's blender.
I like it.
However I don't think that we should ONLY answer questions that the person wants to give, if a situation is staring you in the face and will only get worse I (personally) am not going to sit back and just tell the guy what he wants to hear.
For example, someone posts a picture of their tank, it's, lets say, 100g, and there are about 4 oscars in there, amongst other things. They say they want an opinion on their new substrate. I would not sit back and ignore the fact that there are 4 oscars is this tank by any means, they've got to know!
basically my opinion is outlined in the following:
In most cases, the person (in response to someone telling them about the oscars etc) would take on board the advice with no offence taken, some people would see this as offensive, maybe in the better cases, say "oh, they look happy though" rejecting the advice given, THEN people might be like "hang on...." and then gradually the debate escalates to an argument. In A TINY FRACTION of cases in immendiate response to the thread starters first post someone would come along and immediatley say "OMG WHAT ARE YOU? NUTS? YOU ARE SO CRUEL BLAH BLAH BLHA HOW WOULD YOU LIKE IT IF YOU WERE CRAMPED UP" etc.
Basically, I think people are jumping to conclusions, taking things the wrong way, and rejecting good advice, in most cases. I'm not saying that this "jumping" business isn't out there, it's just not such as big problem as alot of you think.
In the Betta forum when a youth comes in with a VT and wants to breed him
not always the youths you know