LauraFrog
Fish Gatherer
OldMan is right. LFS are generally not willing to help you with cycling or even to listen to the way it should be done. There is some UTTER CRAP on the internet about fish. I can tell you straight out, some of it is moronic. But the fact is, there are so many experienced fishkeepers with loads of knowledge on here that if I - or anybody else - said something blatantly untrue or incorrect, somebody would fix it.
The internet is not so much opinions, but experience. Who was it that said "your LFS gives you 'advice' because they want to sell you fish. We're doing it for free because we care about fish. Please, listen to us not them." It was an old friend of mine from the Petz Community who's not on this forum any more to my knowledge. I quote her all the time.
The majority of us on this forum, myself included, came running here going 'HELP ME! My fish are all dying and I don't know why!" Most of the time we had already tried the LFS and found their advice useless or based on selling things. My own LFS neglected to mention anything about cycling and didn't tell me anything about water quality at all until, a week into having vastly overstocked my tank, I went running in there going 'what's wrong with my fish'. They couldn't help me; 'pour this in your tank and see if it helps'. The people on this forum saved the fish - yes, all of them! - and infected me with MTS in the process.
So you see, most of what you will find on this forum has not been extracted from a book, a dodgy website or a 'how to sell stuff fast' handbook, but from the collective experience of a large number of people. It's a pretty fair guarantee that one of the people on here, usually more, will have struggled through whatever is bothering you, and either solved it or failed, and will happily share their experiences to help your fish. We don't have a vested interest in making sales. The LFS WANTS you to overstock because you buy more. And they don't care if your fish die, cause you buy more.
The internet is not so much opinions, but experience. Who was it that said "your LFS gives you 'advice' because they want to sell you fish. We're doing it for free because we care about fish. Please, listen to us not them." It was an old friend of mine from the Petz Community who's not on this forum any more to my knowledge. I quote her all the time.
The majority of us on this forum, myself included, came running here going 'HELP ME! My fish are all dying and I don't know why!" Most of the time we had already tried the LFS and found their advice useless or based on selling things. My own LFS neglected to mention anything about cycling and didn't tell me anything about water quality at all until, a week into having vastly overstocked my tank, I went running in there going 'what's wrong with my fish'. They couldn't help me; 'pour this in your tank and see if it helps'. The people on this forum saved the fish - yes, all of them! - and infected me with MTS in the process.
So you see, most of what you will find on this forum has not been extracted from a book, a dodgy website or a 'how to sell stuff fast' handbook, but from the collective experience of a large number of people. It's a pretty fair guarantee that one of the people on here, usually more, will have struggled through whatever is bothering you, and either solved it or failed, and will happily share their experiences to help your fish. We don't have a vested interest in making sales. The LFS WANTS you to overstock because you buy more. And they don't care if your fish die, cause you buy more.
