In the summer of 2003 I met Scott L through one of the Livebearer e-mailing lists. We got to chatting about Endler's and I dropped by GL and also his place with a bag with a few Endler's.

By comparison, I also joined an Endler's forum about the same time and posted a few short and long-winded responses. The site either went down or they just dumped everyone's responses. There was no explanation. And they started all over again with the same wheezy questions and nothing to refer to! Reinventing the wheel like that was just too much.

Here when I dropped by in the summer of '03, there were a couple of pretty experienced aquarists and a whole clutch of newer ones who aggressively pursued the hobby, but with great enthusiasm and good-will. That has happened a couple of times since then on GL. That happened again most recently a month or so back. Among those who come to mind from back then include:

Angelee
Reza
Chloe
Gupppies
Maggie
GuppyGirl
parttimer
Jbo
Geo
Aerelynn
Phry
Nate
and not long afterwards an animal savvy and people understanding, but inexperienced fish-wise, lady from Oz, who got stuck with an "inherited" tank of guppies - miskairal.

I wonder if sometimes this site should be called "Guppy Rescue."

(It will be interesting, the list of really active members for this time period that will be recalled in a year or two.)

A couple back then were experienced people who were busy (had lives) elsewhere. I had the (unfair) advantage of having just early retired from teaching after a few decades in a public high school and found myself with 35 to 80 hours a week which I hadn't had before. (Bwahahahahahahahahaha!)

It really was a kick answering questions and misconceptions here on GL. It was also startling what one didn't know. I dropped a misconception bomb (blatantly wrong information) of my own about how long it took a female guppy to be able to bear young to her latest mate. (I was flat out wrong, not realizing the sperm from the most recent mating usually has an advantage over that of previous mating.) Bon chagrin!

It was a time of trading book and net references and looking up stuff like there was no tomorrow. (For some guppies, if this stuff wasn't looked up, there WAS no tomorrow. Sometimes it still doesn't matter.)

There was a real esprit de corps. When someone got crabby, people left. And the cycle began again. We are learning from that. Those who have remained may have found that like me, their best logs were posted from about their 2nd to their 12th month on GL. However answers to queries or how to get answers to queries are easier to come by and have often improved. Patience still isn't easy to come by.

I guess it is just the way of things that most Guppylog members will get what they need and share what they can and move on. That is not too different from many aquatic web sites and mailing lists. For most of us "life stuff" takes one hither and yon and there is only so much time in the day.

We're still here, even though whom "we" happen to be has changed a lot. Click on other four-year-old links and see how often the links no longer work. It is also exciting seeing pretty significant answers from the newbies of a couple of months ago.

I was at an unrelated fishy event a few months ago. While there I was astonished by how quickly people on a much more active list than GL flat out quit responding to correspondents if they found out that the younger person was under 21.

I appreciate what Scott is saying about it seems that we are answering the same questions over and over. And that has caused a lot of people, who had grown in the hobby (and some who undoubted learned what they wanted and simply moved on) to leave Guppylog. It gets very hard, after a while, to ask a genuinely new question about a pregnant guppy.

However the Immediate Help section, Frapper, The Google search of GL and the accumulation of a couple of years, give us resources we didn't have before. Today if almost every question asked has several antecedents, there are some new wrinkles, For instance there are the likes of - Tank Testing Data Stream; Is it true? about switching marine and freshwater fish; Guppylog veterans (a variation on them anyway); Plants which might/ might not be used in a tank such as water hyacinth or bamboo; using terrestrial bacteria in water; doing an ID on fish in zoo moats; using minnow traps, fish related jobs on the side, which have been submitted over the last month.

The depth of some answers is greater - witness the more recent Camallanus discussion. Titles are cleverer than ever. Responses on the whole are less abrasive, even to the infamous "same old, same old" clinkers like "is my female guppy pregnant?" GL is holding it's place better than I though on Fishrank and Aquarank, even as those lists get more competitive and some of those other sites have so many more active members.

New visitors are always going to be hampered by panic and/or inexperience. However, if they and the rest of us knew all the right questions to ask and the appropriate phrases to use and search for, maybe almost no one would ever drop by GL with questions.